Memory tips for tones?

[ben_gb]

Hi,

I wondered if anyone would like to share any tips or techniques they have found to work for helping to memorise the tones of characters?

Generally, I find that I can remember the basic sound or pinyin 'spelling' of a character quite easily, but the tone rarely seems to stick in my head. Does anyone else find this?

Any suggestions of how to overcome this problem would be gratefully received!

Regards,

Ben

[anonymoose]

No miracle solutions, but I suggest repeating words (not individual characters) with exagerated tones so that eventually they will just sound right to you.

[necroflux]

Step 1: Use this page until you are able to ace the tone test every time:

http://www.pinyinpractice.com/tones.htm

Now that you are 100% sure that you can actually recognize tones, you are one third of the way there.

Step 2: You must convince yourself that a word is not a word unless you have the correct tone associated with it. Knowing that a knife is "dao" without a tone should feel just as incorrect to you as not knowing "dao" at all. So every time you learn a word, you must pay as much attention to it's tone as you do to it's pronunciation otherwise.

Step 3: When speaking the language, you must be equally vigilant about being correct with tones, I would argue from day one. Anything less will result in bad habits which are very difficult to reverse. I should reiterate that you don't have to be perfect; what's important is that your mindset is correct and that you are always listening to tones in your own speech and of course in every one else's. Any mistakes that you inevitably make at the beginning of your studies will become apparent as you progress and you can easily fix them at that time.

At least this is what has worked for me. Good luck!

[Qcash3]

Here is a tip I learned in 6th grade, it works for some people. When you think of the four different tones think of an airplane.

Tone 1-The airplane is rolling down the runway (completely level one)

Tone 2-The airplane is taking off (rising tone)

Tone 3-The airplane is experiencing turbulence (falling then rising tone)

Tone 4-The airplane is landing (falling tone)

I hope it doesn't seem to childish, but if you memorize that then you will at least know what every tone is supposed to do. Hopefully that will carry over to your speaking. I strongly agree with necroflux also, when you learn a word learn the tone. The tone should be a part of the word, too many people learn the word and memorize the meaning and leave the tone off. I've seen people do that for years, and it makes it difficult for them to learn more advanced Chinese when the words start carrying dual meanings.

[ben_gb]

Thanks for the tips so far!

I think necroflux's suggestions are closest to where I'm at now. The pinyin practice site is pretty useful. I can hear all the single character sounds fine. However, the combo tones were much tougher, so I need to work on those.

Yes, I do need to find a way to forge a tighter link in my memory between the characters/words sounds and their tones, and I suppose that is really what I'm looking for in this thread...any little 'aide memoires' that people have found helps with this process.

EG Someone once suggested to me that drawing the tone in the air with your finger as you memorise the word helped them. I did try this, but it doesn't really work for me (and, frankly, looks ridiculous).

Another suggestion was to use the number-on-the-end tone mark when writing down in pinyin, instead of the tone accents, as a native English speaker's brain isn't used to reading/remembering lots of diacritic marks and so tends to ignore them, whereas having a big number at the end of the word is prominent enough for it to be picked up and remembered. Not tried this one yet as I'd need to rewrite all my learning lists. Has anyone else tried it?

Ben

[atitarev]

When I read Chinese texts I put tone marks with a pencil, if I have any slightest doubt, that way I make sure I remember both the pinyin and the tones. If you forget the tones, only remember the basic pinyin then it means you don't know this word/character, you have to look it up. This method works for me.

[nipponman]

I wrote a thread about this over a year ago, if you search for it I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

[atitarev]

Nipponman, search sometimes doesn't produce desired results, would you mind providing a link, please? I'd like to read too if I haven't before.

I'd like to add that learning tones is important all the time. If you learn words without tones, it's harder to relearn and I have to do it every now and again. I don't have much trouble because normally I do know what the right tone is and I've been also paying attention to characters that change tones depending on the situation or meaning (it could be not just tone but a different syllable). I sometimes not so sure when I try to speak a bit faster, though.

When learning words, you need to pronounce them correctly too.

I know some people with a decent Chinese vocabulary but tones are completely off, not because the don't know how to pronounce the tone but what they are!

