Mandarin ear training with IPA/Pinyin/Zhuyin for Beginners

Anki Deck to learn the phonetics and the Pinyin/Zhuyin writings for all syllables in Mandarin Chinese. This deck has been tested in Anki Desktop 2.1.60 and AnkiDroid 2.15.6. It has been reported to work in Anki iOS (Thanks to mikelambert for the patches required to make it work). As of March 29th 2023, the deck works in AnkiWeb. Some versions of Anki Desktop require the following changes to work properly:

• Deactivate the "Automatically play audio" option from the deck, and
• Install the anki addon Replay buttons addon.

I made this deck a long time ago when I wanted to learn Chinese the "hard way". I wanted to be able to hear and differentiate between all tones and sounds of Mandarin before learning anything else. Plain Anki cards are not very useful for this. The problem is that in a study session, after a couple of rounds, you can pretty much guess what the back of a card will be only by looking at the front of the card. This is because the order in which the cards are presented is pretty much the same between each round. The cards get stacked at the back if you remember them correctly, and on the front if you were wrong (Anki tries to show you the cards you were wrong sooner). Guessing is not good for memorization. We want to learn the tones not the deck order. Imagine that you are learning about tones in Mandarin and you are presented with three cards A (falling tone), B (raising tone) and C (neutral tone). If the cards are always presented to you in the same order, say A, B and C, then you will know what tone a card is asking you to guess only by learning the order in which the cards appear. So, what this deck does is to choose a random sound, which is then played to you, and you have to guess which tone (or initial or final) it corresponds to. The tone might not be the same the next time the card appears because the card selects the tone to display randomly, and thus, you will be forced to learn the tones, hopefully. Thanks to all the contributors/developers to this Anki deck. Thank you for the time you put into this. It wouldn't be the same deck without your help. In alphabetic order, thanks to Gianluca Venturini, Mike Lambert and Robin Avery. Thanks to those who have opened issues in the github too. Special thanks to SimonLammer and others for the fantastic and interoperable Javascript library anki-persistence and all the others who made this possible (see urls of recordings below). I wrote a little post explaining some stuff in this deck https://helq.github.io/blog/posts/2016/01/en/chinese-log-step-2/. It's fairly old, but the basic idea for this deck hasn't changed much. If you find any issues with this deck please contact me at github issues All credits for the recordings go to: http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/Pinyin_chart https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-pinyin-chart.php http://www.yoyochinese.com/chinese-learning-tools/Mandarin-Chinese-pronunciation-lesson/pinyin-chart-table http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_pinyin.html http://pinpinchinese.com/pinyin-chart/ http://public.gettysburg.edu/~jli/PinYinChart/ChinesePinYinChartM.html http://lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/ http://www.china-on-site.com/language/phonetic/phonetic.htm