Diagnose vs. Score

The single biggest quality signal in a Mandarin pronunciation app isn’t its interface or its vocabulary size — it’s whether it can tell you what you got wrong, not just how wrong you were. A score, even broken into initial/final/tone components, is still a measurement of distance from a target. A diagnosis names the actual substitution: which sound you said instead of the one you meant to.

These articles dig into that distinction specifically — what separates scoring from diagnosis, why most apps stop at the former, and what to look for if you want the latter.