Language Drills

[MrBubble]

Would anyone be able to tell me the exercises or drills you found most effective in learning how to pronounce Mandarin Chinese's tones? I am interested in reading as many suggestions as possible.

[Bu Lai En]

I htink you need a teacher to help you otherwise you think you're saying it right, but you aren't. Then just say one word with all four tones getting your teacher to correct you, then go for some combination words ie a two syllble word that is first/first then first/second etc. Also try words that are the same except for the tones.

If you go to zhongwen.com and follow it's 'links' page to 'learning chinese' I remember there's one site with a lot of audio working on the tones.

Bri

[<Morning Breeze>]

In this day and age, you can have supplementary Mandarin speaking drills by merely sitting in front of your TV.

I was able to catch two new shows which teach the viewers how to speak Mandarin on cable TV.

One show is between cable channels 75-80? (sorry, my memory's so poor!) every Sunday at 10:30 p.m.

Another show is beamed from Mainland China's CCTV station. It's too late though. Tuesday nights at 12:00 midnight.

Catch it if you can. [img]images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[DDE11678]

The show on CCTV is called "After-School Chinese" ... the teacher is a foreigner named Donald Holder, and personally, I think his accent is pretty crappy ... and so is the little Chinese girl (Xiao Hua) ... but the little Chinese boy (Ding Ding) has good, standard Beijing pronunciation. For those of you like me who refuse to speak/learn Taiwan Guoyu (Taiwanese Mandarin), this is a pretty good show because it's fairly standard Beijing dialect. The only problem is that many of the words they teach you might be unfamiliar in Taiwan. It's pretty remarkable how much the two languages have diverged in only 50 years.

[haoren]

The only way is to get a teacher to correct your tone. Otherwise you will get lost.
u can phone 2364-4216, they have some "topic" classes are running, see if they have your classes.