Help! Pronunciation "coaching" with non-teacher.

[shibole]

My wife, who is a native Mandarin speaker but not a language teacher, is trying to help me to learn better pronunciation. We are making some progress (I think I can finally pronounce ü now) but the problem is that when I don't pronounce something properly she often seems to have no idea how to give me advice on how to do it correctly.

I'm using the Integrated Chinese textbook and the descriptions of how to make each sound are somewhat helpful but a bit too technical with all the phonetic jargon. I find the Wikipedia pinyin article to be somewhat helpful, and I also find that using one of those flash applets that plays sounds for all the possible sylables in pinyin to be helpful.

Still I wonder if there is anything my wife could read about how to teach English speakers how to pronounce Mandarin sounds. Does anyone know any web pages on the subject? It's OK or maybe preferable if the pages are in Chinese as that's her native language.

Also, is it important to pronounce everything exactly right from the beginning or is it OK to have sucky pronunciation for a while and get better at it later?

Thanks

[sthubbar]

This is a good question. My opinion is that I'm a huge fan of the Pimsleur method. If a person wants to pronounce a language well, I would highly discourage them from using written material to start. The reason is that our eyes have been programmed for over 20 years to pronounce these symbols in our native language sounds. Now we are being asked to associate new sounds to the same symbols and I think the challenge is too hard.

I recommend what Pimsleur does. They give you a sound for your ears to hear and then you do your best to replicate the sound. You also use your ears to judge wether the sound coming from your mouth sounds similar to the first sound you heard. Only after achieve a basic conversational level in a language should a person then try to associate written symbols to those sounds. [bTW, this is the way all of us learned our mother tongue.]

As a final note, we all have accents. What is important to me is whether my accent is understandable or not. Most of the time it is, other times it is not. It is only on the times that I'm not understood that I worry about my pronunciation.

Just my opinion.

[cdn_in_bj]

Is she coaching you just by telling you what sounds right or not, or is she also showing you how those sounds are formed? For instance, where should your tongue be when saying "chi" vs "ci"? This is so natural to her that she doesn't think about it, and might not realize that it could be the root cause of your difficulties. We western speakers are just not used to forming some of these sounds, and need to teach our tongues new tricks. It's the same reason why many native Chinese speakers have trouble with the "r" sound in English. Anyways, I suggest you try this approach with her, if you haven't already.

Also, is it important to pronounce everything exactly right from the beginning or is it OK to have sucky pronunciation for a while and get better at it later?

I don't think you can expect to have perfect pronounciation from the start. Improvement comes naturally with practise. As long as your wife can understand what you're saying, I wouldn't worry too much. And even when you reach the point where you may think that your pronounciation is dead-on, there will probably still be some subtle differences (subtle to you that is) which in fact make a big difference to a native speaker.

[roddy]

No need to get everything perfect right at the start, but I do strongly recommend that you make sure you are aware of what your problems are and keep working on fixing them. Otherwise they become habits, and then you are in all sorts of trouble

[Lugubert]

One East-West problem is that many native speakers of Chinese just can't understand the concept of consonants vs. vowels, but keep thinking in syllables only. When I asked some Chinese to explain which speakers distinguish between the a vowels in 盘 pán vs. their to me much more closed [æ] than their extremely open [a] in 旁 páng, one didn't understand my question at all, and another one told me that "pan and pang are different (words/syllables), you can't compare them." I have had such a comment from a native speaker of Chinese who had even studied languages in Europe.

[mirgcire]

Yes, there is at least one web site that discusses this issue: www.sinosplice.com. As you mentioned, the hanyu pinyin wikipedia site also has good information on pronunciation. For practice you might want to try www.pinyinpractice.com.

There are some very specific positions that your mouth needs to form in order to make proper mandarin sounds. In fact, unless you pay attention to this, your mandarin will be confusing (at best) to native speakers.

For example to make the ü sound, start by the ee sound (rhymes with bee), then protrude your lips. The tonge position for ü is the same as ee, but the lip position is different. This is even more fun when you say words spelled xue. The lips start protruded and get stretched back into a smile.

BTW, most words with this sound do not have the two little dots. Only lü and nü have the dots, but all words starting with yu, xu, qu, ju are also pronounced with the same vowel sound.

The most difficult sounds for the mandarin learner are zh, ch, sh, z, c, s, j, q, x and r. For zh, ch, sh and r, the sound is made between the tip of the tongue and the roof of the mouth. For j, q, and x, the sound is made between the aveolar ridge and the surface of the tongue. The aveolar ridge are those little bumps right above the teeth. You can get feel for the difference is by comparing the english words "shirt" and "sheet", but the tongue is farther back with the mandarin sh, and more forward with the mandarin x.

