For my last session this challenge, I decided to compare my pronunciation of chu and qu (various tones, though I mostly focused on pronouncing the word 出去). I noticed that I tend to pronounce 'chu' as 'chyu' because that's how I usually pronounce it in English (i.e. the word 'chew') but that is not so correct in Mandarin and makes it harder to disambiguate from qu. Also, sometimes when I say 'qu' it ends up sounding like 'ku'.

More practice recording myself saying whatever phrase caught my fancy and listening to the recordings and re-recording myself to make my pronunciation sound better.

Just spent some time recording myself and listening, trying to make my pronunciation better.

I practiced 1 + 4 tones by recording myself and listening to the playback. Then in the middle of the session I noticed that a candle had started to leak wax so I interrupted the session by cleaning that up. Then I spent the rest of the session recording myself saying 蠟燭溢出.

I noticed that sometimes when I say a 1 + 4 tone word it turns into something more like a 1 + 1 tone pair. To make it more fun to record and listen to myself, I tried to speak Chinese with a British accent. It didn't sound any different than when I'm not trying to put on a British accent.

more practice recording myself saying whatever words or phrases come to mind. I discovered that I say 三藩市 Cantonese style, probably because local announcements are in Cantonese not Mandarin (btw the local government always uses 三藩市 in official Chinese language documents, never 舊金山). I continue to be more sloppy in my tones when speaking in conversational sentences than when drilling words one by one.

I continued to practice pronouncing 母語 and related words in drills and in full sentences. I also threw in some complaints about how boring it is to practice pronunciation and then listened to my complaints for pronunciation errors.

Since the word 母語 had given me trouble in a previous session I drilled that word, as well as 沐浴, 木魚, and 目語. I never expected to talk so much about using wooden fish while taking a bath and sounding like a native speaker while I speak with my eyes.

To try to change my attitude, instead of complaining about how boring pronunciation practice is, I instead recorded myself saying in Mandarin that pronunciation is really interesting. Then I listened to my recording and drilled myself to correct the parts where I least liked my own pronunciation.

I spent time drilling 1+2 and 2+2 tone pairs, recorded more complaints in Mandarin about how boring it is to practice pronunciation, and then tried to improve the pronunciation of certain words in those complaints.

I recorded myself complaining (in Mandarin) about how boring it is to practice pronunciation, listened to it, drilled the parts which I pronounced the worst, and then recorded myself making those complaints again.

In order to continue practicing pronunciation after this challenge (or even to meet my goal), I need to find ways to make pronunciation practice less boring.

The word 母語 was surprisingly difficult to say right. I also noticed that my 1 + 2 tone pairs sometimes (incorrectly) turn into 1 + 1 pairs.

First of all, I've learned that I can't stand spending more than fifteen minutes per session on pronunciation (at least on my own, it might be more interesting with a tutor).

I kept on recording myself saying sentences, then isolating the key words and practicing those tone pairs, then saying the full sentence again. I also learned that when you use the text-to-speech feature on Google Translate, what the Google-voice says does not always match the Google-pinyin.

My 2+2 tone pairs sounded better today, maybe yesterday was a fluke? While practicing tone pairs, I thought my 'x' was off, but after recording myself a bunch of times it seemed okay, maybe I just messed it up once. I never thought I would repeat the word 習習 so many times. I also found that if a say a full sentence at conversational speed, drill the tones on the 2 most important words, and then say the sentence again at conversational speed, the tones will sound better the second time I say the sentence.

I recorded and listened to myself. I noticed that my 2 + 2 tone pair sounds off, especially in full sentences (as opposed to isolated tone drills).

I recorded myself, and learned that my tones are worse when I speak full sentences at conversational speed than when I am doing tone pair exercises in isolation.

I just spent a little time recording myself saying some phrases and noticing how my tones sound.