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Individual tones harder than groups of tones?


hedwards

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This is mostly a matter of curiosity. I've just recently gotten back to working on my spoken Chinese again and I'm a tad bit rusty. I find that my tones when I'm speaking entire sentences are way better than my tones when I'm speaking single syllables. I'm also finding that when I run the sentends through Praat that the whole sentences are closer to the native speakers than when I'm speaking syllable by syllable and repeating what the speaker is saying.

 

I'm wondering if anybody has any suggestions as to why that's the case. I assume that it's a situation where I'm way overthinking things as Praat clearly indications that the tones are there, if not yet perfect. This is also consistent with the experiences I've had with native speakers assuming that I know more than I know.

 

So, am I the only one that has better tones when speaking entire sentences? And should I even bother worrying about single syllables rather than just focus entirely on entire phrases and sentences?

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After reading your post, I like to imagine the situation like this:

 

When you're performing xyz motor task there can be both fine-motor and broad-motor aspects to it. Are you familiar with the Blue Angels special performance squad in the US Airforce? They are highly trained fighter jet pilots who do all sorts of acrobatic maneuvers at airshows. During some of these quick, precise movements the jets can end up 6 inches apart at very high rates of speed. Personally, having no real flight experience myself other than Xplane (flight simulator), I would prefer to do the movement gradually to get a feel for the control stick inputs to ensure no crashing; let's call this stick 'context'. 

 

When you are speaking Chinese sentences and the tones are matching on Praat, one could liken this to finding the right 'context' in which the tones can reside relative to one another; however, since you haven't learned Chinese as long as native speakers, you maybe don't have a feel for the precise single movements yet. 

 

But I'm probably just overthinking things too.

 

China is a big country with lots of accents and the word phrase "shi ta" could be taken as "it's him" or "cause him [to]" depending on the context; just "shi ta" alone, no matter the tones, probably will be understood as "是他".

 

 

tl;dr --- context is key

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I hadn't thought of that. I suspect that the answer probably is in large part a lack of precision and confidence. When I'm speaking an entire sentence I don't have to think as much about where the tones should be as I've set a context, so if it's too high or low, that's probably OK as long as it's consistent with the rest of the sentence. Which seems reasonable, not all Chinese people use the same exact frequency, but the relative frequency changes are basically the same.

 

I think I'll continue to work on the single tones, I think that even 5 minutes a day will probably help a great deal over the course of coming months..

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Out of curiousity, how have you mostly practiced your pronunciation? I do wish I had the same issue as you :)

 

I am the opposite currently, I have no problem with tones in isolation, but as soon as I use them in sentences, my english inflections tend to take over and nuke some of my tones. I'm currently working on shadowing to improve this.

 

I recently talked to a guy who has been learning Mandarin for quite some time, and lately learning a bit of Shanghainese. To me, his Shanghainese sounded more natural, I think because he didn't have a phonetic resource, so learned purely through imitating recordings.

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I think a part of it is probably because I was learning while I was in China. So by the time I started to take it seriously, I had already been exposed to hundreds of hours of various forms of Chinese. I'd also pay close attention to the response that I'd get. If I got a response back that was beyond what I could do, I'd usually take that as a sign that my tones and everything were close enough, assuming that my business was completed correctly.

 

Anyways, as far as the drilling goes, I'd recommend http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/01/21/seeing-the-tones-of-mandarin-chinese-with-praat , To make sure that I'm developing my hearing to go along with the production, I'm also transcribing sentences that I bought from Glossika. I'll even go so far as to take the sentences from glossika and feed those back into Praat to see if I'm producing something that resembles the original.

 

I think that ultimately, one needs to be able to do both reliably, otherwise ones Chinese is going to suffer for it.

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