These lessons examine "tonal cousins": groups of semi-homophone characters that have the same pronunciation, but may or may not have the same tone. Simply click on the appropriate tone for each character and improve your tonal production and recognition.
 said on
January 6, 2009
I've tried to choose high-frequency characters and create short tests with two or three syllables each (this first one deals with [chang] and [cheng]). There will occasionally be less common characters (or 'bound' characters that only occur in two-syllable compounds) that I've included where appropriate to reinforce the phonetic component of certain primitives (e.g. 猖 in this test). I hope these tests will prove useful for those of us who consistently forget the tone on certain characters.
Mark Lesson Studied