Thanks, Olle. I think we agree. I’m definitely going to look at tone pair bingo.

Well, most of the pronunciation training I’ve seen is completely useless (I even listed a few common examples here), so I’m not at all surprised that you have encountered that.

Also, I didn’t say you should practise tones in isolation, I said that it’s useful to discuss separately the problem of learning tones. I do think it’s sometimes helpful to remove context because they are after all two different things. As you said, remembering the tones of a word is not the same thing as hearing the tones of that word. Minimal pair bingo is such an exercise I use quite a lot.

Thanks for the quick reply, Olle. To be honest, it wasn’t really the article that prompted my question. It was more that I have been thinking about it for a while and your article was a suitable one to respond to.

I suppose it was partly driven by a frustration about how difficult pronunciation and tones can be. Obviously I do agree that tones can be taught and learned in isolation, but I have a similar problem to …. above. It is fairly easy to hear and reproduce tones in isolation, although achieving that can take anything from a couple of days to many months for different people. The problem is when speaking and listening. Context helps a lot, but when speaking does the memory of the tone and pronunciation not need to be combined or else any fluency and speed will be lost. Some of the teaching of tones seemed strange to me. For example in tingli classes there would be exercises where we would listen to a recording of a sentence and then answer questions about what tones had been used. For the majority in the class this was mainly an exercise in guesswork and memory of the tone if we knew the word.

I admit that I should really not be commenting. I have no linguistic training and despite a couple of years of full time study of Chinese at Chuanda I have not progressed much beyond a survival level of Chinese. A big issue is that although I had exposure to Chinese for about 25 years it was really only at 55 that I had any formal language learning. Much too old I know.

You’re perfectly right! The reason I (often) talk about the separately is because tone problems are extremely common. I can count the number of students I’ve met with no serious tone problems on one hand, while I’ve met dozens who have almost no problems with pronunciation except the tones. So it makes sense to talk about tones separately. They are also often separated in Chinese, so it’s not uncommon for someone to say that your fāyīn is good, but that your shēngdiào have problems. I’m also curious, what in the article sparked your question? It seems fairly obvious to me that tone is one part of pronunciation, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not useful to talk about it separately, just like you can take any part of any other skill and discuss it in more detail?