My teacher says my pronounciation sucks.... CET students please tell me your method

[andrew1981]

Right now I am student studying in Harbin, I think that my chinese is improving very fast but I am having a hard time with my pronounciation. I heard that the 20,000US/semester CET program in Harbin students have great pronnounciation, as I heard they stress it more than reading and writting. Can someone please tell me how they train you guys? What books do you use? How do they drill you? If anyone has any experience with improving pronounciation, please fill me in..... I just cant seem to improve this aspect of my Chinese....

[Ferno]

any specific sticking points in your pronounciation?

http://www.chinawestexchange.com/Mandarin/Pinyin/South_f/

list of all the mandarin syllables with native speaker pronounciation, make your voice match theirs

[hakkaboy]

Ferno, the isolated syllables are not so much the problem in Chinese pronunciation. The greater difficulty is how to combine the tones in running speech. There is very little information on this subject, and we are supposed to "pick it up"...

[Manchu]

It's incredibly hard to improve your pronunciation once you already started reading and writing. My recommendation? Get a tutor who is facist about tones. Anything that comes out of your mouth will not be acceptable unless it was perfectly pronounced with perfect tones. If you get anything wrong, you have to repeat the entire sentence.

Finding a tutor who will do this will be hard. Most teachers assume foreigners simply can't get the accent and tones right, and settle for good enough. This is unacceptable.

If you do find a tutor who will do that for you, meet with them often, three times a week or more. You should be working on something other than just tones -- you want to still work on learning Chinese, but anything less than perfect pronunciation is unacceptable.

This should also get you to be concerned about your tones, yourself. Yes you may realize its not perfect, but you probably don't think about them while speaking. A Nazi-tutor will make sure pronunciation is first and foremost in your mind.

By the way -- the CET kids don't all have good pronunciation, hence the specialized class. Most foreigners who I've met that have perfect tones were taught it from the beginning, and had that focus maintained throughout their study.

[roddy]

You also need more information on where the problems are - is it tones? which ones? initials or finals? again, which ones? If your teacher is literally just saying 'Your pronuncation sucks', then you are going to need a better teacher.

[Ferno]

Ferno, the isolated syllables are not so much the problem in Chinese pronunciation. The greater difficulty is how to combine the tones in running speech. There is very little information on this subject, and we are supposed to "pick it up"...

true

i cannot even hear the difference between tones 2 and 3 in "running speech"

[snarfer]

I went to a school in Thailand for learning the Thai language, which has five tones. Their methodology was that, in order to have perfect pronounciation, students aren't allowed to speak, read or write Thai until they've attained 40 percent listening comprehension, which, they say, occurs after 800 hours of exposure to native speakers.

I've been trying to apply this methodology to learning Chinese, by spending a lot of time listening to as much audio material as I can. I can't say that it's resulted in any stunning success as of yet, although my listening comprehension has obviously been getting better.

If you want to read more research:

http://algworld.com/

[stephanhodges]

I find it also helps to record your sessions, and then listen to them as soon as possible. This really helps train your ear to hear yourself correctly.

[Ferno]

snarfer this is interesting..

In 1984, the American University Alumni Language Center in Bangkok started using a new version of the natural approach to teach the Thai language. In publications it has been referred to as ‘The Listening Approach’, but in Thailand it was first called ‘The Natural Approach’. In more recent years it’s become known as ‘Automatic Language Growth’ or ‘ALG’. Like natural approaches elsewhere, it is based on the principle that understanding real language use is the only thing that leads to natural language acquisition. But unlike the others, it claims that any attempt to speak (or even think about language) before natural speaking comes by itself will cause irreversible damage and impose a ceiling on the final results! This article reports on the Automatic Language Growth Program (ALG) over the first sixteen years of its development.

it appears i have permanently stunted my mandarin

[Ferno]

this is very interesting. hmm.

i think i will try this - stop all speaking and attempts at memorization of pinyin.

however, none of the articles i read on the site mention exactly how you are supposed to learn the definitions of words just because you heard them a lot of times..

[venture160]

Again, its not $20,000 a semester, its at least half of that.

I agree, you can't just "fix" your tones without alot of work, and a solid foundation from the start, that being said, the CET tones class does help, but of course not everyone comes out with "perfect" tones, ( i have yet to find a foreigner who has them, even a lot of chinese!) But we use a very rudimentary book from Fudan University, and for 2 hours a day read out of that book (but we have to memorize everything and are not allowed to use the book in class) and we also have tape recordings due everyday. In class, which is 2 students and one professor, we will read the texts from memory and the professor will mark down every single mistake, and then write it on the chalkboard, we then spend the next hour with the teachers grilling us to death over our mistakes and saying those words over and over and over again. We are also taught lots of conjuction tones etc etc, I found it to be a very usefull class. Also when you are learning a new word, for a ting xie or something, make sure you memorize the tones with it as well. All of CET's ting xies require you to write the pinyin and the tones as WELL as the characters, if you get one part wrong, its all wrong.

[snarfer]

I attended the classes in Bangkok for several weeks. The idea of a "definition" is itself a problem. When learning via their method one is never given any definitions at all. The two teachers come in and tell a funny story or play games. The stories are illustrated on the board and acted out. As one goes through the levels the teachers do less drawing and acting out until by level 5 they are just speaking naturally in Thai.

According to their literature, every student who has completed their program is fluent in Thai. They have been teaching this way for quite a few years now, so it seems that they have some data to back up their claims.

