These lessons examine "tonal cousins": groups of semi-homophone characters that have the same pronunciation, but may or may not have the same tone. Simply click on the appropriate tone for each character and improve your tonal production and recognition.
toneandcolor
said on January 13, 2009
This lesson deals with the syllables [fan] and [fang]. Keep an eye out for the primitives 反 and 方 that hint at their respective pronunciations.
brett
said on January 13, 2009
13/19 - this test is great! First time I'd seen some of those characters, so I think it would have been harder if I'd had to guess between fan and fang for some of them.
trevelyan
said on January 13, 2009
@toneandcolor - good stuff. Have approved you as a publisher, incidentally, so your lessons/tests will be promoted to the main page now as you publish them. You should adjust the publication date for this one so it is not in the future too.
Am experimenting with a few ways to get color markup in the lessons and tests. Hopefully we'll have something usable by the end of the week.
toneandcolor
said on January 13, 2009
@trevelyan -Sounds good. In the future, do you want me to schedule lessons for a particular day of the week? Not sure how you currently organize user-generated content with the official stuff, and you probably want to spread things out. I'm hoping to do a few more of these and some more homonym/phonetic stuff - maybe one a week. Looking forward to hearing about possible color markup. Options for question types besides multiple choice (fill in the blanks, matching etc.) would also be nice, but I'm sure that takes a lot more work and is probably an issue for the future.
maxiewawa
said on January 13, 2009
14! Not too shabby.
Frank
said on January 13, 2009
@toneandcolor
Thanks for doing this! It seems like a cool thing. If I may ask, at what level student do you see this aimed at?
toneandcolor
said on January 14, 2009
@frankI imagine this is for the upper elementary, lower intermediate learner who has 7 or 800 characters under their belt - at least in terms of recognition if not production. I generally try to pick relatively high frequency characters but I find it useful to learn them in groups so if I throw in an occasional obscure one (like 芳 in this lesson), it's to emphasize the phonetic role that a radical plays. You can download the popup Firefox plugin and toggle it on to check the characters you missed. Good luck!
