Stuck on learning tones in SRS

[Friday]

I use Anki to practice vocabulary. I have cards that ask me for the pinyin, characters, or the English meaning. When asked for the pinyin or characters, I write these on a sheet of paper. For English, I just think of the meaning. Most of my cards are sentences.

I find, this works quite well for learning the English meaning, sentences, and the letters within the pinyin. However, I find, I'm quickly forgetting the pinyin tone marks. I have no understanding of how to store this information for memory. Now, when I study, I find most of the time it is just asking me the pinyin; I spend so much time trying to get the tones on the pinyin right, that Anki rarely presents me with anything new to study. In short, I'm getting quite frustrated with my inability to remember tones for anything longer than 1- or 2-character words.

Is there some way I should be changing my study habits? I can't see anyway to store this tone information in my memory.

[Demonic_Duck]

If you're not doing it already, make sure you say the words/sentences out loud every time you learn or practice them. Even if you're generally more of a visual learner, for tones speaking aloud can help a lot.

[jbradfor]

In general, I've found two tricks to remembering tones:

1) For each new character, delta off a character you already know. I don't know how many characters you know, but for me, by far the vast majority of new characters are radical-phonetic type, so I delta off a similar character.

2) Say them outloud a lot. There are a number of words for which I can not remember the tones, but if I hear myself say them, I can remember.

In short, I'm getting quite frustrated with my inability to remember tones for anything longer than 1- or 2-character words.

This seems strange. So you can remember tones for 1 or 2 character words, but not longer? What if you just stick to 1 or 2 character words for now? Or break down longer words into 1 or 2 character ones?

[daofeishi]

Learning tones through SRS without external auditory input is almost like trying to fly by hoisting yourself from a bootstrap. What I think you would benefit from is more listening practice. To make the connection between sounds and characters, try to add simple TV shows with subtitles to your routine, (preferably a TV show or cartoon with people with very distinctive voices ). That is a strategy that worked well for me. I started out by watching Snoopy dubbed to Chinese, and I can still recall the sound of words and phrases that I learned from that show. "Peppermint Patty: 照你的要求，鸡蛋买好了先生" - that's how I learned that 要求 is pronounced yao1qiu2. I won't forget it. “复活节小狗”: fu4huo2jie2

Shows that I watched and enjoyed when I was at the initial stages of learning Chinese include 喜洋洋与灰太狼, 框框日记 and Snoopy (史努比). See if any of them work for you.

[WestTexas]

Basically I have a few types of cards in my Anki deck. I have sentences and also individual words. If I miss the tones on a word, I count it wrong. For a full sentence, if I miss one or two tones, I will still press '3' to show that I got the sentence right and reschedule it in the future. Ultimately if you are missing tones in a sentence, you are missing tones on one word, and it's that word you should be reviewing, not the whole sentence. Reviewing a whole sentence when you're only really missing the tones on one word is a waste of time.

[Gymnosopher]

With my shorter experience using Anki/SRS and lower Chinese level than those above I think I may have a similar problem - that is, remembering the tones composited with remembering that tones exist at all!

I don't have that advanced a deck yet, still at the downloading too many shared decks stage and making a few of my own, however the deck I most use whilst the others go stale is the one full of my classes 生词 so in theory words I've been studying and want to retain knowledge of. However like yourself there are characters that come up which I seem to always get wrong...

What seems to help me is using the Pinyin Toolkit plugin. The benefit here is that it paints the answer characters/pinyin to a colour code whilst also reading out the character to you (though unfortunately if you want this to account for tone rules in longer words you need to play around with it more than the auto-generation). So if I read my character out loud (thus far I just have character cards) then reveal the answer as different, I can hit F5 for it to repeat the audio and follow after this myself several times to try and ram it home - before marking it wrong and coming back to it.

I think being harsh with yourself if getting tones wrong can make things difficult in reviewing more, but for me I don't want to get sloppy.

[Friday]

This seems strange. So you can remember tones for 1 or 2 character words, but not longer? What if you just stick to 1 or 2 character words for now? Or break down longer words into 1 or 2 character ones?

