Don't Memorize Chinese Tones - Train Your Ears Instead!

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[lexxryazanov]

I believe listening skill is waaaay more important than pronunciation, and practicing listening ones naturally adapt to the tones

[BaoBao-imzv]

I did this unknowingly by watching Chinese dramas for a year almost everyday then start learning Chinese. I had two teachers until this day and both of them were surprised by my pronunciation, i still have a long way to go but listening too much Chinese before start to learn it helped more than i can imagine😄

[sweetmorgan]

just today i complained to my teacher that I can not retain tones and prononciations from card-method hanzi learning, no matter how hard i try. But I can joyfully use everyday words that I heard in chinese dramas and be understood. Now, I just need to find a chinese drama about botany and organic pigments...

[M.C.P.]

Thanks for this video... one of my Chinese teachers told me that tones are important but the rhythm inside the sentences is even more important. Every language has its own rhythm.
Greetings from Italy!

[retrorystergaming]

I always said that foreigners focus way to much on the tones exactly how you mentioned in this video. Listen to the way native speakers speak and just try to imitate them. Once you know how the tones sound it's much more efficient than trying to memorise tones.

[fimbulsummer]

This method is how my university Chinese speaking course began. I think it’s set me up well with “Chinese ears” and even though I haven’t studied Chinese in over ten years, I can still distinguish the tones pretty well.

[lyricsgalore]

Going to leave updates here: day 2 of practicing with a chart, before I could make out less than half of the tones I was hearing, and now i can pronounce them better and when using the maorma site i get more than 70% right, let's see how it will be after a month

[catabulai]

When I first started learning Chinese 14 years ago I spent a lot of time with this online pronunciation chart of pinyin syllables and I’ve always gotten component on my pronunciation. Chinese sounds and tones were so foreign to me at first, I couldn’t produce them before I trained my ears to hear them. Great advice!

[inchargemom]

I think the most important thing is that you keep trying to communicate. People are generally very gracious when they know that you are trying and will help you!

[tedcrowley]

Good advice. You can memorize the 5 tones in minutes, but that is not how people speak. The tones are used for isolated words, but sentences use intonation (and pauses) for meaning, and that often over-rides the isolated tones. It's part of the language.

[thegoodcristian]

This is exactly what I needed to hear today! I’ve been hitting a plateau with my tone recognition, and I think this info will help me a ton. 非常感谢 💗

[Honywood]

We have all the Chinese tones in UK English but of course they don't change lexical meaning although they usually have an attitudinal or grammatical or focus function. General pitch and volume of speaking can also make a difference :)

[Thanos_Kyriakopoulos]

The method I used was take a sentence and first say the tones one by one, then small phrases, and then the whole sentence.
我，喜欢，吃，苹果。
我喜欢，吃苹果。
我喜欢吃苹果。
Because if you go from the first step straight to the third step you'll surely go wrong.

[nio]

This actually makes sense to me. People have the exact same problem telling and pronouncing *vowels* apart in a sufficiently different language, and the solution is the same as with tones: training your ear.

English has like 20-something vowel sounds, and people do just fine

[cmmndrblu]

What has helped me with tones: associating a tone with a colour on Pleco, training tone pair drills, learning characters and words in context from whole phrases.

[DMSBrian]

It's a good practice but it leaves out 1 important thing that i came to realize - tones on their own can be very hard to distinguish, thinking of them as of a melody helps (which is why this practice works well, because it incorporates moving to longer words). The pitch relation between tones is what really helps your brain distinguish between them, eg. in the example you brought up, the biggest difference between the 1st and 4th tone in kai and tone 3 and 2 in shi is the starting pitch in the former but then the pitch relationship of the first syllable to the second is what really lets you identify both with ease. This melody is what is really picked up by the brain during regular speech and learning it can be made faster if one is conscious of this.

[susanburdelski]

Thank you. This is the first useful advice I've gotten for studying tones!

[MrKbtor]

I have been awkwardly using the hand tone tracing technique for years until I gave up and hoped that the listener understands me from context [facepalm cry emoji]....Over time my fluency increased because I didn't overemphasize the perfect tone, however 1 in 5 conversations result in an awkward pause when the native listener would stop and tell me I didn't catch that which affected my confidence to ever use that word again if I had other options which is [sad emoji].

[marymcv]

How did you manage to capture footage of me trying to learn (1:30)?!?! That's my problem exactly - learning individual words' tones, and then failing miserably at the whole sentence!!😂 I'd actually started getting discouraged about pronounciation and so I've been focusing more on reading/writing characters - but this video was a huge encouragement! It showed me what I'm doing wrong and gave me a new technique to practise my pronunciation going forward, and I can't wait to get started! Thank you so much!! New subscriber :)

[devinatalia]

Thanks for explaining this issue. I always not confident in speaking Chinese because it's difficult for me to say it correctly with the right tones. But I will take your suggestion to put more time on training my ears rather than memorizing the tones. Your advise is like opening my eyes on this new approaching method for learning tones. Thank you so much.. ❤❤