I’ve been using an app called Hanly for memorizing characters for the past couple of weeks and have got the writing of about 100 of them memorized but I can’t really pronounce any of them correctly. I’ve recently also started using HelloChinese for like more practical conversation stuff but still the tones are really messing with me. Anyone have advice for getting better at the tones?
Tone is maybe the thing that varies the most between dialects, so don’t be discouraged if something is hard to hear. Listen and imitate.
- ā - like singing a note
- á - like a question
- ǎ - dark, aim for vocal fry
- à - like you’re angry, “fuck!”
While most learning materials describe tone 3 as falling-rising, that is contextual and only happens in isolation, at the end of a sentence, or for emphasis. In all other cases it is best understood simply as a low tone.
Listen to words and phrases and compare them to the pinyin with tone marks. i don’t think it’s useful to study tones by themselves. you just need a lot of listening (and then pronunciation) practice.
also immersion really works. just don’t go to hunan/sichuan/guizhou for mandarin tone immersion, their tones are really weird
