I'm wondering, when is the best time to start working on perfect pronunciation when learning a language? There seems to be 3 schools of thought on this matter:

1) Learn correct pronunciation from the start. Try and Learn the languages phonetic system perfectly before starting to learn vocab.

2) Work on accent reduction when you're able to speak semi-fluently, i.e. at the intermidate or advanced stage. Alot of people on this board seem to follow this one.

3) Don't bother ever working on how to pronounce things - shadowing and listening will take care of it (the AJATT approach).

For japanese I followed 2). I got the basic Hiragana sounds down using 'Remembering the Kana', and then practised speaking (and my accent) once I knew maybe 1000 words, and could form basic sentences.

For Chinese it's not that simple. For a start, there are alot of sounds that don't exist in English, and a lot of them sound really similar - for this reason, it's a big advantage to work on speaking and hearing them early, so I can more easily tell them apart. Also I now live in Asia and don't have the luxury of just listening/read/writing; any words I learn I really have to speak straight away.

This time I'm trying 1), but it's annoying as I haven't found any good systematic way of learning all the pinyin. Every site either has a list of how to say certain sounds, or contains a soundboard, but there's easy no method to go through them one at a time. Also doing this has definitely hindered my learning; time spent on pronunciation might be better spent on vocab and grammar at this stage.

Any what did you do? Any thoughts on this subject??

I was going to say '1', but your description of your attempt at that has pushed me to '3'. Or '4'.

When you find a new word, find out how to pronounce it. Practice it. Then move on.

I wouldn't spend a lot of time at it... If I spent time specifically on pronunciation, I would shadow read audio.

well, i don't think you have to be absolutely perfect before you start learning the language, but some knowledge of the kinds of sounds made is definately a bonus.

i think shadowing and listening is going to be the biggest help by far, but if you don't know what you're listening for in the first place, it's going to make everything a lot more difficult too.

what about that smartfm thing you posted a link to for me? (i took too long and forgot to download it :/) does it have sound files with the kanji?

Anyway, the way i would do it is just start srsing short phrases and things from television programs or dramas with chinese & english subs, and repeat them as exactly as i could. Then look up the sounds to confirm them if i needed to as i went along.

I've had a look at pinyin before, but it seems pretty incomprehensible to me...

how's Taiwan going so far??

personally for me I just got it after a while since I got so immersed with the japanese tv shows. I start noticing stuff in the way they talk and that aids me in imitating them thus getting a good accent. So I wouldn't force it or really worry about it till you can really hear all the things you start noticing once you've listened enough.

Something in between option 2 and 3. If you can expres yourself fluently in Japanese I doubt many people will care about the fact that you have an accent, and you can always get rid of it eventually if you want to. If you were to actually live in Japan it would probably disappear eventually anyway. And there's no real reason to care about an accent as long as you don't plan on living in Japan.