Good catch, I have fixed the issue! I don’t know exactly what kind of textbook you’re referring to here, but I think most people are in agreement that there are indeed four tones in Mandarin. The fact that one of them has (at least) two very different surface forms doesn’t mean that they are separate tones. It makes no sense to analyse them as two different tones and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody try to do that in a convincing manner. As you know, I’m extremely critical of how the third tone is normally taught, however, so I do agree with you in spirit. As for the neutral tone, that’s also badly taught, and “no tone” is of course nonsense, which reminds me that I haven’t written a post on the neutral tone. I thought I did, but I can’t find it, so I must have imagined it!

When it comes to vocabulary lists, it would be hard to write such an article without extensive research. I can anecdotally come up with a few, but not enough to write an article about it. The textbook I used as a beginner had a very large number of odd translations and my teacher always spent a few minutes at the end of each lesson to highlight problems with the words in the upcoming chapter. 🙂

You wrote 4 twice there.

When talking about tones, the most commonly used method is to number them from one to four

There are MORE than four tones! It utterly enrages me when people don’t talk about the low tone. Or “no tone”, whatever that means. What the hell does “no tone” mean? The textbooks throw it out there with zero explanation and never address it again. Turns out, “no tone” does indeed have a tone, and the tone depends on the context.

After a long time, I’ve come to understand that the people who write these textbooks are not particularly keen on anyone else learning Chinese. They are quite content to keep it to themselves. It’s either the “I’m the only laowai in town and I’m special” disease or it’s “I’m a professor of CSL and I have never bothered to pay attention to how adult learners of Mandarin acquire the language.”

Next blog entry should be about lying vocabulary lists that teach words that Chinese people never use. For example, “get” is always listed as 得到 but I have never heard anyone use that word and likely never will.