Book Suggestion Wanted: Pronunciation Book with Descriptions of tongue/lip position

[Don_Horhe]

The tongue does not go between the upper and lower teeth when pronouncing z, c and s, it stays behind the upper teeth.

[imron]

Are you sure? For me 's' is definitely behind the lower teeth. 'z' and 'c' seem to sound basically the same in either position, but 's' behind the upper teeth produces a sound that to me seems wrong.

[Don_Horhe]

Yes, you're right, I should have elaborated a bit more. The tongue position for 's' is the same as the final position your tongue takes after pronouncing 'c' and 'z'. What I meant to stress was that none of the above sounds are interdental.

[Hero Doug]

Are you sure? For me 's' is definitely behind the lower teeth.

The tongue position for 's' is the same as the final position your tongue takes after pronouncing 'c' and 'z'.

I'll second that.

[Meng Lelan]

I'm bumping up this thread. If anyone's been reading my blog I've got a deaf student going to take 1st year Chinese at a regular high school next year and he is going to have to learn how to produce the Chinese sounds - and learn how to do this by sight alone. I'm sure his future Chinese teacher isn't going to have any clue how to teach him that way.

So I found this book - McGraw Hill's Chinese Pronunciation. It even comes with a CD-ROM that shows the speaker's mouth (lips, teeth, tongue) as she produces each sound and you can both see and hear the sound. I'm giving it to my student after I review the whole book.

Anyway has anyone here tried Chinese Pronunciation by McGraw Hill?

[Gharial]

Just thought I'd mention that whilst searching on Amazon for 'McGraw Hill's Chinese' I noticed another book (though unrelated to this thread's topic ): McGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary and Guide to 20,000 Essential Words: A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2,000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese (Mandarin Chinese Edition), by Quanyu Huang. His "broken marks" method (mentioned in the Editorial Review/Product Description, and it seems illustrated with the character fei1 on the book's cover) sounds and looks kind of interesting! Not sure though why only 2 out of the 300 of his students that he surveyed were able to use pre-existing Chinese dictionaries - surely a failure on his part in not teaching them the requisite skills?!

Anyway, sorry that I can't help with the book you were asking about, Meng Lelan. I've got the previously mentioned Yen-Hwei Lin to plough through though...might try to get back here at some point with some impressions of it.

Edited January 10, 2010 at 08:53 PM by Gharial

[Gharial]

Actually, thinking about it, Huang's "broken marks" method (just mentioned, in my previous post) would seem a bit like saying 永 'includes all 8 strokes' - the wooliness is fine I suppose if you're immersing yourself in mounds of hoghair brushes, ink and incense, but it's potentially quite confusing and certainly of little apparent use if you're (still) trying to learn how to use a Chinese dictionary accurately and effectively. Or have I got it wrong, and every student of Chinese is sophisticated enough to "read the small print"? (Me, I didn't much look at calligraphy stuff until I was proficient with dictionaries, so "this" wasn't a problem, but I can imagine books like Huang's or guidance like 永 'includes all 8 strokes' throwing a relative beginner who was coming straight at the characters from a more "fancy" than practical angle first).

Anyway, it would be good to get the Huang and find out if he adequately qualifies what he says (with regards to his apparent method's, versus standard ways, of indexing and finding characters).