But what if you cannot hear the tones

Every time I tried and tried to test myself to differentiate the tones, I failed more than 80%.

Passed all the other test with flying colors.

Does that mean you cannot learn Chinese?

Nope. Even some Chinese people are tone deaf. How do they do/learn it?

This is where I come in.

Thankfully there are other ways to learn Chinese.

That’s what I have been researching for the last 10+ years.

First of all, Understand how sound works.

When you look at a synthesizer you will see that sounds normally have an attack portion, a sustain portion and a decay portion.

The attack is the sound rising (could be very quick and sharp.)

The sustain part is the sound maintaining its presence.

You probably have guessed the decay part does reset to none.

You may think of this as the sun rising-day time-setting.

Furthermore, velocity may be applied at all phases’.

Guess what the tone part is?

If you answer the middle one or the sustain part. You would be correct. If you didn’t, what’s wrong with you? Are you Chinese?
In many other languages the attack portion is the most important. So when you pronounce you emphasis the consonant part. Guess where the emphasis part is in Chinese. So when you think you are emphasing in Chinese for them it has the opposite effect. In fact in many places in China the pronunciations are totally different.

The sustain (middle) part is usually the longest be perceived because of the closure effect. It’s like when you have two different colors side by side and you zoom out a little. The colors seem to melt and average giving you another color. That’s exactly how monitors and TV handle color it always a mixture of red green and blue. By being so close together and so small that your eyes actually perceived it as another color. Yes, it’s that simple.

The tone takes longer to hear (for most people like me for instance.) So, when spoken fast where’s the tone? I didn’t catch that. Didn’t care either.
Because our focus is mainly on the attack part.

So, how to solve this?

That’s still a process in progress for my part. Still working on it.

This is why I developed my Apps’ and tools to be able to go above and beyond the tones difficulties.
Otherwise, you can try like I did repeating hundreds of time and failing each times. Because if you are tone deaf it won’t matter how much you repeat the same word from the same source over and over, if you can’t hear it.

Actually, Research including mine found that; it’s not repetition that makes you learn, spaced or not.

I mean it does, but not as effective as you might think.

How does other things learn like AI?

Consider this: How does a dictionary (online or not) actually include new words?

Or (for those more in tech) how does AI learn new things?
*How does your brain makes new pattern recognition?

*I’m talking about normal people. Low IQ, and people with brain disease don’t count.

Once you understand that you will begin to (Know thyself).

It’s not repetition it’s references. Only once from only one source, all the device above are considering “Who gives a shit?” See the garbage can over there? Yeah that’s its place. It takes many different examples to be a pattern. Just once or exactly the same, doesn’t count as a pattern. So learning only one sentence to learn a word in it, not gonna do much.

You need more and different samples.

One final note:

It always amazes me when math teacher teaches you the simple one. And then hope you can handle the complex one.

I often tell them. Why don’t you teach me the complex one? I’m pretty sure I can figure out the simpler one. You know what I found? Most of the times, they don’t know how teach the complex one, cannot even begin to explain it or it’s so convoluted it makes no sense. Isn’t that interesting! This is the part that differentiate a true master and the meaning behind “When you know you do. When you understand you teach.” Chinese people can all speak Chinese (That’s the Do part). You may use them as references. Almost no one in China have sufficient (understanding) to actually teach it. If you want an example ask any Chinese. If you want an explanation you probably better off asking AI such as 豆包https://www.doubao.com or 思思 https://www.cici.com for outsider. You’ll get a more accurate and thorough answer.