exaggerated tones for beginners

[doug86]

hello again everyone, ive started with one of my textbook lessons this week and i was just wondering if slightly exaggerating the tones when learning is going to help me understand the difference in tones or harm my progress in the long run?

[Yiwan]

It's good if you can properly grasp the rule of stressing on words which affects intonations and tones. Though it must be difficult for a beginner.

[jhargett]

As a general rule, what sounds exaggerated in your head sounds about right to the listener. This is true not just with Chinese tones, but with speech in general I think. When giving a public discourse in English, I have found this to be true as well. I feel like I am over doing the emphasis but it sounds right to the audience.

For the students that I have taught Chinese to, I usually tell them to exaggerate the tones and then it actually sounds right to me. So, I would say exaggerate and then get a Chinese person to listen to it and see if they say it sounds like you are over doing it.

[Ari 桑]

I suppose when you practice it couldn't do any harm. I agree though, tones are generally stressed on the parts of the sentence you want to stress.

[dan ni er]

Yes I think when you are starting out a beginner it is a good idea to really stress the tones. That way it will start to help you in being able to differentiate them. However, after a while you would need a good kouyu laoshi to help you pronounce the tones more subtely

[jhargett]

To me, it seems like saying the tones more subtly comes naturally with practice. When you start trying to speed up, it is impossible to speak quickly and still exaggerate the tones. Then also, you learn which words are necessary to speak with proper tones because the listener doesn’t understand you when you don’t stress them. Another example is the 3rd tone. It seems like you don’t really have to learn rules about when to do full 3rd tones or the half 3rd tones (sandhi), because who wants to say a full 3rd tone in the middle of the sentence and slow the rhythm of the sentence down. So, the common thread here is, practice! (Like you haven’t heard that before)

Just my thoughts, probably completely wrong