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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).

Best of luck!

>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.

> I've decided to focus purely on conversational mandarin, and skip learning Hanzi (characters) entirely

I initially did the same, but for curious and started learning a few characters too. It actually proved to be beneficial to my speaking too, as the characters provided a kind of visual mnemonic in a way I hadn't expected, helping me to remember sounds and tones.

And of course when actually in China, it's really beneficial to be able to read a menu, or at least have an idea of what you're ordering!

Absolutely do what works for you, but I'd suggest trying a few to see if you get the same kind of "visual reminder" benefit I did.

> I often remember vocabulary without the tone.

Then you didn't really remember the vocabulary, did you? It's critical to remember the tone along with the words. I know it feels like you "almost" got it, but if you don't remember the tone then you should treat it as not remembering the word at all, IMO.

FWIW, what helped me was doing a little finger gesture in the air with the syllable, sort of tracing the pinyin tone marker. Then when I talk I'm sort of habitually waving my finger down out of sight, but at least I'm producing the sounds correctly. Basically, treat learning vocabulary as learning {syllable, tone} tuples, rather than trying to learn a syllable with a built-in tone.

You should treat forgetting the tone on a syllable approximately equivalent to if you misremembered the vowel and substituted a similar one.

Based on my experience learning Japanese I'd say this is the perfect approach. In the early days, people should stay away from the written side of a language.

As someone not in China but interested in learning, I'd prefer to try to understand what I'm hearing before working on tonal pronounciation. This is why I'd love and pay good money for a dataset of engaging Chinese tv shows, etc with the English translation and the Hanyu Pinyin displayed simultaneously and perfectly synchronized to what's being spoken on the screen. For me, listening comprehension is everything.

As someone who has learned Japanese and is currently going through Mandarin : the written stuff is super useful in the mid term. It’s the equivalent to learning Latin and Greek roots for English. It’s a vocabulary multiplier and let’s you find words yourself even when you hear them for the first time.

It might feel like an uphill battle but it helps a lot imo

>I've decided to focus purely on conversational mandarin, and skip learning Hanzi (characters) entirely.

I studied Mandarin formally a little while ago up to HSK 2/3 level, at a reputable university based on a weekly 3 hour lesson. Although not comparable to your experience, I can relate to your approach.

On the course, we were encouraged to concentrate as much on the conversational side as reading simplified/traditional texts, mostly assisted via Pinyin. The only resources available to us were a well stocked library. It took so much longer and proved to be an incredibly frustrating experience at times, especially when desperately trying to find native speakers to converse with or decipher even the most basic of texts. As a lapsed 'student' I feel it was all worth it in the end, despite only retaining 10% of everything I learned, at least the knowledge can be justified as well rounded.

The other resources I leaned upon for assistance consisted of TV, news, movies, meetup and various language courses, which were no substitute for real interaction with native speakers. Wenlin and Plecodict were a godsend, when you did not want to consult a physical dictionary. Amongst others, the forum below sparked more interest in the wider aspects of the language and culture.

http://www.pleco.com/

https://wenlin.com/

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/

Hanzi are something you can learn on your own time outside of class. It’s really not a good idea to skip them at all. As someone who’s also learning Chinese, hanzi make remembering what I learned easier, since you can see how lots of vocabulary that you learn consists of parts of other concepts synthesized together.

Plus you have loads of homophones, and thinking of which hanzi each word is using makes it far easier to know what you’re talking about.

Example: shí. It means 10. It also means time, as well as dozens of other things. I can’t imagine trying to mentally divide all the overlapping words without the visual assistance of different hanzi when reading. It’d be like trying to learn the differences between they’re/their/there in English as a second language without looking at the spelling differences. It makes it harder.

I’ve tried this approach but it’s impossible to find a tutor in SF :/

So far I’ve used duchinese and wordswing but it’s def not as effective.

I'm incapable of self-teaching a language. I need the external motivation from a set schedule, and the interaction with another human to keep me progressing.

