Losing tones

[weilian]

My spoken Chinese level is a bit higher than my written one at the moment. I'm able to couple sentences with "ba" and "bei" together pretty quickly. Sometimes grammatical orders gets me off track and I've got to repeat a sentence.

One of the biggest problems I've been having though is that while I know the tones of the words I say, some of them get dropped when I'm trying to communicate. What have ya'll done to help solve this for yourselves?

[renzhe]

What I found to help:

1) Massive amounts of listening. After a while, some phrases get etched into my memory so well that I don't mispronounce them. Then I only have to worry about the stuff inbetween

2) Speaking slowly and more deliberately. It's less fun, but it's much easier to get it right.

It's still a huge problem for me. The faster I speak, the worse my tones get.

[L-F-J]

sometimes i've realized that through massive amounts of listening, the sounds etched into my brain are more easily reproduced through a normal/faster rate of speech. if i speak slowly sometimes i'll make tone mistakes because i'm actually not sure of them and speaking slowly we are forced to remember them accurately.

but speaking at a normal rate is the point, for me. and if i pronounce things correctly that way, then i dont worry about tones exactly. cant be a perfectionist in language learning- especially chinese. the point is to communicate.