Starting Chinese again. Focusing on tones in the beginning

[Krobador]

I studied Chinese a little bit years ago and I'm thinking about starting again. Tones are what worry me. I'm bad at pronunciation. My English pronunciation has a strong accent (English is the only foreign language that I speak). My listening comprehension isn't that good. I don't have a "good ear". My musical abilities are nonexistent. I have very monotone voice. Chinese is full of new sounds and of course Chinese has tones.

I haven't used italki before, but it seems to be a good tool to help. I could do 2-4 italki lessons per week (probably 2, but depends on the week.). I can study vocabulary and grammar on my own, but italki lessons would focus only on speaking. I have some Chinese friends, but I don't want to make them my teachers. I can talk with them in Chinese, but its just informal discussion. Of course I would also do my best to immerse myself with Chinese audio.

I think it makes sense to focus on tones and pronunciation in the beginning. I would also study grammar and vocabulary, but tones and pronunciation would be something that I would prioritize the beginning.

How would you start? Do you have any tips? 

[thelearninglearner]

19 hours ago, Krobador said:

My listening comprehension isn't that good. I don't have a "good ear". My musical abilities are nonexistent. I have very monotone voice.

wow, I think you're me. had to check that i wasn't the one that posted that.

 

but really it's okay. the tones are just raises in voice not really tones in the monotone voice sense. for the third tone you lower your voice and for first, second and 4th you just go higher to lower and whatever. there are a lot of monotone chinese people too. that sound like they are all using one tone, but really other chinese people can tell the difference. it's good that you're aware so you can put a little extra work into it. you can try https://www.archchinese.com/mandarin_chinese_tone_drill.html or https://mandarinportal.com/mandarin-chinese-2-character-tone-drills/ to help you get started. there are a few android apps as well. plus http://www.speakgoodchinese.org is also a big help

[mungouk]

Hi @Krobador, welcome to the forums.

 

What made a big difference to me was learning vocabulary with native speaker audio at the same time, using Tofulearn and StickyStudy apps on my iPad. (Memrise website too at the beginning, but I gave up on that after a while because the user-generated content has a lot of errors.)

 

Eventually, with lots of repetition, I started to hear the recording "in my mind's ear" when I was recalling the word. I found this really helped me to speak with the correct tone... in most cases without really having to think about what the tone is.

 

 

[Krobador]

Thanks for tips @thelearninglearner and @mungouk. 

At the beginning I plan to use Skritter HSK lists to learn vocabulary. I think they have native audio. 

I plan to do 
1. Tone exercises where I listen words and pick the right tone. 
2. Tone drills. I would listen and repeat tones.
3. Italki lessons where I would only focus on tones and pronunciation.

Somebody on reddit told that they drilled tones for hours at school. He is a native speaker but from area where they speak some non-standard variety of Chinese so they drilled tones at school.

[Shelley]

I felt the same way, until I ignored tones. By this I mean that I learnt the tone and sound of the word/character together. Don't treat it as a sound you tack the tone on to, the sound and tone is the pronouciation.

By doing it like this you learning one thing instead of two.

The tones are in no way singsongy, the differences are subtle and so you just need to listen and speak as much as you can.

You will eventually get your ear in. Just listening to Chinese on in the background without trying necessarily to understand all can also help you become familiar with the sounds.

[889]

I don't know your native language, but in English tones are actually pretty important.

 

You don't use the same "Hi" to greet someone you haven't seen in years that you use to greet a friend you just saw yesterday. Indeed, if you did it would be insulting. Think about it a bit and you realize there's actually a whole crescendo of different "Hi"s.

 

So don't get hung up on 1 2 3 4. Just mimic as closely as you can. And get yourself to the point where you can actually distinguish and repeat 陕西 and 山西.

[Dawei3]

On 11/1/2020 at 5:57 AM, mungouk said:

with lots of repetition,

 

16 hours ago, Shelley said:

By this I mean that I learnt the tone and sound of the word/character together

I learned with Pimsleur CDs with an approach that follows the comments from both Mungouk & Shelley, repetition & learning the tones & word together.  Pimsleur also has you learn words as part of a sentence, not in isolation.  Learning the whole sentence makes your language more fluent.

