It is harder for me to memorize pinyin/pronunciation with numbers, I would rather write pinyin without tones, Pleco has this feature for its fill in blanks reviews.
1 Like
Is it the numbers that are the issue, or memorizing the pronunciation?
Trying to memorize with numbers is harder. It is easier to memorize just the sole pronunciation. I donât feel like it is much needed to write tones while reviewing if I care more about memorizing pronunciation rather than tones.
Welcome, and thank you for your feedback!
The ability to look up things without tones is definitely useful in Pleco, but Iâm not sure the utility of learning the pronunciation of characters without the tone. After all, shi and shĂŹ and shĂ are completely different to the ears of a native speaker.
In some cases, the tone is actually more important than the pronunciation of the toneless part of the syllable. E.g., in Taiwan when I would mispronounce ĺ as shi4, people would think I was saying ĺ si4. Trying to emphasize the âshâ part didnât clear things up, only correcting my tone did. This, unfortunately, happened many times until I fixed my mispronunciation of the tone. So to them, shi4 (my mispronunciation) is more similar to si4 (four) to them than to shi2 (ten), which is the opposite of what many learners of Chinese would expect!
Is your intent to just forego tones entirely? To pick them up later via some other means, like listening to audio or even listening to our text-to-speech audio recordings? Iâd like to get a better idea on your thinking about why you want to avoid the tones in your studies to better understand how toneless testing would make HanziHero more useful to you.
2 Likes
Toneless reviews are both easier and faster, I would rather listen and try to memorize tones than writing with numbers. Iâve tried writing with numbers and made a lot of mistakes, got frustrated and reviews took much longer time.
Are you making mistakes because you dont know the tone, or because you know the tone but not the tone number?
1 Like
Both. Trying to remember pronunciation, with numbers inside the pinyin, is hard. I would rather try to remember qiaokeli, instead of qiao3ke4li4 (qiao-three-ke-four-li-four)
I can confirm that 100%, whenever I use any new words with my wife and I mess up she will always correct the tone, even if I have also made a mistake in the âsoundâ.
So yeah, thereâs no âpronunciation without tonesâ because itâs the same thing. I wish it wasnât but thatâs Chinese 
2 Likes
I know that tones are important, however I would rather try to memorize them by other ways than writing as answers. In Pleco you may choose to ignore writing pinyin tones while doing their fill-in-the-blanks tests. I just think this âoptionâ to ignore tones could work here as well.
If the problem is the tone numbers, hanzihero already accepts actual accents. For example you can type qiÇokèlĂŹ. I find it more troublesome though. The tones are officially numbered, so it is nice to learn.
If anyone is curious, here is why I find it troublesome:
- On mobile, I have to switch to pinyin input method to get tone 3 (and long press on the keyboard key (what I normally do to get other accents)). The pinyin input is for typing characters not actual pinyin.
- On mobile, I like to put spaces between syllables so my English input doesnât try to input whole Chinese words (it is basically cheating). Spaces are accepted for numbered tones, but not accents.
- On desktop, it is just generally inconvenient to input accents without compose key or dead letter keys. Also what about tone 3? In general, numbers is just easier.
2 Likes
This is an oversight on our part. I filed a task for us to also accept spaces for accented pinyin as well.
In terms of the original feature request, we will think about this some more. While I understand why some people would want to do this, I think if we add it we would definitely want it to be off by default and enabled via a documented user setting that has some pretty big warnings about the potential downsides of such a studying approach if not properly augmented.
1 Like
I prefer my reviews / quiz, to include the tone numbers. I would rather type the accents , but my keyboard does not have tone 3, so the tone numbers is an excellent alternative. Also, I noticed that it is commonly used in many other places, so I am happy to continue with this trend.
3 Likes