Tones just clicked for me one day — I could hear them distinctly in both people who were speaking to me and when I was speaking (it hurt my ear to be able to hear all of my tonal mistakes).
The key to mastering tones (actually all of the spoken language of any language) is to listen more. Receptive skills like listening develop before productive skills like speaking.
In order to supplement your tutoring, I suggest you listen to a lot of Mandarin while you away from the tutor, especially when you are on the road. Specifically, I recommend TV shows, radio shows, or podcasts that are aimed at younger people (maybe 8-20 — younger than that has some strange kiddie terms, and older usually gets you full on adult language). Language targeted to young people usually has a relatively narrow set of vocabulary, and it usually avoids complicated words (e.g., like Latin-based words in English) and idiomatic phrases (e.g., four character combos).
Even if you don’t understand much or even any of what you hear, you will start to develop an intuitive feel for how the language sounds. Once your vocabulary develops, you will start picking up phrases, then sentences, then entire paragraphs. Somewhere in that journey, your ear will (most likely) develop to a point that you can not only hear other people’s tones, but you will naturally hear your tones as well (at least when they don’t sound right).
>Specifically, I recommend TV shows, radio shows, or podcasts that are aimed at younger people (maybe 8-20 — younger than that has some strange kiddie terms, and older usually gets you full on adult language).
Do you have any specific shows or podcasts to recommend?
I haven’t looked at that specific space in a long time, but what I did then was to do an online search for what Chinese/Taiwanese teens were listening to or watching. It helps if you can do this in Chinese and if you localize your search results properly so that the search does not focus on results from your home country.
Doing a quick test, the Slow Chinese podcast may be a good start.
The key to mastering tones (actually all of the spoken language of any language) is to listen more. Receptive skills like listening develop before productive skills like speaking.
In order to supplement your tutoring, I suggest you listen to a lot of Mandarin while you away from the tutor, especially when you are on the road. Specifically, I recommend TV shows, radio shows, or podcasts that are aimed at younger people (maybe 8-20 — younger than that has some strange kiddie terms, and older usually gets you full on adult language). Language targeted to young people usually has a relatively narrow set of vocabulary, and it usually avoids complicated words (e.g., like Latin-based words in English) and idiomatic phrases (e.g., four character combos).
Even if you don’t understand much or even any of what you hear, you will start to develop an intuitive feel for how the language sounds. Once your vocabulary develops, you will start picking up phrases, then sentences, then entire paragraphs. Somewhere in that journey, your ear will (most likely) develop to a point that you can not only hear other people’s tones, but you will naturally hear your tones as well (at least when they don’t sound right).
Best of luck!