When talking about pronunciation, many learners automatically think of sounds and phonetic symbols and rules. Actually, pronunciation is an umbrella term covering many aspects besides sounds and phonetic symbols, such as stress, intonation, and rhythm. These aspects are not isolated from each other. Rather, they are interrelated. For example, the word stress influences how the letters are pronounced. And the sentence stress again will make it necessary to pronounce words differently from when they are read individually. Similarly, intonation and rhythm also cause variation in the sounds of words.

One common problem in Chinese learning is that many learners take great pains to improve the Chinese sounds they produce while neglecting stress and intonation. This type of learning is not effective because sometimes stress and intonation matter more than the individual sounds do. Experiments have demonstrated that often when a native speaker mishears something, it is because the foreigner has put the stress on the wrong place, not because he or she has mispronounced the sounds of the word, e.g. father "[ba\ba ]" is pronounced as [ba-ba-], which then might be understood as the word "retain". 

  Language learning needs a lot of practice and this is especially true with pronunciation. Pronunciation is difficult to learn without some drills on sounds. The trick to working with drills is not to work on individual sounds for more than a few minutes a time because they become boring and demotivating. It is important to combine drilling pronunciation exercises with more meaningful exercises as using films, which will be mentioned in this paper.