Is it possible to be perfect with your tones?

[bomaci]

if you ask the question "is it possible to be as good as a native speaker" I'd say yes, it's possible. But there's a diminishing returns issue here - the extra time it would take you would probably be better spent on learning more vocabulary, listening skills, gardening, etc. And I think its dubious as an aim - imagine how nervous you'd be every time you opened your mouth, terrified you might ruin your so-far perfect record . . .

Actually with the right methodology learning a native accent doesn't have to take that long. See the earlier posts about native accent which mention the chorus method developed by Swede Olle Kjellin. I recently read a book written by him. In it he claims that pronunciation is really a rather small part of a language and thus fairly easy to learn to perfection. According to him you should spend some time on learning perfectly a rather small amount of material. Corrsesponding to about a page of written text. He claims that if you learn to pronounce a limited amount of text absolutely perfectly you will be able to pronounce everything you could possibly want to say in the language.

The reasoning being that the pronounciation rules in a language are limited. So if you concentrate on a small amount of text but enough to give examples of all the pronounciation rules in the language, you will only have to learn that text perfectly.

[roddy]

That's an interesting idea. I'd query though that you can draw an equivalence between accent in other languages and tones in Chinese. I also suspect that carrying the good habits learned in memorization of one text over to general speech might be easier said than done.

That said, it's worth a try - certainly won't do you any harm.

[bomaci]

I'd query though that you can draw an equivalence between accent in other languages and tones in Chinese.

I think you can actually. I think people get to hung up on tones in chinese and forget about another very important aspect of it, rhythm. According to the book I read, rhythm is the most important aspect to get right in order to get an understandable pronounciation. He also claims that if you focus on the rhythm when chorusing a sentence, the intonation will come by itself.

I have recently focused alot on rhythm in my chinese studies and I have found that it helps a lot. It becomes much easier to hear word boundaries when you have gotten the rhythm of the language "down".

[Long Zhiren]

Yes. To coin Thomas Jefferson, more perfect to be precise.

I know of well-educated native Chinese speakers who are now regularly mentioning that many of these expatriate westerners wandering the streets in China speak Chinese even better than the native Chinese themselves! That is impressive.

A lot of Americans are impressed that I speak English better than they do. However, this is not impressive, because (1) I am American and (2) I am a native English speaker.

As long as you can understand and be understood, I'm not sure what the extra effort merits though.

[flameproof]

I know of well-educated native Chinese speakers who are now regularly mentioning that many of these expatriate westerners wandering the streets in China speak Chinese even better than the native Chinese themselves! That is impressive.

I am sure there are such foreigners, but it also depends on what a native speaker considers

good Chinese

.

Good means what? Vocab? Pronunciation? Speed? Choice of words?

And doesn't perfect depends also on the vocab? You can handle after one mandarin lesson your vocab perfectly, even if it's just 10 words. That is perfect too. But I believe even a well educated native speaker may struggle if he gets to very elaborate vocab. And then it's not only how you talk, it's also what you talk. Take Bush as an example of a native speaker I would not call "perfect".

[HashiriKata]

another very important aspect of it, rhythm. According to the book I read, rhythm is the most important aspect to get right in order to get an understandable pronounciation.

This sounds useful so please forgive my ignorance: what is rhythm? how is it different from intonation? what is the Chinese rhythm like? how do you extract / isolate it from the flow of speech?

Thanks,

[studentyoung]

what is rhythm?

how is it different from intonation?

They are different things. Although some people have no intonation or pronunciation problems in Chinese, their rhythms are quite odd, because they are not so familiar with some phrases or sentence structures. For example, I once heard some foreigners said, “你好——吗？” or “中国共——产-党中央——委员——会”. But the normal rhythms are “你-好-吗？” and “中国共产党-中央委员会”. I am quite sure that this rhythm problem will happen on students who learn Japanese. If you ask a Japanese native speaker and a foreign student to read a long Japanese article, they will probably give you two different rhythms.

what is the Chinese rhythm like?

how do you extract / isolate it from the flow of speech?

Yes, it is really so hard to explain the Chinese rhythm. But you will understand more on it, if you listen to more Chinese listening materials.

Thanks!

[bomaci]

This sounds useful so please forgive my ignorance: what is rhythm? how is it different from intonation? what is the Chinese rhythm like? how do you extract / isolate it from the flow of speech?

Rhythm in language is simply a result of the differences in length between syllables when put together in a sentence. As far as I know there are two different rhythm types for languages. Stress-timed and syllable timed. In a stress timed language some syllables will be more prominent than others in the flow of speech.

In this kind of language a syllable will be pronounced differently depending on if it is stressed or not. In the other type syllable timed, syllables are pronounced the same regardless if they are stressed or not.

As far as I know mandarin (especially the beijing variant) is a stress timed language. For example look at how 是 is pronounced in

他就是我的朋友 and in 是啊. In the first sentence most beijing dialect speakers will pronounce 是 as "ri" transforming "jiushi" into "jiur". However in the second expression where 是 is in a stressed position, it will be pronounced "shi".

To hear the rhythm of chinese I suggest that you listen to recordings of individual sentences over and over. Then you will start to hear a rhythmic pattern.

[HashiriKata]

Thank studentyoung and bomaci for replying. I'll be paying more attention to rhythm in Mandarin and see (I did have some vague notion of rhythm but I think it comes with fluency in the language, and not the other way round).

Bomaci mentioning of the concepts of stress-timed and syllable-timed is particular interesting, as it never occurred to me that Mandarin is a stressed-time language (I know that English is one).

Best,