Does mandarin really have fewer tones than cantonese?

[leosmith]

How did you ever come to this conclusion? No character study? Can you get that from chorusing too?

No not from chorusing, but you can listen to the sentence at the same time as you are reading it and thus pick up the characters. I haven't studied any characters for over a year now but I find that I am getting better and better at reading chinese, just by listening and reading simultaneously.

This might work for someone who has a very strong background in characters already, like yourself, but I thought you were advocating it for beginners. In the case of a beginner using this as her only method, I would disagree with you.

That may be true, but it would be a very large sample, and a very inefficient way to learn them.

I don't quite understand why you would need a large sample. Even in one single sentence you can get all four tones in without problems.

You'd need to have enough material for you to learn all the tone change rules, not to mention all 1500 or so possible syllables. If you're going to use real sentences, that would be a lot, IMO. I'm curious - how many hours of isolated pronunciation work do you recommend people using your method should do?

When I started studying mandarin I studied all the sandhi rules and knew them perfectly, but I soon discovered that knowing the rules doesn't help a bit without a lot of listening and imitating.

But with a lot of listening and imitating, which everyone has to do regardless of their learning method, they are a huge help. Also, it seems a little strange to be advocating this method if you actually learned the basics yourself. Is it not possible that this is helping you with Cantonese? Are you really advising beginners not to learn the basics?

Conversation will not help very much, because in conversation you are too busy trying to get your message across to be able to focus on rules for tone changes.

Everybody has to go thru this painful part of language learning, no matter what the learning method. It is much more efficient to go out and face the music than to try to perfect your skills at home.

I'm sorry to be so argumentative bomaci. I'm just afraid beginners will take this and run with it, thinking this is a one-shot solution. I'm very skeptical of the "only one method" theories. Do you remember all the hype about the "listen only for 400-700 hours" method? Thankfully that's dwindled out now. I only know of one guy who's still using it, and I feel sorry for him - he seems to only be sticking to his guns out of principle at this point. That's what I mean by a one-shot. Your reading method is one too, right? The way you use chorusing is also one.

All of those methods I just mentioned are quite excellent in moderation. But the old "do this only or you will get messed up" theory keeps surfacing in posts. So in closing, I would like to advise any beginners to 1. do a lot of research regarding how to learn your target language, and 2. try a lot of different methods at first to find out what works the best for you. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours are at stake here.

[bomaci]

So in closing, I would like to advise any beginners to 1. do a lot of research regarding how to learn your target language, and 2. try a lot of different methods at first to find out what works the best for you. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours are at stake here.

I actually agree with this. This is what I have done myself when studying mandarin. The reason I am so strongly advocating chorusing is that I have found it to be the best method for me.

You'd need to have enough material for you to learn all the tone change rules, not to mention all 1500 or so possible syllables. If you're going to use real sentences, that would be a lot, IMO. I'm curious - how many hours of isolated pronunciation work do you recommend people using your method should do?

First of all chorusing is primarily a method for mastering the prosody, i.e. rhythm and melody of a language. So you don't need to learn all 1500 syllables in one go. And I honestly think you need to either. If you have learnt to identify "zh" and "uo" I think you will have a good chance of picking out "zhuo" the first time you hear it. The reason I go on about the chorus method so much is because rhythm seems very much overlooked when learning tonal languages and wrongly so in my opinion. Working on rhythm makes it much easier to listen to the language, because you hear the word boundaries better. It also makes it much easier to imitate sentences you haven't heard before. Olle Kjellin the inventor of the chorus method claims that if you focus on rhythm when chorusing the intonation will take care of itself. I see no reason as to why this shouldn't apply to mandarin and cantonese.

I'm curious - how many hours of isolated pronunciation work do you recommend people using your method should do?

I combine pronounciation work with the rest of the language learning process as I outlined in my previous post. But for isolated study I think you should select maybe 20-30 sentences and work on those until you know them inside and out. If you do that you will learning new sentences will come very quickly.

[Luobot]

First of all chorusing is primarily a method for mastering the prosody, i.e. rhythm and melody of a language. (#22)

That strikes a chord with me. I find that the rhythm and melody of Mandarin is quite pleasing when it’s well articulated and spoken at a natural pace, and with some repetition, it makes an imprint. The natural rhythm in particular makes a better imprint in my long-term memory than anything else. In beginner’s audio material, however, you typically get something that’s very slowed down and unnatural sounding. I find that this artificial, slow-motion way of speaking is devoid of Mandarin’s natural rhythm, and that makes the material actually more difficult to assimilate. And once accustomed to an unnatural, offbeat rhythm, it tends to keep you in that mode and at that level. That’s why I feel that for beginners (or at least for me), it’s important to listen to the type of audio that follows any slow and artificial pronunciation with a natural recitation.

[L-F-J]

Interesting way of defining it, dividing it up into dependent and independent tones. So I did a recount and found 4 dependent tones (the usual 4 suspects) and 7 independent tones:

1 - half third tone.

4 - neutral tones that are influenced by their preceding tone.

1 - neutral-neutral tone, which I previously thought was just neutral, but now I know it’s really neutral-neutral. This is the tone that refuses to be pushed around by the tone that precedes it, especially if the preceding tone was a bit wimpy to begin with. 你明白我的意思了吗 (Nǐ míngbai wǒ de yìsi le ma) ?

1 - questioning tone (not to be confused with tone 2), for asking questions without using 吗 (ma).

you've got 11 there. but i count 12 if you add the half fourth tone! that is when two fourth tones are together the first one only falls half-way, while the second one falls all the way down.

[DrZero]

L F J ... I like the way you have articulated a phenomenon (the half-fourth tone) that I have observed but never seen described as such. Can I ask where, if anywhere, did you see it described?

P.S. In a google search, yours is the only mention of "half fourth tone" that comes up!

[L-F-J]

yes, i didnt coin the term myself. this was clearly described and referred to as the "half fourth tone" in a book called "modern chinese"... something-something, from the peking university.

i didnt care for the rest of the book. too much repetition of vocab to introduce new grammar. very boring... beginners book.

but the beginning sections on pronunciation and tones as well as erhua were extremely detailed. (even with pictures of how your throat and tongue should look when you say a certain sound- like i'm going to cut my throat open and look in the mirror to see if i'm doing it right! )

[DrZero]

cut my throat open and look in the mirror to see if i'm doing it right! )

Hey, yet another idea for the truly dedicated Mandarin learner!

[skylee]

Quote:

cut my throat open and look in the mirror to see if i'm doing it right! )

Hey, yet another idea for the truly dedicated Mandarin learner!

Very funny. hahaha.