Audio vs Pinyin

[XiaoXi]

21 hours ago, Yadang said:

Doesn't this have the danger of reinforcing learning the tone separately from the (non-tonal part of the) pronunciation?

Yes that's a good point, although so does pinyin since it also has a tone mark over the top of it. It's at least better than pinyin since it takes your focus to the character. But yes personally I would go for pure audio whenever you're ready.

[XiaoXi]

13 hours ago, Apollys said:

I had a textbook that utilized this method and absolutely hated it for the reason you mentioned.  I was tempted to white out the tone marks from the entire book, but figured it wasn't worth it and just used a bookmark to block them as I was reading.

 

I definitely think it's dangerous to start down any path that teaches your mind tones are somehow less innately connected to the language than the other parts of the sounds.  In fact, tones are the most clearly evident element of the sound.  If you hear someone yelling far away, or your friends are talking in another room, there are times when almost all you hear are the tones.  And yet this can be enough to make out the meaning in some contexts.  If you hear people talking in some weird accent, they're likely changing the position of their tongue or lips, but the tones remain.  In short, tones should be the top priority.

Yes very good points indeed. You're right this is another big mistake learners make, to treat tones separately when Chinese people just learn them all as individual whole 'sounds' from an early age. Another good reason to avoid pinyin with the tone marks above every word. You should listen to the sound only and the character, that way you treat it as a whole thing and it also shifts your focus 100% to the character, rather than the pinyin word.