Sorting Characters by Tone

[Stump]

Hi every one,

As many I'm struggling with learning tones in Chinese. I have never cared about it when learning, always thought it would come naturally with practice, but it didn't. Now I find myself being able to write and read quite ok, but when talking it sounds funny for locals.

I've given a thought to what would be the fastest and laziest way to catch up with the tones of all these characters. And it comes to my mind that it would be quite easy if I could related the tone of a character to each others by relying on my visual memory.
Which means simply by making 5 lists of characters, each list listing the characters of a tone.

However I know approx 2k characters now so it would take a while to do manually.
Do you guys have an idea how I could easily sort them? There must be a way to easily batch this, maybe there's a "Chinese characters database" I could query.

 

[Stump]

Ok so finally I did it by taking a word list imported on Excel
Wordlist: http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

Just separate the pinyin with "special paste", then remove all vowels by using the "find and replace function" so you just keep the letter with the tone (quite straightforward).

Then just use a if function to sort out the tone:
=IF(B2="",5,IF(OR(B2="ā",B2="ē",B2="ī",B2="ō",B2="ū",B2="ǖ"),1,IF(OR(B2="á",B2="é",B2="í",B2="ó",B2="ú",B2="ǘ"),2,IF(OR(B2="ǎ",B2="ě",B2="ǐ",B2="ǒ",B2="ǔ",B2="ǚ"),3,IF(OR(B2="à",B2="è",B2="ì",B2="ò",B2="ù",B2="ǜ"),4))))))

Afterwards all that is needed is to add a filter table on excel.

Done.

 

[feng]

I have never cared about it when learning, always thought it would come naturally with practice, but it didn't.

I hope you aren't surprised :wink:

I've given a thought to what would be the fastest and laziest way to catch up with the tones of all these characters.

Don't know if it was really Einstein who said this, but
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

How about "I've given thought to what would be the best way to have really accurate pronunciation so I can make use of my hard won Chinese skills" ?

And it comes to my mind that it would be quite easy if I could related the tone of a character to each others by relying on my visual memory.
Which means simply by making 5 lists of characters, each list listing the characters of a tone.

If that works for you, great. I just don't imagine it happening, since most people have problems combining tones, more so than getting tones right in isolation.