Depends on the language but general things

@Gray

I’m learning a tonal language too but from the beginning I decided that I wanted to have native audio on my flashcards so I could practice using a real person’s voice. So for about two months I asked my tutors here to write me interesting sentences and to also make recordings of them for me. I would then add the sentences and the recordings to Anki and practice reading them along with the audio. I later found anatomical pictures showing how the mouth and tongue should be positioned when pronouncing the sounds and searched for an online dictionary with real recordings of each initial/final/tone combination, made a script to download all of the audio files from the server to pair them with the charts and pinyin, and then imported the whole thing into Anki with cards both ways from sound to pinyin and from pinyin to sound. I’ve now been reviewing the pronunciation deck daily for about four months and it ended up being the best thing I’ve done so far my pronunciation. a couple weeks ago I also changed the sound to pinyin cards so that they now require me to type the correct pinyin with the tone, so it is helping my recognition of the tones and pronunciation even more.

If you message me privately your email address, I could give you the deck but it is only for Mandarin. Not for Cantonese.

however I do recommend this approach if you can get the material somehow.

For me there's really just one thing. I'm learning a tonal language, but during roughly my whole first <em>year and a half </em>of study, I couldn't figure out how to actually practice the tones. Most dictionaries for my target language don't include audio, and even if I could find audio clips for some words, putting audio onto my flashcards would have been a huge hassle. I learned what the correct tone <em>was</em> for each word, but I often wasn't quite sure how it should actually <em>sound</em>, in practice.

It was only about half a year ago that I suddenly realized I could use the text-to-speech feature on my phone to hear the pronunciation of each word. In fact, it turns out that the flashcard program I've been using even has a feature in the "advanced" settings that lets you set up the cards to <em>automatically</em> read one or both sides of your flashcards out loud, in whatever language(s) you choose.

I think my pronunciation and speaking fluency would be vastly better if I'd known about this feature from the beginning! It's not a substitute for having a teacher give you personalized pronunciation feedback, but for everyday practice, it's much better than trying to learn new vocabulary without hearing it at all.