Even remembering the tone marks for 2 character words is more difficult than remembering how to write the characters. As much of the deck I'm using is sentences, I tend to forget 25% of the marks and don't seem to improve any.

Learning tones through SRS without external auditory input is almost like trying to fly by hoisting yourself from a bootstrap. What I think you would benefit from is more listening practice.

All of the decks I'm using have audio, although, usually when I have a "listen" card, I just write the characters.

To make the connection between sounds and characters, try to add simple TV shows

I watch Chinese-language cartoon shows all the time. This has improved my listening ability, but it doesn't seem to have done much to help me improve my memory of the tones. I'll try Snoopy.

For a full sentence, if I miss one or two tones, I will still press '3' to show that I got the sentence right and reschedule it in the future. Ultimately if you are missing tones in a sentence, you are missing tones on one word, and it's that word you should be reviewing, not the whole sentence. Reviewing a whole sentence when you're only really missing the tones on one word is a waste of time.

Oh, good idea, I will do that. Yeah, I'm getting stuck maybe 2 words per sentence, with about 10 words in each sentence. I'll try that out for a while. When you write the sentences out while studying in the SRS software, do you just right the pinyin letters and skip writing the tone marks?

[Guest realmayo]

Seems to me that you've fallen into what I think is a trap of thinking of a Chinese sound as "sound + tone": this might encourage you to think of the tone as an "optional extra" added on to the sound, rather than a key part of it.

One suggestion to remedy that might be to try listening drills which just test your ability to hear the correct tone of individual sounds.

Another is the 'story' approach, which is to settle on four people to represent each tone. This worked very well for me when I was working through the first 1500 or so characters. As an example, I chose tennis player Roger Federer as the first tone, so when I was remembering a new character, I made up a story in my head that connected the character and its meaning with Roger (or sometimes just with a tennis racket or court or whatever). I should add that I never now think about Roger, or the other three people (can't remember who they all were now anyway) any more, but I do remember the tones (most of them ).

[Olle Linge]

I think many wise things have been said already. Here's what I would do (repeating what I think is important and adding some new):

1) Read the words aloud, focusing on tone

2) Get the sound files and listen to your flashcards

3) Regard sound and tone as one, not as sound with an optional tone

4) Don't cheat (i.e. if you get the sound right, but not the tone, you MUST hit "again")

5) If a specific character bothers you, connect the tone to a part of the character (for instance 行 seen as two steps (second tone: walking going) or as four marks (fourth tone: conduct, behaviour), remember that it doesn't need to be entirely true or correct as long as it works)

6) Use the colouring that comes with Pinyin Toolkit

7) If colours aren't enough, associate each colour with something and then associate that colour with the word (for instance, first tones are red by default and red means fire in my world; picture a fiery mountain to know that 山 is firs ttone or a someone using their hand to watch out over the ocean (blue, water, fourth tone)

Listen more (this is obvious, but should be mentioned)

Basically, you could vary the above-mentioned principles until you've found something that works for you. Personally, I only use a few of these when I really forget the tone of a word several times. Good luck!

[roddy]

I used to make myself say the word (out loud if I wasn't on public transport) and then also carefully and consciously check the tones. So I'd see, say, 要求， say yāoqiú, then think to myself something like 'first, then second' and maybe also remind myself that 要 is otherwise 4th tone. Then over time and as I got better at the tones I guess I dropped that second stage and shifted to trying to produce the sound quickly and accurately (which is, after all, what you'll need to be doing).

You do need to shift over time from thinking of 我 as 'wo, and that's third tone / blue / Roger Federer in his underpants' to 'wǒ'

[Olle Linge]

You do need to shift over time from thinking of 我 as 'wo, and that's third tone / blue / Roger Federer in his underpants' to 'wǒ'

I would say that any method that requires more complex recall that isn't immediate (i.e. you need to do it in more than one step) should never be the main method. In other words, I agree. However, when studying for tests or when I encounter words that I simply cannot remember regardless how I try, I think these methods are quite useful. So, I want to clarify that some tips I mentioned were meant to solve problems with specific characters, rather than being adopted as the main method for remembering tones.