I guess the point I am trying to illustrate is that mandarin speakers have no idea about this. They learned at such an early age that it would not have been helpful anyway. It really takes a lot of attention to understand the relationship between the shape of your mouth and the sound it makes. This is what speech therapists get paid big bucks for. To better understand how difficult it is try explaining to a mandarin speaker how to pronounce "usually".

[shibole]

Thanks for all the advice so far!

If a person wants to pronounce a language well, I would highly discourage them from using written material to start.

This seems to go against the whole integrated language learning approach though, or am I wrong? I am using an integrated textbook and think this is the way to go.

As a final note, we all have accents. What is important to me is whether my accent is understandable or not. Most of the time it is, other times it is not. It is only on the times that I'm not understood that I worry about my pronunciation.

I still have some cases where I'm not understood. I have been trying to keep track of which sounds I have trouble with, but that does require that I write them down in pinyin.

Is she coaching you just by telling you what sounds right or not, or is she also showing you how those sounds are formed? For instance, where should your tongue be when saying "chi" vs "ci"?

She's sort of trying to show me, and I'm also trying to read written descriptions in the textbook on how sounds are formed, but it's kind of difficult for her to show me. A guess an x-ray machine would come in handy here....

make sure you are aware of what your problems are and keep working on fixing them. Otherwise they become habits, and then you are in all sorts of trouble

That's what I'm worried about, basically.

One East-West problem is that many native speakers of Chinese just can't understand the concept of consonants vs. vowels, but keep thinking in syllables only.

Actually I've noticed this already. I'd say that it extends to tone as well. Sometimes I say something wrong like "míng" but she can't tell if I'm getting the consonant, vowel, or tone wrong. In some cases she first says it's the vowel, then says it's the tone. Also, with these compound vowels it often sounds like more than one sylable to me, and then I end up trying to speak it in a way that sounds like two sylables to her even if I'm sure I'm sluring the vowels together.

Maybe I should try to practice pronunciation for a while without looking at any pinyin just to make sure that isn't causing confusion, but I need to be able to read how to pronounce characters that I look up in the dictionary....

[roddy]

I would ignore advice to avoid written material (ie pinyin in this case). Yes, you do need to learn to associate old letters with new sounds, but that's a very minor issue compared to getting your ears to hear those new sounds and your tongue and associated paraphernalia to make them. Obviously don't go around pronouncing x as ecks though. Learn the rules of pinyin pronunciation and that's a tool that will stand you in good stead.

I also suspect that new learners who don't use pinyin are going to have issues distinguishing sounds and get themselves in an almighty mess if they don't have a teacher sitting on top of them every time they open their mouths. There's a stage where you can't distinguish new sounds, as we tend to funnel them into the sounds we already know - that's when you need something written down to show you that even if you can't hear it, they're different.

As for something practical for you and your wife to do - download Audacity or a similar tool and spend some time recording yourself and your wife saying a few syllables and compare them. Model yourself on your wife and see how close you can get, and if there's a problem you can break the syllable down and see where the problem is.

Textbooks - the only one I can personally recommend is this one, which you'd probably need to order from China. Plus points is that it goes through basic pronunciation step by step, then tone patterns, then onto intonation, sentence stress, etc, and there are clear explanations of what your tongue, etc, should be doing at each point. Minuses are that it's all in Chinese, so perhaps more useful for your wife than yourself at the moment, and the tapes aren't great quality. It was recommended two years ago on here by Carlo, and I haven't seen anything better yet - but that said I haven't looked.

I think maybe hoping your wife will be able to tell you what you are doing wrong is a bit ambitious. It's hard enough for an untrained native speaker to explain how to make the right sounds. Being able to hear what is going wrong is a whole different level of expertise, and the only people I've met able to do it even on a simple level have had proper linguistics training. That said, if you can find someone who can do it it's fantastic - one teacher I'm working with at the moment seems to have a better idea of what my tongue is up to than I do.

[cdn_in_bj]

Yes, there is at least one web site that discusses this issue: www.sinosplice.com

Was the guy who runs that site (John) on TV a week ago? I'm pretty sure I saw him doing some sort of English/Chinese "rap" about "the Jing" (Beijing). It was so cheesy that I had to change the channel. But I must admit that his spoken Mandarin is really good.

