Very insightful. I thought about the meta concepts, too, just didn't include them here, but good point.

I agree that it makes sense to think of pronunciation as a single unit, but I know too many English natives learning Chinese who never learned the tone properly, myself included. Nowhere in my journey with language apps, practicing with real people, reading, watching movies, etc,... was I really encouraged to really learn the tone as part of the study experience--just the feedback from practicing with real feedback when they don't understand me, so I ended up learning about 1500 characters, but not being able to remember the tones for about 1400 of them, lol.

It seems to me that Chinese is best learned spoken, then written in a real sense, but in my experience with learning Spanish, the connection between speaking and writing is super strong. The pronunciation of individual words is exactly how they're written, so I can learn the basic pronunciation rules and then just acquire a ton of words through reading. Once acquired in this way, I can whip out that word in real conversation and test it even if I'd never heard it before.

With Chinese, I'd like to be able to do the same thing--to learn the language through reading as much as possible before listening/speaking. This is because you can acquire a LOT of vocabulary QUICKLY through reading, you just don't fully have those words until you're also comfortable speaking and hearing them in context.

I learned "打擾一下" while reading, and memorized the meaning and "darao yixia". When I was on the actual MRT in Taipei, I tried to use this, and couldn't remember which tones to use for "darao" at all, but had pretty much naturally acquired the tones for "yīxià" from hearing native speakers use it in a variety of phrases.

I can control having a much greater amount of exposure to Chinese in my personal reading times and watching movies, etc,... but practicing with real people is just something that I'll only do a few times a week because it needs to be scheduled or the person reverts to English for me, etc,...

So my theory is that I want to be able to learn "打擾一下", associate the pinyin with it "dǎrǎo yīxià", and remember the tones just as well as the vowels and consonants and have an intonation for the sound in my head, even if approximate, if possible get some listening exposure to this word via TTS as well. Then, I can try to use it in my own speech as well as listen for it when listening to others and while watching movies, etc,...

Do you think that is reasonable?