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I'm not sure it's working for tone 1. I played back the teacher's recording and it thought it was tone 3. i was able to get 2,3,4 right though, and i think it probably helped my tone2
I have learned english and have got rid of my thick accent by imitating how other people speak, I should be able to do that with mandarin. I can just learn the pronunciation of the characters and adapt my accent as I speak. Why is there such a stress on memorising the tone for every character?
E.g. most people will remember which syllable to stress in a word after vocalising the word, but when learning mandaring people add the tone to their flashcards and are expected to have a more direct conneciton.
IMO there's no replacement for hardcore practise here - at the end of the day it is most like a physical skill so the learning tools you use for practising an instrument or sports technique are going to serve you well.
Focus on shortening the tones you sound (while staying accurate) and focus on combining tones.
Thankfully there are only 4 tones so only 16 unique combinations of two tones (actually only 15 because 3->3 isn't really used) And only 64 combinations of 3 tones
If you master those combinations in terms of speed and accuracy (both speaking and listening) the rest of it can be composed.
Then begins the long path to memorizing every phoneme+tone -> character pairing :)
This is GREAT. I have always had an issue with tone 2 and 3 but it turns out I have this tiny dip before the rise in my tone 2. It took a while looking at the tone patterns before I worked it out. Now give me something for that stupid ü or u-umlaut and then I might actually sound ok.
That's actually fine. (I'm a native bilingual speaker, although not from PRC.) Also, the 3rd tone is characterised more by being low than the fall-then-rise. In fast speech the rising part is often not heard; it's only really present in stressed syllables or possibly at the ends of sentences.
I use hearing aids and always have trouble discerning tones, this is my only gripe with learning chinese and it is hindering me. I have learned english and have got rid of my thick accent by imitating how other people speak, I should be able to do that with mandarin. I can just learn the pronunciation of the characters and adapt my accent as I speak. Why is there such a stress on memorising the tone for every charact…
I remember when I first started having Chinese lessons, my teacher used some Windows-based software to show me visualisations like these. It helped a lot to know where I was going wrong.
The visualisations here are the most useful part IMO, followed by the example sounds.
If you're a native English speaker learning Mandarin: one tip for the second tone is to make it sound like you're asking a question. In English, we raise the tone of the last syllable in a question. So if you pretend you're asking a question, you'll naturally get the right tone.
From experience of trying to converse with actual fluent speakers of Mandarin, there is a huge gap going from what you learn in the classroom, where you practise the tones in slow-mo, and how people speak and listen in reality. IMO there's no replacement for hardcore practise here - at the end of the day it is most like a physical skill so the learning tools you use for practising an instrument or sports technique ar…