Goal: Heritage reconnection — grandparents speak no English

"HEXI never let me skip tones. The pronunciation ring kept me honest. At month four I called my grandmother for the first time in Mandarin. She cried. So did I."

David grew up hearing Mandarin but never speaking it. The exposure gave him some comprehension — enough to follow his grandparents' tone, not their meaning. His placement was A1: passive recognition without production capacity. Heritage learners are common; their profile is distinct.

Mandarin pronunciation has exactly four tones plus neutral tone. Tone errors in Mandarin aren't accents — they're meaning errors. 妈 (mother) and 马 (horse) differ only in tone. HEXI blocked Production mode access until pronunciation hit 50%. David objected. HEXI gave him the research.

DeKeyser (2007): automatization requires practice in conditions that match performance. Practicing production with incorrect tone mapping encodes the wrong procedure. Fixing it later is harder than building correctly from the start. Eight weeks of Imprint™ before Construct™ access.

The call to his grandmother happened in month four. His Mandarin was slow, his tones imperfect, his vocabulary thin. She understood him. He understood her. The production ring was at 45% — still low by CEFR standards. But CEFR doesn't measure what that call was worth.

FP Ring Progress · 8 months

Methodology: Composite profile based on typical CEFR A1→A2 heritage reconnection trajectories. Ring scores are VOICECAST-verified.

Your rings start at zero. VOICECAST measures where you actually are.