{"id":7332,"date":"2015-12-04T11:13:16","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T11:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=7332"},"modified":"2024-01-07T18:47:42","modified_gmt":"2024-01-07T17:47:42","slug":"the-tone-training-course-is-now-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/the-tone-training-course-is-now-open\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hacking Chinese free tone training course"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I wrote an article about how to learn to hear the tones in Mandarin<\/a>. In my opinion, that’s a very important question. The most obvious reason is that understanding spoken Mandarin becomes very hard if you don’t hear the tones. In addition, it’s also true that it’s impossible to be able to pronounce something correctly and consistently if you can’t hear the difference yourself.<\/p>\n

Learning to hear the tones in Mandarin<\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem is further aggravated by the fact that this is almost never taught in classrooms. Pronunciation in general is overlooked, but the listening part (identifying sounds) is even more neglected.<\/p>\n

Some students are good at this and pick up new sounds easily. But what about the rest? Are they just supposed to accept that it’s too hard and either stop learning or accept that their listening comprehension and pronunciation will suffer?<\/p>\n

Of course not! The problem is that there is no good way of systematically hearing the tones, especially not if you don’t live in a Chinese-speaking environment. Even if you do, your input is likely to be too random and unpredictable to help you much (unless you belong to the group who can easily pick up sounds and tones, of course).<\/p>\n

As I mentioned in last week’s article, speaker variation has been found to be very important for learning to hear differences. Please refer to that article for more about this<\/a>. But most learners can’t find varied input from a number of speakers that is also systematic and predictable enough to allow their brains to establish and adjust the correct sound categories. Allow me to introduce the tone training course:<\/p>\n

Announcing the tone training course<\/strong><\/p>\n

The goal with my thesis research is to fix this problem, or at least take a significant step in the right direction. Thus, I hereby announce the opening of the tone training course, presented in cooperation with Kevin Bullaughey through the language learning platform WordSwing (more about this below).<\/p>\n

Below, I will tell you more about the course and how to join it. First some basics:<\/p>\n

The course:<\/p>\n