# Hayane Pinyin — Master Mandarin Aspiration

> Master Mandarin Aspiration (iPhone/iPad app by Kengo Kawakami.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/hayane-pinyin/id6766196415 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Kengo Kawakami](https://appshunter.io/developer/1896232319)
- Category: Education
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 4 MB
- Languages: American English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified, China), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)
- Released: 2026-05-07
- Data updated: 2026-09-09
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/hayane-pinyin/id6766196415/reviews.md

## What is Hayane Pinyin?

Hayane Pinyin trains the most overlooked yet pedagogically critical contrast in Mandarin pronunciation: aspiration.                   
The pinyin pairs b/p, d/t, g/k look familiar to learners worldwide, but they don't work the way you think. Both  members of each pair are voiceless. The difference is whether breath escapes after the burst — what phoneticians call Voice Onset Time (VOT).    
Most learners produce these stops by mapping them to similar-looking sounds in their first language (Japaneseば for pinyin b, English p for pinyin p). The result is systematic, hard-to-correct accent errors that ear-based feedback alone won't catch.
Hayane Pinyin solves this with three things textbooks  
  cannot:                                      
  • Real-time VOT measurement — your pronunciation gets an 
  exact millisecond reading the moment you finish speaking.
  • Three-way verdict (good unaspirated / borderline / good   aspirated), per phoneme, with research-grounded thresholds.                                    
• Visual feedback: a VOT bar showing where you landed relative to native targets, plus the actual waveform of    your recording with burst and voicing-onset markers.
Special detection for the most common Japanese-learner error: voiced ば substitution (pre-voicing, negative VOT) is flagged in red so you can correct it directly rather   than guess.                                              
Each example word is read out by high-quality on-device  
 Mandarin speech synthesis, so you can hear the model and  immediately mimic. How it works:
1. Choose a phoneme pair (b/p, d/t, g/k).                
2. Listen to the model word.                             
3. Tap record and produce the syllable.      
4. Read your VOT value, the three-way verdict, and the  burst-to-voicing waveform.        

UI available in English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified      Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.                        
                                                         
  Privacy first                                              
• Microphone audio never leaves your device — all analysis is on-device.                                   
  • No accounts, no analytics, no third-party SDKs, no tracking.                                    
  • Works fully offline.                                                                                 
  Built on the academic phonetics literature (Chen, Chao & Peng 2007; Li 2013; Lisker & Abramson 1964; Ladefoged &  Maddieson 1996) as the design foundation, with threshold derived from native Mandarin distributions.


## Version history (last 2 releases)

### 0.1.1 — 2026-05-10

Tone Trainer redesigned as a visualization-only learning aid for accurate self-paced practice. F0 contour analysis upgraded with curved canonical templates from phonetic research. Vowel Quality now provides informational F1/F2 feedback for self-assessment. Stability and accuracy improvements.

### 1.0 — 2026-05-07

No release notes.

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-09.*