 

Pimsleur regularly repeats sentences, but in an unpredictable manner.  By constantly hearing Chinese spoken perfectly and repeating it back, your pronunciation gets better and better.  I'm non-musical like you and it took me about 3 months to hear tones.  However, I tried to explicitly imitate what was said in the lessons.  Overtime, my tones got much better.  Now, even though my language level is just intermediate, Chinese assume my level is far higher because Pimsleur gave me good pronunciation.  

 

Hence, as you noted, tones are really important.  Recently, I met an American whose pronunciation is the worst I've heard.  His American accent in Chinese is extremely strong.  Yet, a native Chinese in our language group could understand him.  I think it's because although his phonetics are terrible, his tones are mostly correct.  He's even more notable, because I think he may know & understand more Chinese than I do.    

 

 

 

 

[Demonic_Duck]

10 hours ago, 889 said:

in English tones are actually pretty important.

 

No, in English intonation is important, and tones are nonexistent. In Chinese, both intonation and tones are important.

 

This may seem like splitting hairs, but it's an important distinction. Intonation affects the production of tones, but the underlying tone remains the same. Even though both intonation and tone are expressed through pitch, the tone will still be discernable to native speakers, if produced correctly.

 

I agree that imitation/mimicry is the best way to learn, but you should still know on an instinctive level that 山 is first tone and 陕 is third tone. Otherwise, you're just guessing the tones, in which case you'll frequently get them wrong.

 

@Krobador One common pitfall early on is learning 3rd tone as falling-rising, whereas in most cases it's just falling (or is pronounced as 2nd tone due to sandhi). This is largely the fault of many Chinese teachers and textbook writers who continue to teach it poorly. Look up "half third tone" if you haven't heard of it before. You'll also want to nail down the tone sandhi rules. They're mostly pretty simple, but can become complex with lots of third tones in a row, so again, imitation is your best bet here.

[889]

I certainly agree with what you said. You are splitting hairs. Eh?

 

And you don't need to know a whit about 1 2 3 4 to mimic 陕西 and 山西 correctly. Not one single whit. Any more than a native speaker.

[Demonic_Duck]

2 hours ago, 889 said:

You are splitting hairs.

 

Tone and intonation are both expressed through pitch, yet are meaningfully different. You can think of it like how farting and making love both produce heat, yet are meaningfully different. Like with tone and intonation, you can also do both at the same time, and like with tone and intonation, doing so has an impact on the overall effect.

 

2 hours ago, 889 said:

you don't need to know a whit about 1 2 3 4 to mimic 陕西 and 山西 correctly

 

I should be a bit clearer about what I mean with this. I don't mean that you should think of the number 3 when you hear 陕, or that you should visualize a series of numbers whizzing past your eyes when you hear spoken Chinese.

 

What I mean is that you should learn its three-ness (or ˇ-ness, or purple-ness, or Gwoyeu Romatzyh "shaan"-ness, or whatever helps you remember it) as an intrinsic aspect of the pronunciation of the syllable. And you should aim to be able to recall the fact that it's third tone just as easily as you can recall that it's s-h-a-n.

 

Additionally, given the trivial amount of time it'll take you to learn that there are four tones plus neutral, their approximate contours, and the handful of rules about how they interact (excluding the relatively rare case where you have long strings of third tones), you might as well spend some effort on learning it explicitly upfront. That will save you massive amounts of effort and heartache down the line when you're memorizing the pronunciations of thousands of characters and 万s of words. It will also help you internalize how tones and intonation interact in real-world settings, without having to learn these more complex interactions explicitly.

[Jan Finster]

On 10/31/2020 at 4:25 PM, Krobador said:

I think it makes sense to focus on tones and pronunciation in the beginning. I would also study grammar and vocabulary, but tones and pronunciation would be something that I would prioritize the beginning.

How would you start? Do you have any tips? 

 

I focused on tones and pronunciation obsessively for about 3 months when I started on my Chinese journey. There are tons of (free) resources on Youtube for self-study. It was only after approximately 3 months that I took my first Chinese Skype class. We went through the pinyin table and I got most right. There will always be some blind spots, so eventually getting feedback is helpful. For me such a blind spot was for instance not pronouncing the final "g" clearly enough to differentiate e.g. yin vs ying...

