You didn't get the tone shift thingy? Seriously? I mean, I don't speak Mandarin that well, but that sort of shift just seems to flow naturally with how you breathe. When my tutor got around to telling me, it sorta seemed like a 'duh' rule to me. It's impossible to pronounce three third tones in a row as three third tones unless you talk really, really slowly.
Well, I got it on a spoken level, but I was learning the accents to help me learn how to write in Chinese and I got horribly messed up each time I tried to apply what I know of Chinese to what I'm learning to write Chinese...
Oh. Okay, now I get you. Well, sort of. The accents kinda get randomly assigned, don't they? It'd be helpful if, say, all verbs were this tone and etc., but that doesn't seem to be the case. And Chinese has so many homophones even after tones are factored in...
true that. But learning about the tone shifts have helped me suss out what the word actually *is*...in a way, tho, it's kinda fun figuring it out, 'cause the pinyin and the radicals are kinda like puzzle pieces.
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