How deeply do you "feel" tones?

[Demonic_Duck]

I think I skipped over that part when I read your post, my bad. I think the fact the function of the pitch patterns in English is different from the function in Chinese is probably more likely to cause problems for learners than be a help, though. Still, I think deliberately building up an awareness of these patterns in one's mother tongue and paying attention to them could only be beneficial.

 

Edit:

The irony is that I truly do know the tone of the word. I don't always know the character of some words I use, but if I know a word and can use it, then I know its tone. Perhaps @demonic_duck misunderstood, but I definitely know in my brain what the tone is. On a test, I would receive 100%. But somewhere between my brain and my mouth, in a long speech some disasters occur and some tones change.

 

I understood what you wrote, I was just suggesting that you are almost certainly mistaken about this. If you took a test of tones for all the words in your productive vocabulary, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get 95%, 98% or even 99% of tones correct. I would, however, be surprised if you got every single one correct (unless your available pool of productive vocabulary is very small). I have never, as of yet, come across a foreigner whose knowledge of tones for their active vocabulary is as good as a native speaker's (which even then wouldn't quite reach 100%, as discussed previously in this thread). That is to say, even for foreigners with a level considerably higher than mine, I still notice them getting some tones wrong in ways that are systemic (i.e. saying the same word incorrectly in the same way each time). I also notice this in myself: occasionally, I'll use a word I've been perfectly happily using for years without questioning it, and have a moment of doubt as to whether I've been saying it right; in these cases, checking with a native speaker often confirms my suspicion that I'd been saying it wrong.

[hedwards]

I can understand this. What I've found is that alternating between pronouncing the words carefully and individually with just the tone change rules applied with speaking more quickly and less carefully has worked pretty well. The big thing is that until your brain accepts that the tone is a vital component of the word, you're going to be fighting it. But, with practice you should find that the basal ganglia start to fire in a way that makes the tones correct, or closer to the accuracy of a native speaker.

 

That's just my 2 cents , one of my biggest sources of anxiety lately has been that since I haven't been speaking to anybody in ages that my tones on those sentences that I just rattle off are so far that I don't even realize how bad they are. But, my new teacher seems to understand what I'm saying and isn't taking too long to respond, so it must be working at least a bit.

 

I think it's easy to underestimate how much benefit there is to working from a recording of a native speaker and mimicing that at first. These days, I don't seem to need that as much as I can apply the tone change rules on my own and I've heard enough Chinese that I can sort of give it a Chinese sounding pattern to it.