Mandarin Chinese...?

[flameproof]

I don't quite understand why it doesn't make sense. Surely it is entirely possible to learn mandarin just by listening up to quite a high level.

who said you can't? Kids can speak good Chinese before the ever see the first character. Lots of folk in China can't read and write, still, can talk.

In my view you can learn tonal languages by listening just as you learn other languages.

All languages are tonal, ok, except sign language. If you don't use tones you speak like PC generated sound.

[HashiriKata]

All languages are tonal, ok, except sign language. If you don't use tones you speak like PC generated sound.

This is a very new concept of tones (a clearly mistaken one, of course! )

[flameproof]

HashiriKata

Spoken language is always sound. You can pick up tones perfectly by hearing. In fact, many Chinese don't know tones at all.

[roddy]

Many English speakers don't know that you make 'th' sounds by putting your tongue slightly forward of your teeth. That doesn't stop Chinese learners of English struggling to make the sound inordinately grateful when you explain this to them. Sometimes they're so happy they don't even say sankyou.

[OneEye]

Many English speakers don't know that you make 'th' sounds by putting your tongue slightly forward of your teeth. That doesn't stop Chinese learners of English struggling to make the sound inordinately grateful when you explain this to them. Sometimes they're so happy they don't even say sankyou.

Precisely. There are sounds in Mandarin you just can't learn by simply listening. I've never met anyone who claimed to have learned English just by listening who didn't have a strong accent due to pronunciation issues.

bomaci,

It just makes no sense to skip studying the tones. Your argument seems to be that you can learn just by listening, and I haven't disagreed with that. I just don't think it's the best way to go. A little studying makes things so much easier. Sure, listening is important, but I think you'd be impeding your own progress by not studying a bit. And like I've said, a few hours of studying the tones and pinyin can save a lot of time and headache.

Thanks for the IME recommendation, though.

[flameproof]

you just can't learn by simply listening

Children learn by listening. You can really ignore tones completely when you just listen, because you simply copy. As long as you copy correct you are 100% accurate.

[xiaocai]

Children learn by listening.

Kids can speak good Chinese before the ever see the first character

I think kids are different from adults in terms of "picking up a language", and quite obviously, this forum is not for children who are interested in learning Chinese...So the analogies might not be very appropriate here.

Kids have the gift for imitation but will start losing it when growing up. So that is why there are "native speakers" and "non-native speakers".

Even for those "semi-native speakers" like me whose fisrt language is not mandarin, the fisrt Chinese classes would be 四声 and 拼音 in primary school (maybe this is taught in kindergarten now). And we did have to memorize quite a few rules and practice everyday...

[roddy]

To say that kids learn by listening is a major oversimplification - they listen and also speak and get huge amounts of feedback on the speech. There's also theories of critical periods for language acquisition; and the fact that (most) adults have the ability to learn in additional ways that children just don't have.

As long as you copy correct you are 100% accurate.

Obviously. It's the copying correctly that's the problem.

[flameproof]

Obviously. It's the copying correctly that's the problem.

I agree to some extend. You have to be aware that you need to have some accuracy. But that's the way to go.

To learn tones with no context is meaningless, dead boring and for me impossible.

(OK, when I look up a word in Pleco I look at the Pinyin tone marks and use them, but I prefer listening)

[OneEye]

Children learn by listening. You can really ignore tones completely when you just listen, because you simply copy. As long as you copy correct you are 100% accurate.

Actually, what you quoted from my previous post was not about tones, but pronunciation issues. There are some consonants in Mandarin that simply don't exist in English (the retroflexed i, r, sh, zh). And, like I wrote earlier, there are also some pairs of consonants that sound the same to an English-speaker's ear, but are actually different sounds in Mandarin (zh/j, q/ch, and x/sh).

It becomes difficult to distinguish these sounds when you don't hear them in your native language and you never say them. A child can hear these and imitate them, but an adult has more difficulty because he hears a foreign language through a "filter" of his own language. After some explanation and training, it's possible for him to differentiate between the sounds and to produce them on his own, but it would be very difficult to just get it right by listening only.

Sure, if you can copy 100% correctly, no problem, but I have a very hard time believing anyone can do that without studying it. I have a highly trained ear as a professional composer and music studio engineer, and can hear things in music that 99.9% of the population never could (my success depends on it), and I had trouble hearing the difference between these sounds until I used the FSI Pronunciation and Romanization Module. And it's precisely because I had no exposure to these sounds and that I was hearing through an American "filter" that I had these problems, and I really believe that no amount of listening to dialogue would have fixed this. But within a few days of spending one hour per day on the FSI P&R Module, I had no trouble at all with pronunciation, tones, transcribing pinyin, or anything related.

Back to my original point: I'm sure that you can learn Chinese to a high level without studying pinyin, tones, proper pronunciation, or any of that. I never argued against that, though you and bomaci seem to be trying very hard to convince me of it. My argument is that it's not a good idea, considering the bang for the buck you get from studying it. It just doesn't seem to be a smart way to go about it. And, boring or not, it's only a few hours, and the payoff is more than worth a little boredom.

So, if you can explain to me why it makes more sense not to study it, please do. I'll admit I was wrong. But don't just tell me that it's possible, or that some people have done it. That's irrelevant. Reportedly, Stan Getz couldn't read music, but that doesn't mean I'm going to tell every kid that picks up a sax that they shouldn't bother learning to read music. Listening is extremely important in jazz and language, and I'm not discounting that, but it isn't the be all and end all. Studying stuff on paper builds skill and knowledge that will help tremendously when it comes to actually producing sound.

[bomaci]

And it's precisely because I had no exposure to these sounds and that I was hearing through an American "filter" that I had these problems, and I really believe that no amount of listening to dialogue would have fixed this. But within a few days of spending one hour per day on the FSI P&R Module, I had no trouble at all with pronunciation, tones, transcribing pinyin, or anything related.

I agree that for individual sounds you may need some training. However in my view just reading the pinyin saying that 中 is prounounced zhong does not help in my view. You need to read explanations on how the sounds are formed in order to get them right. However individual sounds are not really that important in my view. For tonal languages getting the intonation right is much more crucial, and for learning that nothing helps but listening and repeating a lot of sentences. The reason why I dont like tone marks is that I feel they interfer with what you are hearing. In my view, it is much easier to learn a cantonese sentence by listening to it and imitating it rather than analyzing the tones in it and worrying that you are getting the tones right on every syllable.

[flameproof]

You need to read explanations on how the sounds are formed in order to get them right.

I would say you have to hear them. And for some sounds, which you don't have in your native language, it's not a bad idea to look up how they are formed, in case you struggle. For example, English natives often have a problem with the U sound in "女", or the throatish H, like in 很. So were you struggle depends really where you come from.

For the perfection, just keep in mind they most Mandarin speakers are not native speakers themselfs and also may speak them poorly. That's not an excuse not to learn them well, but you won't get beaten, or even get "The Look" if you don't get them out perfect.

Everybody learns of course individually, for me tone learning out of context would be too abstract and I wouldn't remember it anyway. So I just listen and copy the melody of the sentence.

But it's also up to what you like to learn. Learning must be fun, so just do the fun parts that you really want to do. With fun you learn 3 times the speed. Without the fun you probably learn never.

Another point, I never think Mandarin is "difficult". Maybe some parts are. But I still prefer to think "I can do it". Once you think it's "difficult" you have your first internal brain block excuse not to progress, because it's soooo difficult.