不太 technically has the tones bu4tai4, but when spoken, the 不 shifts to the second tone, making it bu2tai4.
I suggest allowing both as valid answers, along with other words that have such shifting tones.
I am a beginner to Chinese so if there’s some pedagogical reason for not allowing bu2tai4 as a valid answer that’s okay, and I’d be curious to know why.
I am curious to learn more about this also. I understand that close to zero resources point out the tone sandhi changes.
Thanks for your feedback!
I can see us eventually adding some special code/logic to accept this specifically for the 不 and 一 case. Or, if not accept, block it from submission with a notice e.g., “Oops, you typed it with tone sandhi changes” or something.
However, there is a pedagogical benefit (as outlined in our docs): the transcription that does not reflect tone sandhi changes is more standard in most cases. At the very least, the “headword” will almost never reflect tone sandhi changes. Of the ~10 dictionary entries for e.g., 不要, nearly all of them have it as bu4yao4, except a very sparse beginner’s dictionary and a fairly special Chinese-only cross-straits dictionary which was set up specifically to track phonetic differences between Mainland China and Taiwan.
