Thanks for all positive replies.
I exercise voice tones myself all good because I’m saying it.
I also partly think watching YouTube video lessons where PinYin is displayed so toning is easy, however reading and not listening?
I seem to more adapt at reading Hanzi than hearing correctly, how I answer most questions correctly as they have voice & characters to all quiz questions.
Well, the thing is, it’s like when they say you can have it good, fast, or cheap, pick two.
There is tones, there is grammar, and there is word choice. If you have two out of three of them correct, usually you’ll be understood – especially if tones is the missing one. But your grammar and word choice have to be spot on to make that happen.
I was in a training session years ago for an oral proficiency rating thing, and we had several non-native speakers and a bunch of native Chinese speakers. They played a recording of a candidate who spoke very fluently, used high-level vocabulary, but had absolutely no tones at all. I mean like robotic speech. All the non-natives said immediately “Fail”. But the native speakers all said “Why? We can understand him fine.”
Discerning tones in isolation is a parlor trick. Especially because tones change in actual speech. I spent enough hours in the phonetics lab looking at waveforms to confirm that. And native speaker tones can break down or change under stress as well. I know interpreters who have wrong tones or no tones at all depending on how difficult the incoming speech is to process while interpreting simultaneously.
So it’s a really interesting question.
I learnt Chinese for half a year and drop it, cause got nowhere with tones.
How do you feel with Chinese once you become fluent? It becomes less annoying language or still annoying? Does it become natural to use tones, without thoughts?
My wife still prefer to speak English, even German got good. Like many emigrants. I think cause German sounds harsh and there are many rules.
I do admit living in Taipei for 2 years using only hao and xia xia was not a problem.
I plan to live Taiwan more permanently so figure I should make the effort, be more respectful to Taiwan people, make life easier and more sociable.
Im not giving up.
Yes, but there are no words that neighbor could easily be confused with.
I second this. China tried to do away with characters all together because they felt like their writing system was preventing people from becoming literate. Problem was that there are soooooo many homonyms without considering the tones, so just pinyin would make the written language confusing. So the world has simplified characters now instead. If they tossed out tones all together? Chinese wouldn’t be understood even by native speakers.
As a beginner, I would say to listen to recordings and only use the pinyin to follow along with/draw attention to the sounds and tones. Don’t just read the pinyin without a recording, as you will fossilize your mistakes. Characters should come only after you’re 95% certain of the sounds, tones, and meaning of the word you’re learning the character for. Do not listen to teachers who tell you you need to get away from pinyin “as a crutch”. Don’t only ever learn pinyin, but use pinyin until you learn the word very well before you learn the characters.
I remember going to a Chinese speech contest at the end of my first year of learning Chinese. I’d written my speech in pinyin and felt like I was so far behind everyone else there, whose speeches were written in characters. One of my other classmates had the same feeling and asked our teacher why we were so far behind. He told us we weren’t behind. Guess who didn’t struggle to remember the meaning of the words being said and also how to say them? Yeah, the people from our class. Guess who got up on the stage and stumbled through their speeches, if they weren’t memorized? Yeah, every newbie who wrote their speech in characters.
What am I getting at? Oh, there’s a time and a place for each thing in Chinese learning. Start with listening, then go to following along with pinyin and a recording, then practice speaking. Once you’ve mastered that, learn to read characters. Around the same time, you can also practice writing, but for the love of god, learn the correct stroke order when you do
I wouldn’t worry about it. I suggest that rather than focus on the tones of individual characters, listen to tonal shape of the sentence, and practice repeating those sentences. You’ll get it soon enough, even if you can’t necessarily identify what tones you’re using on a character-by-character basis.
Vietnamese used to be written with Chinese characters, til they switched to a Latin-based alphabet
Feel? What does feel have to do with it? I feel like I’m talking, in Chinese.
Chinese has never been annoying. I learned Chinese because I wanted to, and because I like the language. Can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny, or if your bias against Chinese is what doomed your efforts to learn.
Yes. Learned tones early on, like from the beginning, lots of practice speaking and listening and imitating, and the tones become more natural.
Speed of speaking!
That’s where ‘air’ writing characters comes in.
It becomes frustrating because now you understand what locals say about you.
That’s the way I was thinking, due to foreigners returning restrictions! I have plenty of time to learn.
I must be getting better? Quiz test 5
Give us more please
It is to me. I have b2 in Spanish, Croatian, English as German native speaker.
I couldn’t move on with Chinese and I think is about tones and maybe cause Taiwanese are socially awkward. I didn’t like their attitude towards outsiders. It’s not like Madrid, where you go down in bar and have long conversations with people. Working long hours in Taiwan and strange requests from parents in law, make me unmotivated.
Learning should be fun and I didn’t get that with Chinese. It’s a pity cause kids talk Chinese too
Very true, especially younger men.
Finding local friends is difficult.
Taiwanese are a closed society, think of Europe and North America whereas hundreds of different nationalities living in same proximity?
Be understanding and accept the difference.
Yeah. I have a number of Taiwanese friends. I also have a number of Taiwanese ex-friends. People who are stuck in their ways don’t change, even after studying outside of Taiwan for a decade. I have accepted that and don’t waste my time on it. The longer I live here, the more foreign friends I make and the less effort I make towards seeking out Taiwanese friends. I’m not on an exchange program anymore, so I have no issue being friends with people from everywhere. There is zero social pressure on me to have “local friends”. How does one practice Chinese without “local” friends? Well, ideally you have one or two local friends, but start going to classes offered to “locals”. Learn to hand pour coffee, weave rugs, do aerial yoga…you’ll pick up on what the teacher and your classmates are saying eventually. Some opportunities will be a total waste of your time, but the experience can always be something to learn from. My 
I can see your point, and a person’s feelings about language can be subjective.
I also think (my subjective opinion) that German and Taiwanese culture are very different!
I dunno. My thirty years of learning Chinese have all been fun. I find Taiwanese are always happy to talk to me. A sense of humor helps. I agree it’s hard to make lasting friendships here but the man or woman on the street is certainly not socially awkward when it comes to one on one exchanges with foreigners.