Hey,

I just noticed that Skritter uses "qiánbian" as the standard Pinyin for 前边, instead of "qiánbiān" as listed in nciku and various other dictionaries.

Investigating further in this matter I came up with a general question: Is there a rule regarding the tone of "边" in two character words? For 左边 and 右边 the tone of "边" is listed as being neutral in nciku (although not in the german dictionaries like leo.org and HanDeDict). However for 旁边 the tone is listed as being the first one in all dictionaries.

I am frequently confused by the same issue since I tend to associate the 边 suffix with the neutral tone whereas Skritter apparently does not follow a fixed scheme.

CEDICT says 1st tone for

旁边

Neutral

前边
右边
左边

I think I pronounce it as neutral in all cases...

i think i hear most of them as neutral here (in Guandong, China)... however I would say 旁边 is more likely to have a first tone sound. This could just be because my brain is tricking me after reading what @faceleg said :)

I remember it like this, for pretty much all of them, the emphasis is on the first word: RIGHT side, IN FRONT (bian?), NORTH, etc... but with 旁边 it is like alongside-side, so the 边 also is stressed because it adds meaning.

Note: this is nothing about why it actually may or may not be correctly listed as a first tone, just how I might remember it.

We've got *边 as neutral in most cases where it's a directional suffix, but we also allow the full first tone because Taiwan doesn't use as many neutral tones. I think it's usually neutral in the mainland, although it might vary from place to place. If there are words besides 旁边 where it's first, we might have just not standardized them yet, so let me know.

Isn't there a rule somewhere that says that the tone for a character will change if it is part of a 2 or 3 characters word? I know that 2 first tones characters together remain first tones, but then 2 third tones change into something like third and second...

These are the rules I've been linking people to; let me know if there is a better writeup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_phonology#Tone_sandhi