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I just started learning Mandarin again with HelloChinese and it seems like a lot of the spoken example sentences are not following the written tones. Like the sentence “我说中文”. The speaker is pronouncing 文 as wèn instead of wén. I don’t have any experience speaking with tones, but I’m a musician with very good relative pitch and I feel like I ought to be able to tell whether a pitch is rising or falling, so this is confusing.

I like Mandarin. Based on my previous attempt and some videos I’ve seen explaining grammar rules and whatnot it seems to be a very logically structured language compared to English. But then in that same sentence from before, 说 and 中 are pronounced with different pitches despite both being the first tone. Which is fine, but what dictates that 中 is higher than 说? Does it matter that they’re about a tritone apart? What is the meaning of the relative pitch? While I’m confused about the above thing with the tones being mixed up, the way that pitches are chosen for the tones is absolutely fascinating and I’d love to read more about it if possible.

I know there’s a certain amount of “just do the work and stop asking questions before you’re ready for the answer” involved here, but this is just a lot of how I learn. I love jumping around and getting bogged down in theoretical stuff at the same time that I’m doing the more rote stuff. It makes it go down easier.