3 ms·

6 months is insufficient to get the tones right unless you have a really good ear imo

• tasogare 7y ago
  It totally depends on your situation. I said 6 months to be large but it can be closer to 3 if you’re a dedicated learner with a lot of time (like the typical univ student). The trick is to practice with a native speaker from day one, and hear recorded syllables a lot. Optionally one can use Praat to check if their f0 follow the tone contour.
• yorwba 7y ago
  You should be able to produce the correct tone contours by practicing for a few minutes with a teacher who can tell you whether you got it right, assuming you can control the pitch of your voice at all. Maintaining the correct tones during continuous speech is harder, but you can approach that goal by starting slowly and carefully pronouncing each syllable, then speeding up successively. Recognition does require a good ear, but after 6 months of daily practice, vocabulary is more likely to be the bottleneck. Regularly doing listening exercises and consuming spoken-language content helps (even if you don't actually understand a lot yet).