I moved to Hong Kong this year from San Francisco to do these classes (and because I wanted to make the move). HK speaks Cantonese, so it's not full immersion. But you're a lot closer to China here and there's a decent amount of Mandarin around. The best thing to do would be to move to the mainland, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but every class my teacher and I basically spend the first hour (before getting into the official material) just chatting about life. A lot of it is about mundane topics (travel, food, what we did in the previous day, my adventures hitting on girls, etc.). We do it all in Chinese. She helps me by adding to my vocabulary as I try to express these things in Chinese. She adds new vocabulary constantly to this as well, waiting for me to get confused and prompt her about it. These conversation are the most helpful part of the class. They're natural and real. They hit topics I'd use in real life daily. They also involve natural repetition helping me naturally add the vocabulary and grammar to my repertoire.

> I’ve tried this approach but it’s impossible to find a tutor in SF :/

I’m really surprised by this — Chinese is everywhere in the Bay Area.

Suggestions:

1. Contact the Chinese department at a local university (e.g., USF) and ask a professor there. They will know tons.

2. Go to any cram school with marketing aimed at Chinese kids (Maybe something like Kumon. There are cram school ads in Chinese everywhere) and ask if they know someone. There are a lot of folks who teach Chinese to heritage speakers of Chinese (i.e., folks who speak it in the home but have not learned it formally). The teaching technique is a little different, but you can probably find someone who has taught non-heritage speakers if you specifically ask for it.

Sign up for lessons online at italki.com! I've only used it to do language exchange, but they have a bunch of teachers there who teach via Skype, and you'll probably pay less than what you would for a local teacher.

Have you looked in the Oakland Chinatown?

Some tips from my own learning experience:

1. In both listening and production, differentiate between volume and pitch changes. 2. Tones have pitch contours. They're not just sudden changes from low to high etc. They are continuous changes in pitch over time. Try to visualize or feel the pitch curve (e.g. by using this type of tool). 3. Pay attention to the starting and ending pitches. 4. Don't overly connect syllables together. We tend to do this in English, but in Chinese, most syllables (characters) should not have a constant flow of air connecting them. 5. People usually mess up 3-2 combinations because they connect the third tone's low tone to the beginning of the second tone. Actually, the second tone should start higher than the third tone ends. 6. For each tone, there is a range of acceptable tone contours! This is how Chinese speakers are still able to have sentence-level expressiveness (e.g. happy sentence vs. sad sentence). Maybe try practicing some dramatic readings.

As your vocabulary expands, you start to come across more and more of these "unlucky pairs" that can be confused for one another. Some funny stories from my learning experience include "wo3 yao4 ying4 le!" instead of "wo3 yao4 ying2 le!" and "wo3 ba4ma1 hen3 xin4 jiao1" instead of "wo3 ba4ma1 hen3 xin4jiao4". ("I'm getting hard" instead of "I'm going to win", and "my parents have sexual intercourse" instead of "my parents are religious."

Tones aren't something that people usually master overnight. In fact, almost all non-heritage learners of Chinese never learn them perfectly. And a lot of heritage learners still have accents, even if they are able to speak the correct tone numbers.

Shows like "China Bridge" (Hanyu Qiao）and "Informal Talks" (Feizhengshi Huitan) both feature non-native learners of Chinese from a variety of countries -- the first one is a speaking competition, and the the second is a roundtable talk show -- and are great for comparing yourself to other learners of Chinese. (As an interesting side note, the China Bridge show is heavily biased in favor of learners from Western countries. In my opinion, seeing those dynamics play out on tv is an important part of the Chinese learner's cultural education.)

I've kinda obsessed about my Chinese accent (本人有点声控哈哈）, and it's still a bit aways from being native. I think it's important to remember that with English, for example, being able to speak American English doesn't mean that you can speak British English perfectly. To truly "lose" any accent takes a lot of work -- but it's definitely possible. A big part of the Broadcasting curriculum in China involves losing your regional accent so that you can speak Standard Mandarin on the air.

Sorry for the discursive thoughts, but best of luck to all Chinese learners here!

> Each course is 20 classes (i.e. 40h), and after 10 you're supposed to be reasonably conversational

How on earth are you expected to be "reasonably conversational" after 10 classes (20h) worth of Mandarin?

It's just impossible.

You misread. A course is 40h (20 classes), and it takes 10 courses to get reasonably conversational. i.e. 400h of class-time (not counting homework, study, and practice in the wild time)

I read the after 10 as referring to the number of classes. 400h seems a little more reasonable, albeit a lot lower than the usual estimate which has it over 1000h