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Pinyin test without tones.

tones are essential to learning mandarin. It's equivalent to the correct spelling of a word in other languages. I'm in the same boat as you with remembering the tones so I sympathize with your frustration. Unfortunately, we do need to learn the tone, it's what distinguishes say horse (ma3) from mother (ma1).

I know this but I find that it's much easier to remember the sound as opposed to knowing the actual tone. If you ask a Chinese person the tone, they won't know off the top of their head. They will have to say it to themselves several times. Also I find the tones come naturally with the flow of e sentence a lot of the time.

"If you ask a Chinese person the tone, they won't know off the top of their head" - this is obviously not true, only people with poor Mandarin (even Chinese people have poor Mandarin), will have sometimes doubts. Why is that? Well in China we have so many dialects, and they can overlap tones, meanings, sounds of mainstream Mandarin equivalent words. Chinese people do not have any problem with telling you tone if they can use mandarin like native / bilingual speaker.

Let me just summarize and just say that Chinese people train tones all the time throughout the whole primary school.

It absolutely is true. Just because they trained their tones from a young age doesn't mean they can recall it instantly as an adult. Every single adult I ask for tones will need to repeat the word a few times, analyze which tone it is, then tell me what tone they just said it in.

When it's your mother language there's no need to stop and think about tones when you say something; you just say it.

I have asked many Chinese people tones, including people who have got very high results in mandarin at school and they always have to say the word before telling me the tone.

I would think that's just because it's automatic. For example, I can play Chopin's minute waltz, but I don't think of the individual notes anymore. If someone asked me, I would have to get the music out or play that section out to see what an individual note's tone is. We don't think (very often :)) when we talk and what words we choose, but at some level we do know the answer. That's why if somebody says "It's damn hot", I will take background information (winter/hot soup, or summer and muggy as hell) to comprehend what he is saying. For a test, why don't you list out the words you use in a given day (spoken or written) and then try to define them. Most likely, you will have trouble defining some words but you will comprehend the meaning and pronounce the word perfectly.

I say the word aloud before inputting the tones. However, when I initially learn a new word, I consciously am thinking about its tone. Over time, through repetition and using that word in a variety of contexts, memory of the tone transforms from an explicit memory (I can tell you what tone the word is) to an impicity memory (I pronounce the word and use the correct tone without consciously remembering it).

jenniferhunter -- you bring up a perfect example. While you were learning the waltz, you likely were reading sheet music. As you began memorizing it, you might've retained a few important details in your mind (chord progression, where a certain cadence goes, key changes, fingering for a tricky part, etc.) to help you in places where you got stuck. But eventually, mostly through a lot of practice, most of your explicit memories would fade and your fingers -- your implicit/muscle memory -- would take over. I can relate. There are piano pieces I learned as a 12-year-old which I can still play perfectly today. But if you put sheet music from those songs in front of me, I would likely make a lot of mistakes trying to sight read!