Picking nits here, but wouldn’t you need a 了 in there somewhere, like 我買了晚飯? At least, that’s what Google returns as the translation for the past-tense sentence “I bought dinner”.
Also, the presence of the (toneless?) 了 would then break up the 3-3 sequence of sounds, presumably removing the need for tone changes. I guess – I’m no expert.
No, neither of your examples make any sense.
Before and after tone sandhi is applied, 我買 and 我埋 have different tones–3rd/3rd before, 2nd/2nd after, and 3rd/2nd both before and after. Also, you typed “bowl of rice” for your second sentence without realizing it.
The tones would be the same for these two sentences, but nobody would confuse the two because the first sentence isn’t something a Chinese speaker would ever say. It literally doesn’t compute.
If you’re interested in learning Chinese, you should probably spend more time studying the way it’s actually used and less time on silly word games.
Yeah outside of some freakish outliers no one ever gets tonal languages by obsessing over the rules. Extensive listening is the way.
Some people learn by rote. Some by repetition without knowing the rules. Others by learning the rules. Some learn by curiosity, making mistakes and playing “silly word games”. For example, now I won’t forget 每, 果, 買, 晚 and (yes!) 碗 are all third tones.
The OP was about finding a sentence that when spoken, has a different meaning when written. I’m asking not only to learn but also to satisfy my curiosity. I was asked to give examples, and despite my very basic Chinese (a few weeks of learning old), gave some.
With your abundant and superior Chinese knowledge, perhaps you can indulge me and find some better examples instead of nitpicking what a beginner Chinese person typed?
Any given written sentence is always going to have the same meaning when spoken. It may, however, have other possible meanings to a listener who doesn’t see the characters, but this is much more likely to be the result of homonyms than tone sandhi.
Sorry, this would be even more of a waste of time for me than for you. I’ll be happy to leave you with a joke that makes use of a clever pun though:
A: 歪老二…猜一種動物。
B: 螃蟹！
I understood that where you have three or more third tones in a row, it’s generally up to the speaker how to sandhi them. So a 3 3 3 3 could be 2 2 2 3 or could be 2 3 2 3. Usually context dictates. And native speakers will know what they intend to say fractionally before they say it, so they will automatically choose the sandhi that best expresses their meaning - and avoids any potential confusion.
also I seriously believe that these are the real tones (as opposed to the previous diagram)
Actually, everyone learns to comprehend spoken language by hearing it in a way that they understand. There isnt much scientific information backing up that people learn to understand what is being said out loud by learning detailed rules. Some people spend more time on rote memorization or by learning rules or playing word games, but in the end, the only way to listen and comprehend what is being said (and have the capacity to produce ones own spoken language) is by hearing real world language examples presented in a way that you understand what is being said, in lots of different ways, in many different contexts. People have gotten into this debate elsewhere on Forumosa. There wasn’t a poll, but a large amount of us either never learned English grammar rules in school at all (some people aren’t even taught phonics, but that’s coming back to bite the education world in this moment), or didn’t learn it until university level linguistics or because of teaching English in Taiwan. If you don’t ever need to learn rules in your native language to comprehend and be understood, you don’t ever need to learn rules in your second language(s) to comprehend and be understood. You can learn the rules if you want to, but the rules are not granting you fluency.
If you test me on which words have which tones, I will probably fail 80% of that test. In fact, I was using Skritter quite a lot a few months back, and Skritter consistently told me I had ~20% comprehension on tones for individual characters. (Side note: when adding words that Skritter doesn’t have in their system, they tell you not to change the tones when tone sandhi applies. Two third tones in a row should be entered as two third tones in a row). But Skritter would be wrong about my skillz with tones. Just as I do not go around thinking about whether the vowel im about to use is short or long in English (I just speak), I don’t think about which tones im using in Chinese. I can hear the difference between the tones, but I don’t really remember which is which. It is very rare that I am misunderstood based on my tones, but when I am, I am usually asked, verbally, if I meant another thing. “I think you mean to use a fourth tone followed by a second tone” has never been used by any native speaker I’ve ever interacted with “on the street” in my decade of living here. Only Chinese teachers that waste my time in so many other ways, focus on “which tone is this?”. Again, there are too many other things to worry about with Chinese. No need to worry so much about specific details about tones.