Pinyin Dictation
Chinese exercise: Train your ear to distinguish the tones and pinyin with this online dictation. Listen to the sound file, write the pinyin and choose the tone.
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1/ Listen to pinyin
2/ Write Pinyin
3/ Select the tone
Hearing a tone is a separate skill from saying one
Learners discover this late and it costs them. Producing the four tones correctly is a matter of practice with the mouth; recognising them at speed, in someone else's voice, is a matter of practice with the ear, and the two do not train each other. A student who can read a pinyin table aloud perfectly may still fail to catch which tone was just said.
Dictation is the exercise that trains the second one, and it is uncomfortable for exactly the reason that makes it work: you have to commit to an answer before you see it. Hearing a syllable and writing it down forces a decision that listening passively never does.
Write what you hear in pinyin, with the tone as a number. Getting it wrong is the useful part: the mistakes cluster, and the cluster tells you which pair of tones your ear is not yet separating, which is usually the second and the third.