Hi Tikaf,

That’s a great question! In general, doing things randomly is good when you want to test or assess, but a structured approach is better when you want to learn something. I wrote more about learning to hear sounds and tones here if you’re interested. The most important thing is that you get immediate feedback, so using the deck you mention would work if you already feel you know the tone pairs well. It’s a form of tone pingo, which I talked about here.

The problem with using this if you don’t already know tones well is that the difficulty level is much too high. I don’t know exactly what the sweet spot is for this type of learning, but you probably want to be right more often than not. I have tried (a decade ago, maybe) full-on, randomly distributed tone pairs for students I thought would be able to handle it, only to realise that it’s much, much harder than I thought (this is assuming that they don’t know the words, of course, because then it’s no longer about tone perception).

Thus I was wondering about the effectiveness of using this deck and random tone pair drilling versus going through a whole list of words with the same tone pair pattern.
I would instinctively use the latter method, but I’m curious about how you see the matter yourself.

Thanks for recommending Zungzi, it’s pretty neat!

Great article, and great app recommendation!