What material to use with my tutor when working on pronunciation?

[Zorlee]

Hi!
I've been using iTalki a lot lately, trying different tutors in order to find a good one. I found a really nice tutor yesterday, and basically what I want to do is to use all my time on nailing proper tones and pronunciation.
I've been using the FSI course for pronunciation and romanization. Should I just work my way through FSI together with her? Or do you guys have any other recommendations?
I have been recommended by a lot of people that I should get private tutoring, at least in the beginning, but I really don't know how I should progress using my tutor.

She mentioned that she owned and had used the Integrated Chinese textbook series. Would it be better to buy one of these?
The thing is, since I already speak Japanese, I have no problem working with characters and grammar on my own. My main concern is to not develop bad pronunciation habits from the beginning, but I'm a bit confused on how to use the time with my tutor, since I've always been 100% self-studying in the past.

Thank you guys so much for your help
All the best,
Zorlee

[Guest realmayo]

First, I'd avoid getting in a situation where you're just reading text that you don't know very well and your tutor is correcting you, because your speaking won't be natural -- this is assuming you're having to spend time and effort figuring out the meaning and pronunciation of the text you're reading. 

For practising just pronunciation, I'd use sentences that you would use in a normal, simple conversation, and that you're happy using that way. For a source of such conversational sentences, maybe consider trialling (if they have trials) Chinesepod -- they explain the vocab and the sentences within their dialogues, and you have audio so you can listen loads on your own, before getting your tutor to listen to you.

For tones specifically, I think this is good and free: http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/tone-pair-drills

For grammar and vocab etc there are obviously lots of textbooks out there, and plenty of recommendations on these forums.

[muyongshi]

In general I agree with realmayo, but I do have to add that I think spending 1 to 2 weeks on JUST your pronunciation and all the different combos, etc can and is beneficial. But if that is all you ever practice then you are going to be handicapping yourself pretty bad.

[Tamu]

Hey, congrats on starting Chinese after Japanese!  It's good you're focusing on pronunciation, because knowing Japanese well kind of lets you "cheat" your way through reading and writing beginning Chinese and it's tempting to skip pronunciation and tones.

 

Pronunciation:

realmayo's advice is good. The sinosplice link he includes is great. There's a Anki shared deck of it which you can find; it's really helpful when you're starting out.

 

For tones specifically:

Foreigners at even advanced levels still make mistakes in their tones here and there. It's really good idea to start working on it from the very beginning.

 

HackingChinese has a drill you can use with your tutor. It's a clever one. My suggestion is to use it with nonsense words, or just with "ma" or "si", etc, if you're working on tones only. I started using it when I found it on his site and it helped me find a pecularity in how I was pronouncing things which I was then able to fix.

http://www.hackingchinese.com/a-smart-method-to-discover-problems-with-tones/

 

There's also a comment in that blog post to a tool which can record and graph your pronunciation of a word and compare it to a native speaker's tone. Olle, who writes HackingChinese, points out that this program is designed for linguists and takes time to understand its settings. I did get it to work pretty well for me, though, although it's probably overly strict in how exactly you have to match the native speaker to be considered "correct":

http://speakgoodchinese.org/

 

He posts here often, so perhaps he'll add his thoughts.

[Zorlee]

Thank you guys so much for your help!
I have a lesson with my tutor today, and will deffinitely try out the tone-bingo drill from HackingChinese. I've been working on tone pairs for the last couple of days, so this should be a good test to see how close / far off I am.
If you have any other tips, please let me know