Flashcard test pre- or post-sandhi tones?

[roddy]

Split from

I would rather learn only the original character's tones, but that is not possible.

And as it is in Skritter, so too it is in life.

Chinese person: 你好

You: nǐ...bùduì...yòubùduì...suànle ba, zàijiàn.

[imron]

I would rather learn only the original character's tones

that wor ks fine if you on ly wa nt to spe ak in sin gle sy lla bles.

[hanyu_xuesheng]

And as it is in Skritter, so too it is in life.

that wor ks fine if you on ly wa nt to spe ak in sin gle sy lla bles.

Sorry, I don't understand your answers.

I am able to apply tone sandhi rules myself. I prefer to test the original tones, not the modified tones. In dictionaries you'll never see tone sandhi modifications.

[OneEye]

Some of us actually pronounce all the tones in normal speech, imron.

That actually makes me wonder if there's some function that will allow you to switch things to the Taiwan standard, which has far fewer neutral tones, and many characters whose tones differ from the mainland standard (e.g. 暫時 is zhànshí, 星期 is xīngqí). It would be really annoying to be stuck with the mainland pronunciation in Skritter.

Edit: oops, didn't see that. Could you move this to the other thread, roddy?

[roddy]

For my money, you want to be learning what's going to be coming out of your mouth - any intervening processes, such as figuring out sandhi, is going to slow you down, and in fluent speech even minimal delays are noticeable. You need the pronunciation chunked and ready to go. Obviously you can't learn every case you're ever going to come across (who knows what you might one day need to put 不 In front of), but the more you do know, the better.

"Could you move this to the other thread, roddy?"

Yes, but now you're talking about Skritter functionality so it's all a great big mess again. I'm starting to think my battle against entropy is unwinnable.

[Silent]

I'm starting to think my battle against entropy is unwinnable.

Keep up your spirits don't give up.

It will become easy the moment the universe starts contracting.....:-)

(according to some just a matter of time)

[imron]

Sorry, I don't understand your answers.

I haven't used the Skritter iPhone app so I misunderstood your original comment. It came across to me like you were interested only in the pronunciation of characters and not the pronunciation of words, which in my opinion leads to stilted and unnatural speech, because people don't speak in characters. Anyway, I agree that tone sandhi shouldn't be shown in pinyin. The neutral tone however should be.

[icebear]

Anyway, I agree that tone sandhi shouldn't be shown in pinyin. The neutral tone however should be.

Agreed.

[Olle Linge]

Anyway, I agree that tone sandhi shouldn't be shown in pinyin. The neutral tone however should be.

Why not, though? I haven't really thought about this a lot, but I usually change pronunciation of 不 and 一, but I always write the underlying tone for T3. I think this is quite sensible, because 不 and 一 are fairly common characters and I would never ever forget their underlying tones, whereas I think it helps getting the reading right more quickly if I see the surface tones (and colours in Anki). T3 is different, because there are thousands of characters with underlying T3, which means that it would be stupid to include tone sandhi in Pinyin simply because if the character is uncommon, I wouldn't be able to tell T2+T3 from T3+T3, for instance. So, I think it's fine to include tone sandhi for 不 and 一, but not T3S, which would make things very confused indeed.

[imron]

Why not, though?

Consistency more than anything else. Plus, it's one of the rules of the definition of Pinyin. If there wasn't a well defined practice that people adhered to, you'd get a mix of different things among different learning materials and it would probably cause more confusion than you saved by indicating the sandhi.

[navaburo]

Personally I like putting a little dot under the vowel that undergoes tone sandhi, like Pleco uses. It's just a quick warning sign to not take the tone mark literally when pronouncing.

[Olle Linge]

Consistency more than anything else.

Is it consistent, though? I checked all the textboks I have (both Taiwanese and Mainland) and all of them changed tones for 不 and 一. I also checked som children's books with Zhuyin and they also give surface tones for these two characters. In fact, I checked a number of books with phonetic writing included and the only I could find that did not use changed tones for 不 and 一 were dictionaries.

[hanyu_xuesheng]

Dictionaries:

不客氣[--气] bụ̀ kèqi

Textbooks:

bú kèqi

The 1st is preferred for advanced learners who know the rules, the 2nd for beginners.

I personally prefer the 1st.

[laurenth]

@navaburo

Personally I like putting a little dot under the vowel that undergoes tone sandhi, like Pleco uses. It's just a quick warning sign to not take the tone mark literally when pronouncing.

Thanks for mentioning this about Pleco (ABC dictionary). I had never noticed.