[Kong Junrui]

What I personally think is a good approach is, not thinking "okay, I need to learn this character, and memorize its tone," but to rather think about the tone as part of the word itself, like it actually is. So instead of memorizing 你 as pronounced as ni with the third tone, you think of nǐ, so you remember the tone as part of the word. I dunno, it's kinda hard to explain via text, but I think I got my message across.

So basically, instead of having the ~400 sounds in Mandarin along with 4/5 different possible tones, you have the 1600 possible sounds, so that ni3 sounds different from ni2.

[gato]

This is probably the post nipponman is referring to.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/56-what-is-your-chinese-name33&highlight=memorize

Techniques for learning characters

Even the Chinese have trouble remembering the proper tone for certain characters that used more in writing than in everyday spoken language. Like memorizing anything else, I would suggest repetition. Say the character out loud with the proper tone several times when you first learn it, and then review every couple of days until it sinks in.

[bomaci]

I would really recommend that you memorize the sound of words instead of memorizing tones. If you want to learn tones for characters I would recommend that you get some text with accomanying audio and then read the text as you listen to the audio.

[tanhql]

listen listen listen. download some sound clips with chinese saying perfect mandarin in sentences, and not individual phrases. either that or record yourself speaking sentences using perfect tones. in that way, when you say that sentence in the future, you feel sort of 'funny' if your tone is off a bit. i'm a native chinese so i don't know if this way is perfect, but this is how native chinese learn their tones from young (from their parents) ...

[kudra]

try this thread

www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/6539-how-could-i-get-better-at-tones

[Jose]

Another suggestion was to use the number-on-the-end tone mark when writing down in pinyin, instead of the tone accents, as a native English speaker's brain isn't used to reading/remembering lots of diacritic marks and so tends to ignore them, whereas having a big number at the end of the word is prominent enough for it to be picked up and remembered. Not tried this one yet as I'd need to rewrite all my learning lists. Has anyone else tried it?

The problem is that numbers can also be hard to remember. Another approach I have tried occasionally consists in modifying the pinyin so that I use different letters for the different tones. I got this idea from the old Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) system. The GR system is too complicated, so the modified version of pinyin I occasionally use in my personal notes is much simpler: For a first tone, I write a colon after the vowel (I took this from the IPA convention of using a colon for long vowels). e.g ba: instead of bā; for the second tone I add an "r" (as in GR), e.g bar instead of bá; for the third tone I duplicate the vowel (also from GR. Note that the influence of GR remains in the current romanised name of Shaanxi province), e.g. baa instead of bǎ; and for the fourth tone I add an h (also from GR), e.g bah instead of bà.

Using that method, you would write 方法 as fa:ngfaa, 特別 as tehbier and so on. I think the tones stick in your head better like that. But maybe that's just me.

[Lu]

I'd recommend listening as well. If you hear a word a hundred times in the right tone, it will sound strange if it's said with the wrong tone, and if you can't remember which tone a word was in, just say it in every tone and listen which one sounds right.

Also I agree with other posters that tones are vital, if you're learning words and know the pinyin but not the tone, you don't know the word.

Once met a guy who had studied Mandarin for 1-2 years, he was fluent and could say a lot of things, but he had no tones at all. He had completely wasted all the time he had put into studying Chinese, this way.

[kudra]

...but he had no tones at all. He had completely wasted all the time he had put into studying Chinese, this way.

sounds harsh I know, but see this post

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.php?p=77779&postcount=15

with a link to a paper from CS dept at Univ. of Chicago that suggestes that from a mathematical information theory point of view, tones are as important as vowels in Mandarin. (Not obvious how this translates into human-human verbal communication).

The point of this for me is to focus attention on the tone issue -- what would you think of someone who said, "Oh, I remember words, I just have trouble mixing up the vowels a lot of the time"?

Note: I am not talking about obscure words, and I suspect that verbal communication is slightly more forgiving about a few scrambled tones here and there. But as a 1st approximation, the math suggests that tones are about as important as vowels.

Note 2: They may have done their analysis on archives of spoken news programs, in which case my impression is tones are more important because it is more formal and abbreviated. Nonetheless, even if it was based on news, I think the points above are valid.

[Long Zhiren]

Knowing the tones of just the radicals will get you the right tones about 90% of the time.

[necroflux]

Tones of the radicals, are you sure about that? I didn't know there was such a correlation.