Get the basics fast enough

[ChineseLearn22]

Great thread!!! so much information helped me alot guys

[Kherith]

Hej guys,

 

I wanna ask : Do you have any tips on mastering tones ? I repeat and repeat and repeat, still confuse them all...

[Shelley]

If I got it right you have been in China trying to learn chinese for lest than one month - yes? if so then You need to be more patient it will just take time and practice, you need to do lots of listening and practising.

 

I don't want to discourage you but it will not happen over night.

 

Don't do too much in one go, it gets confusing and frustrating. Try to pace yourself.

 

It will happen eventually.

[Angelina]

Try to understand that the person you are talking to needs to understand what you are saying. Look at mastering the tones as a way to make it easier for people to understand you. Also, listen!

[pross]

Tip: Invest in your listening ability. It wasn't until I could hear my own pronunciation mistakes, that I was able to make real progress on correcting them.

[Gharial]

Try to assign a simple mnemonic for tone when learning new vocabulary (ultimately reducible to individual characters). For example, he2 could be "This here rising river" (with the here pronounced like Cilla Black or similar Liverpudlians would say it), and fen4 could be "Effin' hell, I'm having to dig deep!" (with the ffin part the rough pronunciation). Note how I'm keeping the syllable pronunciation, tone, and general translation in the same order each time.

 

The ABC ECCE dictionary indicates which characters and combinations (pinyin strings) thereof are the most frequent, and marks where canonical tones need to be modified according to tone sandhi/tone change rules (again, see a review I posted). It's a pretty useful resource.

 

Lastly, the advice on pages 2 to 4 of the original CC course is very good. You can preview it on Google Books.