Unfortunately, their teaching method conflicts radically with the pre-conceptions of most Chinese teachers. I had an idea that I would like to set up a similar program for myself in Chinese, but I found it impossible to persuade any Chinese that such a teaching method could possibly work, as Chinese pedagogy is based on long hours of boring and repetitious memorization...

There are some other interesting implications however. For instance, the conventional idea of language exchange in which the partners attempt to speak their second language to each other is fatally flawed. Language exchange partners should instead speak only their native languages, thus picking up the proper accent from the native speaker.

[imron]

Some of you might be interested in reading this, which talks about the case of a Mexican working in Los Angeles who became a fluent speaker of Hebrew over a period of several years, while working in an Israeli restaurant. He apparently did this by doing nothing more than regularly conversing with the Israeli owners and Hebrew speaking customers.

[Ferno]

I attended the classes in Bangkok for several weeks. The idea of a "definition" is itself a problem. When learning via their method one is never given any definitions at all. The two teachers come in and tell a funny story or play games. The stories are illustrated on the board and acted out. As one goes through the levels the teachers do less drawing and acting out until by level 5 they are just speaking naturally in Thai.

According to their literature' date=' every student who has completed their program is fluent in Thai. They have been teaching this way for quite a few years now, so it seems that they have some data to back up their claims.

Unfortunately, their teaching method conflicts radically with the pre-conceptions of most Chinese teachers. I had an idea that I would like to set up a similar program for myself in Chinese, but I found it impossible to persuade any Chinese that such a teaching method could possibly work, as Chinese pedagogy is based on long hours of boring and repetitious memorization...

There are some other interesting implications however. For instance, the conventional idea of language exchange in which the partners attempt to speak their second language to each other is fatally flawed. Language exchange partners should instead speak only their native languages, thus picking up the proper accent from the native speaker.[/quote']

this is fascinating :shock:

yes this totally blows apart traditional teaching.

i still find it hard to believe that it works - but i guess it does, children do just by listening and observing.

very intriguing - how would you learn the words for "method" "conflict" "idea" "attempt" etc... just by hearing them spoken without translation? these aren't physical things you can just point to... The teachers never use english to explain something or repeat a Thai sentance in English?

would watching movies or TV in Mandarin with English subtitles create the same effect?

[Ferno]

Some of you might be interested in reading this, which talks about the case of a Mexican working in Los Angeles who became a fluent speaker of Hebrew over a period of several years, while working in an Israeli restaurant. He apparently did this by doing nothing more than regularly conversing with the Israeli owners and Hebrew speaking customers.

the method says you're not supposed to speak at all until after an extended period of listening (600-800 hours)

[imron]

The article mentions that initially he wasn't doing much speaking, just listening to all the Hebrew being spoken around him. It was only after a period of maybe 2-3 years that he said he felt comfortable starting to speak to people.

Anyway whether no speaking or some speaking, the basic concept is the same - i.e. learning a language as an adult in the same way you learnt it as a child, just by listening and interacting with the world around you.

[ddjiii]

I'm no expert but I have done a little ESL teaching, and this argument (pedagogy vs. natural learning) has been going on probably since people first started learning other languages, and has strong (sometimes way too strong) proponents on both sides. My own sense is that both approaches have value - you can't learn completely either by sitting in a classroom repeating syllables or on the street just listening to what's around you.

For myself, did a lot of classroom learning in college, but for the last ten years or so my Chinese education has consisted of hanging around Chinese people and talking with them. The results? My口语 is really pretty good, and my vocabulary and grammar are pretty bad. At this point, I really need some boring repetition. So I don't think you can go all one way or the other.

[Ferno]

well if this is true, either you go the natural approach or you don't, "trying" and "memorizing" (pedagogy??) will only limit whatever fluency you do achieve - native speakers never put any effort into learning to speak their own langauge

[Manchu]

native speakers never put any effort into learning to speak their own langauge

Ha! I and my 16 years of schooling beg to differ. And I also believe my 3-year old self who deperately wanted french fries but couldn't communicate this well enough to his parents would think you're wrong as well.

The way I think of it is this: memorizing in itself does nothing for you. But the "natural" way is going to take you 15+ years before you can communicate at an adult level. Using American-born Chinese as an example: they have used Chinese their whole lives, and yet often sound like uneducated children when they come to the mainland (barring actual Mandarin training).

Memorizing enables you to compact years of "natural" learning into a shorter time period, but you'll forget. It preps your brain for the "natural" process as well. I've memorized hundreds of words that, after using them in the real world, I would never translate back exactly as I memorized them. But if I never memorized them in the first place, my brain wouldn't have been able to pick up on them as well in conversation in just a few years. I don't want to spend a decade on every language I learn before sounding halfway intelligent.

So yea, what ddjjii said.

Also, I don't think this is so related to pronunciation in itself. Once people are past adolesence, very few have the ability to hear small differences in foreign languages. There are only two ways to get correct pronunciation: be linguistically gifted, or have a native speaker tell you when you're saying it wrong. Even as children, we had a lot of help from our parents.

[snarfer]

Actually the Thai school says you should start speaking and learning to read and grammar and all that stuff as soon as you have the 600 to 800 hours completed (or achieved 45% oral comprehension). And they have classes on written Thai. Admittedly they do emphasize reading as much as possible in order to learn to write.