[bloak]

Thanks for that example. Would a Chinese person ever write the tone in pinyin when writing something for themselves?

[dmoy]

Not when doing fragments in obvious context like that. For one, tone doesn't disambiguate anyways. There's 10+ common characters with pinyin 'dan', and only 4 (5) tones in Mandarin.

But also when the context is super obvious there, there's no need.