Hi Andrea, I think I can answer you the second and third question. It is possible to understand what you're talking about if some of the tones are wrong in your sentences since we can guess what you're trying to express, but when all of the tones are wrong, that might cause problems in terms of comprehension; especially the words with the same pronunciation but different tones can mean quite different. On top of that, you may not only face the problem of the tones but the pronunciation, which could complicate your sentences. I listened to your record at least five times and I'm afraid that I'm still not quite sure what you said, except for "wo men" and "na jiu tai hao le, fei chang gan xie ni". Did you say we are able to sing at the first sentence in you record? Ciao, Hung-Chien

1) I know that in colloquial chinese the third tone is not pronounced entirely, so you go down but you kind not really raise again, that is, you make it shorter. Can you please give me other examples, depending also on regionalism, like, just for instance "in Beijing they say this tone differently" "In Shanghai this other way" ect. if there are indeed such differences; Answer: About the third tone, maybe we go down 100 steps and raise 60-80 steps. I'm not sure what do you mean by "other examples", like what? because the standard Mandarin sounds quite similar, usually we pronounce the third tone same in Shanghai or Beijing. However, different regions say different dialects, for example, even a person with perfect Mandarin will not understand most of the southern dialects if he is a northerner. It used to be a problem but now we build Mandarin as a standard and use it all over the country. 2) could you understand something with enough context even with all the tones wrong? (sorry for the naive question) Answer: It depends whether there exists any misunderstanding words or phrase in the sentence cause there are quite a few words with same pronunciation but different meanings in Chinese.With all pronunciation correct and all the tones wrong, I guess you have a around 70% chance to let a Chinese understand what you say. 3) this is me speaking a sentence without paying too much attention to the tones, please tell me if you can understand me and how much difficult/bad it was: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0JWeXkuGpHB Answer: quite agree with Hung-Chien, It's easy for me to understand "na jiu tai hao le, fei chang gan xie ni". For the rest of the record, I think there might be some grammar mistakes or pronunciation mistakes. You have to check that first. PS: If there is some mistakes in my English, I would be grateful if someone can correct it. Thanks.

我们能上课我们可以5点上课 对我来说就太好了非常感谢你！ ------------------- Hello, Andrea. If you pronouce every word/syllable well enough to be identified, the tone often does not count so much, for the context gives a lot of complimentary information, although in some cases the tone of a single word/syllable may become crucial for understanding. In terms of your pronuncation of this practice. The part of '对我来说，就太好了’is recognizable to my ear, despite the mis-pronunciation of ‘常’( [ chang ], not [shang]）, because these words themselves give a good context and there is only one misread character. But the characters in front part are too hard to discern and determine. Since there are quite a few misread characters in such a limited context, it's got to be nearly impossible to understand. 课 [ ke ], not [ gei], and not [kei] either; 可以 [ ke yi], not [ kei ni]; Your ‘五点’sounds like 我将[ wo jiang], they should be [ wu dian]; and again, 课 should be [ke].