 

I know this is a bit controversial, but, in the beginning, I did use my finger to draw the tones in the air when I said them. A bit like a conductor of an orchestra. It looks super silly, but it helped me immensely. With the help of my fingers my tones were much more clear. In fact without my fingers I could not raise my voice enough on tone 2 and drop it enough on tone 4. When my teacher saw this, she was not surprised. Apparently a lot of students do this. She did not mind and said the fingers would eventually go away. And they did. It took a bit of time. After 3 more months  I would sometimes catch my fingers making micro-movements, but after another 1-2 months they were completely still. I guess I could have accelerated this weaning off period, if I had spend more time on shadowing, but in the beginning I did not know it was a thing.

 

On 10/31/2020 at 4:25 PM, Krobador said:

My English pronunciation has a strong accent (English is the only foreign language that I speak). My listening comprehension isn't that good. I don't have a "good ear". My musical abilities are nonexistent. I have very monotone voice. Chinese is full of new sounds and of course Chinese has tones.

 

Me too. 100%. But this is not an issue, if you work on it. Because I a considered myself a tone-retard, I deliberately invested so much time in the beginning.

[i__forget]

30 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

For me such a blind spot was for instance not pronouncing the final "g" clearly enough to differentiate e.g. yin vs ying...

The "g" in "ying" is not pronounced... "ng" is a sound similar to "n" but without using the tongue.

 

[suMMit]

I found "tone pairs" to be helpful

[Krobador]

Thank you all for your responses.

Yep, I know that 3rd tone is usually low, not falling-rising. Also, I don't treat tones as something extra, I understand that tones are integral part of pronunciation, I understand their importance. 

My native language is Finnish and Finnish is actually pretty flat language. 

[Jan Finster]

10 hours ago, i__forget said:

The "g" in "ying" is not pronounced... "ng" is a sound similar to "n" but without using the tongue.

 

Yes and no. You do hear a soft "g" in ng ending, e.g. 大家好欢迎来到...

 

Maybe we are talking about the same thing since I do not know which "g" in what language's pronunciation you are talking about. Anyway, my teacher's point was that you should not pronounce yin and ying or shen and sheng identically. 

[realmayo]

14 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

And you should aim to be able to recall the fact that it's third tone just as easily as you can recall that it's s-h-a-n.

 

What about when you say it right but have to repeat yourself to work out which tone you said it in? I reckon I could always instantly spell-out the pinyin of any word (except for the occasional s/sh mistake) on demand, but won't always be able to tell you the tone instantly, until I've spoken it out loud (I just tried with 辽宁 for instance).

[Jan Finster]

8 minutes ago, realmayo said:

I reckon I could always instantly spell-out the pinyin of any word (except for the occasional s/sh mistake) on demand, but won't always be able to tell you the tone instantly, until I've spoken it out loud (I just tried with 辽宁 for instance).

 

I am with RealMayo on this one. It is definitely easier to remember "shan" than the tones. Eventually, yes, you should be able to know both, but this comes easy to some and is the result of hard work for others.

Just like some people know what a "g" on the guitar sounds like and are able to tune the guitar to get the perfect "g" on that string without a tuner, other people need a reference tone. The latter may only recognise the "g" once it is played. 

[amytheorangutan]

as someone who struggle so hard with tones now, I cannot stress the important of pinyin pronunciation including the tones but it sounds like you are already doing the right exercises and try to record yourself and compare with a native speaker recording because I thought I was doing great until I heard myself speaking ?

[Demonic_Duck]

1 hour ago, realmayo said:

I reckon I could always instantly spell-out the pinyin of any word (except for the occasional s/sh mistake) on demand, but won't always be able to tell you the tone instantly, until I've spoken it out loud (I just tried with 辽宁 for instance).

 

I'd hypothesize that it's because you're not 100% sure of the tone of 辽. When I do the same same exercise, I can instantly recall that 宁 is 2nd tone in this context, but it takes me a little longer with 辽, because there's a shadow of a doubt in my mind that it might be 3rd (probably due to interference from 了 liao3).

 

I'm open to the possibility that other people process these things differently, though — maybe my experience is unrepresentative.

[889]

I just listen to people in their first couple of years of study who are so focused on 1 2 3 4, and belabour and stretch out every syllable. It sounds awful. Like Chinese who overdo it saying book-eh and map--uh in English.

 

Can't help but think their Chinese would improve immeasurably if they weren't so focused on those numbers and were more focused on simply saying words exactly like Chinese people do.