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> After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker.

I imagine that being sufficient is going to vary a lot by individual learning styles and ability to mimic. I'm guessing you are rather good at mimicking sounds/music/etc.

> That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say.

I'm not so great at mimicking, so without someone telling me I'm actually pronouncing the words wrong, I'm just going to converge on an incorrect pronunciation. I cannot self-assess the accuracy; I need a tutor to point out that what I mistakenly believe is correct is not correct -- that is provide feedback to me. (I've tried similar exercises to what you describe and it just results in incorrect convergence)

This is especially an issue with Chinese where my native English brain naturally ignores tonality. Since the information is being stripped away, it's borderline impossible to self-ascertain whether my tones match or not.




Try it. You might be surprised. I thought I was really lousy at that sort of thing too.

It turns out the back-and-forth has a big impact.

That's not just me. Lots of my friends use it. Nice thing about CDs is you can get them from the library free too (or interlibrary loan).




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