What should I be studying?
Everyone who studies Chinese seems to understand that learning characters requires hard work and consistent effort. Many people spend an hour a day or more on just learning characters. Why don’t people feel the same way about learning tones?
After the first 2-3 months, most people don’t spend time on basic listening and pronunciation drills. It’s crazy. You can’t learn much of anything in 2-3 months (not characters, not grammar, and not pronunciation). Mastering Chinese tones takes time and practice: it’s something you should be doing all the time.
Here’s what I want you to do: every day you study Chinese characters, take 5 minutes and work on your pronunciation. Just spend 5 minutes a day (here are a few ways to practice). Your tones will thank you for it. For extra credit, try out Lingomi’s listening and pronunciation tools. We’ve recently added a basic tone test and have a strong
What percentage of your study time do you spend practicing basic sounds and tones?
This is so true, and why I advocate learning how to use the words, rather than just memorising individual words with boring repetition. And as you say, pronunciation is often overlooked too, in favour of learning the characters alone.
[...] post by Steve from Lingomi discusses why you should study less Chinese characters, Steve advocates focusing on pronunciation and not overlooking tone practice in favour of [...]
Learning tones is not as important as learning characters because spoken Chinese is so diverse, whereas written Chinese is the same almostn everywhere in China. Chinese media is subtitled because of the wide variation in pronunciation in China. Stick with practicing the characters!
Laowai: thanks for your comment. My post talks about why learners should spend a few minutes each day practicing their pronunciation. Tones and pronunciation are extremely important… Especially when going all over China. If you speak Chinese properly, others will be able to understand you.
Ideally, learning Chinese should be balanced. One needs vocab, characters, grammar, listening, and pronunciation to be able to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, more people skimp on the pronunciation part of the language diet.
[...] learners need to spend more time studying tones, even if it means spending less time on characters (here). Some might even accuse me of being a broken record. Others may imagine me to be a pronunciation [...]