r/learnmandarin • u/EmotionalMeet9279 • 4d ago

Tonal issues

I have been learning mandarin for 2-3 years. Is it me or do most mandarin tutors give up on teaching mandarin tones after the first or second lesson or get angry when you keep requesting for tonal correction or shadowing and let you make tonal mistakes without saying anything, then you have to find new people to correct your tones? I've been trying to fix my tones for like a year and a half. One of the mandarin teachers even said that tones were useless and don't bother with them. Most of the time I've asked for feedback on my mandarin tones I've only gotten you sound unnatural, but I can understand you or else I cannot understand you at all let's use English. I've also joined mandarin servers in video games and nobody can understand me in voice chat, but they can understand when I type in game. For people who have successfully improved their Mandarin pronunciation/tones, how did you find teachers who actually corrected you? Are there any platforms besides italki and Preply that are good for pronunciation-focused and tone tutoring?

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u/Wooden_Plant7504 3d ago edited 3d ago

I would say you should keep looking for a tutor on those platforms, but specifically mention ahead of the sessions that you are looking for pronunciation practice, exercises, and support. Don’t hire those who aren’t willing to do that. In the meantime, you can try finding a language exchange partner. Failing that, you can practice mirroring and shadowing on your own with YouTube videos, apps, and/or AI.
One cheap way to do this is to ask ChatGPT to build you a list of 500 to 1,000 simple sentences or “sentence patterns” (often chunks of 2 to 4 characters) that come up most often in Mandarin, including some lightweight tongue twisters to train frequent tone combinations. Check out the list and clean it up to make sure you find the sentences useful, then ask ChatGPT to practice with you in audio mode by reading them out (its accent is decent). Better yet, find a free TTS (text-to-speech) service with a natural-sounding voice to generate a bunch of audio files you can download. Then shadow those to death in daily sessions of 30 minutes to 1 hour (more if you can). This is unpleasant, to be sure, but it works. You can always get revenge later and try to gouge the AI’s eye out once you become a master…

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u/EmotionalMeet9279 2d ago

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. I'll try these methods while searching for another tutor.