Remembering tones

[Scoobyqueen]

how?

[navaburo]

Definitely happens to me too. I recommend writing in tone marks next to the characters, then checking / correcting, then reading aloud again with the marks.

[ReelNicholas]

It has been suggested to me to mark the tones above a pre-written Chinese text and then go through and read it aloud.

[roddy]

How are you learning them in the first place? Sounds to me like you might not be learning the pronunciation as a whole, but kind of tagging the tone on as an afterthought. That is, you might be looking at 工 and thinking "Ok, that's gong, and it's first tone" instead of thinking "Ok, that's gōng". This makes it a lot easier to forget the tone (which basically means you don't know the word properly.) It's very easy to fall into a trap of thinking "Oh, I know those words. Just not the tones." How do you do on remembering them in speech?

What I did was to do a lot of very fast flashcard work on basic vocab which I already "knew". If I couldn't read it out loud with the correct tone the instant it popped up, back it went.

[navaburo]

To Roddy's production flashcard suggestion I would add aural recognition flash cards. Pleco does a good job of this. You will need to use words not characters though, because of ambiguities.

After some training hearing and writing down the word in characters, you should see a big improvement in reading aloud also.

[Frapunchino]

I often prepare texts[ half and A4 page] which i would read aloud to my one-on-one tutor, (1) write the pinyin on one side without the tone markers, then (2) I would write the hanzi version somewhere else, with the tone markers right above/near the character but in another color [ i use light yellow, so that's its barely visible thus forcing my mind to try its best to remember them] and added to that (3) dozen and dozens of practicing reading aloud, checking from time to time on the pinyin version for words i forgot, till i almost can remember the text by heart. and that's pretty much it. but anyway on the big day, i always get corrected on many tones, but i guess this is normal..the tutor even says im improving, not in real-time, but more in the sense that when she says "wrong" i am able to detect where the wrong tone lies.

while you are mentioning this somehow sticky business of remembering tones when reading aloud, i would say I don't really get this problem when (1) reading a piece of text for the first time or (2) when I talk to myself in chinese, i most of the time remember the tones which go with the words, i mean when i think of 家 its associated that this is the jia1 and not the short and abrupt 假 [holidays]

P.S - if you ask me, yes i do feel lucky that my mind couple/classifies the word with the tone like this, since i saw many people complaning that when learning chinese, more than remembering new words , you had to remember the tone which goes with it.

hoped my answer fulfills your expectations

[Tiana]

I'm with Roddy. When I learn "mēng", I learn "mēng" as a whole, and not "meng" plus 1st tone. I think this approach pays off as I rarely forget the tone of a particular character. Imagine how ineffective it would be if in learning these three words "would read aloud" we think of them as "woul" plus "d", "rea" plus "d", "alou" plus "d"

[Scoobyqueen]

Thanks for the responses.