[Lu]

Perhaps you could try and hire a teacher/tutor for a while, to set your pronounciation straight. Like some other posters noted, it's really hard to explain how you pronounce your native language, you just do it. TxFL teachers are trained to teach people their native language. Spouses are good for practicing your language, but not necessarity good teachers.

Good luck!

[gato]

Recording your wife and yourself and comparing the two seem the easiest option short of hiring a professional language teacher.

[bomaci]

A trick which might help with tricky vowel sounds is to have your wife whisper them to you.

For instance have her wishper "shi zhi chi" (湿知吃). You will find that vowels when whispered get different pitches so you will hear a sort of whispered melody which you should then try to imitate. For the ü sound you could for instance let her whisper "qi1 qu1 ji1 ju1 (七区鸡居)

This should allow you to hear the changes in pitch between "qi" and "qu" and imitate them.

Once you can whisper the vowels at the same pitches as your wife just turn on the "voice box" and see what happens. An even better idea is of course if your wife can record these things for you so you can practice them on your own.

[bomaci]

I don't think you can expect to have perfect pronounciation from the start. Improvement comes naturally with practise. As long as your wife can understand what you're saying, I wouldn't worry too much.

Just because your wife understands you doesn't mean that everyone else will! If you speak to someone everyday you get used to their accent and pronouciation quirks and thus your wife will have a much easier time understanding you than a native speaker who is not used to your accent. My view is that you should try as much as you possibly can to perfect your pronunciation on your own. You have to train your ears to hear what sounds right and what sounds wrong. Apart from the tips I gave above you can also let your wife record sentences for you which you can then chorus. Of course you could try chorusing live with your wife as well (I.e let her say a sentence over and over while you speak along with her, trying to match her speech rhythm excactly) but this can be pretty tiring for her and your bound to stop before having reached optimal results. Have your wife record 20-30 sentences for you (at natural speed!) and chorus these until you can say them excactly like your wife. Having done that you will find that you will find that listening to chinese will be much easier, and you will find it easier to imitate new words as well.

[shibole]

Wow, I've gotten more and better advice than I could have originally hoped for. Thanks everyone!

[shibole]

Following up on the suggestions to download Audacity and use it to check my pronunciation, I figured that someone had to have a tool more specifically intended for this kind of thing. I did a bit of searching around and found this:

http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=57

Unfortunately: "The Speech Analyzer download is temporarily unavailable while we correct a serious bug in the installer. Please check back later."

Doh!

Sucks that I just found this and it isn't there.

Anyone know if it's any good?

[shibole]

Another program I have found to be quite helpful: http://www.speakgoodchinese.org/

Not sure how I missed this on the wiki until recently.

[shibole]

That program will plot a little graph showing your tone. If you're already a master of tone it probably won't be that helpful, but it's much better than using the tone analysis stuff in Audacity, for example, because "Speak Good Chinese" actually isolates/recognizes the sylable and can analyze the tone based on that. So it isn't "generic" audio tone analysis but a smart sort of tone analysis that can actually plot a line based on tone (assuming you pronounce the specified word correctly).

The fact that you need to pronounce the sylable somewhat correctly also means that if it isn't working correctly you might want to check your pronunciation of that sound. Of course sometimes it seems to work poorly and people tell me that I am pronouncing the sylable pretty well, so it isn't perfect.

I have this tendency to make the 2nd tone sound almost like a 3rd tone, and it has helped me correct that. I also have tone problems with certain sounds like "yue" that I just don't pronounce well period.

On a related note the speech anaylzer link now says "During recent testing we have discovered an incompatibility between a component of Speech Analyzer and a component of FieldWorks. We are temporarily making the download of Speech Analyzer unavailable until we have a new version that corrects this problem. Please check back later." so I guess they're working on it. I wish they'd just let me download the thing since I don't use FieldWorks or know what it is....

[imron]

We are temporarily making the download of Speech Analyzer unavailable until we have a new version that corrects this problem. Please check back later."

Don't know if it's any help, but a little bit further down the page, it mentions:

An older, non-Unicode version of Speech Analyzer (version 2.7) is bundled with Speech Tools 2.2

[marcusat]

i think the best way that works for me is to always get the frustrated teacher to not just bark the correct answer, but first say

"the is what you sound like XXX, and this is how it should sound XXX"

that way you can compare the wrong with the right directly, because sometimes you think your doing it exactly the same, but to the native ear it sounds wrong. good luck

[shibole]

Thanks! We'll try that.