Sounds reasonable, but it seems like there’s also other situations where sandhi doesn’t happen, like this one, 你把我惹毛了. It does seem to have something to do with the pronoun in the initial position though. Or maybe it’s a me and you with an auxiliary verb sandwiched in between?
Based on my extremely limited experience (I don’t know Chinese), when native speakers here speak at their normal rate, it’s often hard for me to tell whether they apply sandhi. For example, in this snippet, the speaker is speaking so fast that “那我” sounds something like nao to me, so it’s hard to tell whether 我 is influenced by the 可 that follows it:
In some of the movies on YouTube, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell whether the actors are using tones at all. 
The sentence below is from educational materials, so sandhi seems clear to me (from the second (lower) passage):
In the sentence quoted above, Google Translate also seems to apply sandhi between 你 and 想.
I don’t know about mainlanders, but Taiwanese seem to be like John Coltrane or Charlie Parker with their Mandarin–they pretty much do whatever they want to do.
Somewhere in the U. S. Government course I’ve toyed with over the years (just at the beginnings of the thing), the course writer says something like (not an exact quote), just because native speakers can get away with ad-libbing with the tones, that doesn’t mean the learner can get away with it.
In the case of 你給我, there are three 3rd tones in a row. The 給 becomes a 2nd tone due to sandhi, so the 你 consequently precedes a 2nd tone, and thus retains its 3rd tone.
When you get lots of 3rd tones in a row, like 我也想走走幾秒, all kinds of things can happen. But in this case, 走走 is normally pronounced zou2 zou3, and that might set the pattern for the statement.
3 Likes
At this point, not one single native or non-native speaker has ever heard of–let alone agrees with-this tone sandhi exception for “wo3” and “ni3.” I had the teacher clarify the point with colleagues, and I received a short video excerpt with a Chinese speaker saying stuff that seems to have no relation at all to the point at hand. Then, this teacher now says that wo3 and ni3 are only excepted from tone sandhi when they’re the first word in a sentence. as they quite often are. In fact, I have heard people do this–and do it myself–when, for emphasis, that first wo3 is so separated from the following word that you do two third tones in a row because there is no “in a row” feel. When the initial “wo3” is that separated and emphasized, it’s full 3rd tone, never half, which would be weird.
Depressingly, another point came up where the teacher said that the “bu” in a negative potential complement must be 4th tone, not neutral tone as I’ve always been taught. For example, “kan4bu4dong3,” and not “kan4bu5dong3.” Yet the teacher grants that the “de” in positive potential complements (e.g. “kan4de5dong3”) is indeed neutral tone. Then the teacher pulls out a textbook to support the point and shows two grammar points that do not, in fact, address what’s we’re talking about. I pointed out that the third item on that same page says precisely that the “bu” is neutral tone. Teacher reads it and admits the error. How on earth can a native speaker make errors like that? I mean, the erroneous theoretical ideas have to come from somewhere. After that dealbreaker, I’m happy to get what I can from this person’s valuable aspects, as long as I can gracefully evade the inexplicable brain farts. A very nice person with a great attitude for teaching who’s actually not a total dope. The dopey part is just a mystery, and I’m getting a very good rate.
1 Like
Native speakers don’t really have to think about this kind of thing. He’s probably just not a very experienced teacher.
1 Like
Definitely lacking in teaching experience, but it’s not just an abstract idea: this person’s speech consistently reproduces the “error” (a full 3rd tone “wo” instead of a 2nd tone, sandhi-ed “wo”). You would think mom and dad and other native speakers would have pointed this out somewhere in this person’s life.
1 Like
That’s weird. Maybe they’ve been taught the concept at some point and have tried to follow it
Your teacher is a dick. That’s “dick” with a rising-falling-looping tone.
It could be a China vs. Taiwan thing. Is he Taiwanese, but the book teaches the type of Chinese spoken as a standard in China? Keep in mind also that even Taiwan-published Mandarin books contain some linguistic elements that are more commonly used in China than in Taiwan.
Standard Mandarin in China uses neutral tones far more often than Standard Mandarin a spoken in Taiwan.
This notion really cracks me up… that this teacher might be the only person in the world that does this no-sandhi thing for pronouns, and has then has passed this meme on to her students.
But let’s allow that maybe she picked it up from her hometown.