Tone and Colour
Another interesting post over at Sinosplice today on the subject of using colour to learn tones in Mandarin. It seems plausible, but not proven, that colour might be a better way to encode tone information visually than he traditional tone marks – plausible, but not proven.
I’m planning to put it to the test – I’m assembling two vocabular lists which I will study as flashcards only, one list will be colour coded and the other with tone marks as usual. After a week, I’ll see if my retention rates have differed. In general, if I can remember a Chinese word’s spelling but get the tones wrong, I don’t mark it as “known”, so if this method increases retention of tone information, my scores should reflect that. I’ll only test English-Chinese, so I can’t see the colours until I look at the answer. We’ll see if I can glean any useful data. Unfortunately iFlash doesn’t support colour, so it will take a couple of days to make the cards as images.
Interesting to see how the brain works.
Will be very interested to know how this goes!!
How did this turn out?