Do not ever ignore tones!

[imron]

I have thought (or maybe I've appropriated someone else's thought) that for native English speakers at least, putting tonal information into the 'normal' flow of romanization rather than sitting on the top like an optional hat would be beneficial.

Gwoyeu Romatzyh tries that. It's an interesting concept but I think pinyin has too much momentum going for it to change.

[pancake]

...then messed with the recording to make sure there were no tones left. He then asked some other native speakers to listen to the recording. Their comments were, apparently, that "it sounded as if the speaker was seriously ill". Other than that, they understood this article about a rather arcane subject perfectly.

Interesting! I have a similar observation: I once overheard a guy without vocal cords (I'm guessing because of a cancer operation) speak Chinese, and his buddy could understand him perfectly, from what I could tell. It did sound as "if the speaker was seriously ill" since, indeed, he was.

EDIT: And to add a bit to the debate, I think speakers of non-tonal languages would have trouble with the tones irrespective of the romanisation system used. Wikipedia references as study wherein it's claimed that Gwoyeu Romatzyh did not impart any additional tonal accuracy for students. Why should it, it's all just notation? I think the system of diacritics at least has a nice logic to it. And, in my humble opinion, G-R is offensively ugly.

Edited February 14, 2010 at 10:32 AM by pancake

[chrix]

Well, GR has a nice logic to it too.....

[renzhe]

I am convinced that speakers of non-tonal languages have a harder time mastering the concept of tones. And this is not intentional or by choice.

I think that our brains are conditioned to use tonal information as context, not as semantically meaningful. Because of this, we hear tones, and immediately forget them as soon as we manage to or fail to get context out of it. It takes lots of training and exposure to get this right.

If you let me listen to a Chinese sentence and ask me to repeat it immediately, I'm pretty sure I'd get most of the initials and finals right, but I'd mess up half the tones. The tones I'd get right would be the ones where I really know the words well. I simply don't remember which tone I've just heard one second after I hear it. It's gone. It's getting better with time and practice, but this is one major battlefield when it comes to learning Chinese.

So, while there is the rather annoying "tones are not importan" language-learning brigade, most people are perfectly aware of the importance of tones, but find it very hard. Like Chinese people find Russian declensions hard, although everyone knows that they are important.

As for the importance of tones for understanding, they are very important, often just as important as initials and finals. I've lost count of how many times I've heard a word on TV or in a movie and I wasn't sure whether it was "jiao", "qiao" or "xiao". Try it sometimes -- when you don't understand a word, try to look it up phonetically, just using the pinyin. It can be very hard, since spoken language is not perfectly sounded. This is where tones play a huge role. This is also why Chinese is so resillient when it comes to merging initials and dropping half of the finals and all other accents people have.

[renzhe]

And of course people use wrong tones with foreign languages all the time.

Here is an interview with Ana Ivanovic (the tennis star): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkBT1-ldmGw

Her English is good, but she speaks with a distinct Serbian melody that you could identify even if you didn't hear any other part of the accent. Serbian also has tones (pitch accent, actually).

It's not a huge problem when you do this with English, which is a stress-based language, but it can be a huge problem when you do this with a tonal language like Chinese. I just wanted to point out that transferring tones from your mother tongue to other languages is not something people do specifically because of disrespect for Chinese or anything.

[chrix]

That reminds me of Taiwanese people speaking Japanese with all the "tones" wrong (the Japanese pitch accent)

[pancake]

Well, GR has a nice logic to it too....

De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that, but I find the way GR encodes tonal information to be highly unintuitive and far from "nice". But your opinion has been noted.

[chrix]

Excuse me, we were not talking about tastes here, we were talking about logic (and if you had spent any time looking at the principles it's based on you'd see that the tonal information is encoded according to a number of principles). No reason to be condescending here...

[pancake]

Chrix: Since my words seem to have caused grave offense somehow, please allow me to elaborate on what I mean.

If someone played me the four tones, say, the 'a' final and then asked me to assign ā, á, ǎ or à according to the way that I thought makes most sense, I bet you dollars to doughnuts that I would make the same choices as the pinyin designers.

If someone, on the other hand, asked me to choose between a, wa, aa or whatever (haven't really researched GR to know the exact details:wink:) I am completely confident that my choices would be different from those of GR.

Therefore, to my mind, pinyin has a "nice" logic to it and GR does not. Note, however, that I have never said that GR lacks logic altogether. That's a strawman.

EDIT: Spelling mistake. Should learn to use preview.

EDIT2: Inserted missing word. Lesson from first edit not learned.

[chrix]

Let me help you out here:

De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that, but I find the way GR encodes tonal information to be highly unintuitive and far from "nice". But your opinion has been noted.

I've marked the condescending parts for you.

Well, for me it makes no sense to qualify "logic" with "nice", but if that's what you want to do, fine. As you said so beautifully in Latin, one can't argue about tastes...

[pancake]

Chrix: Now you are being condescending. Since I am completely uninterested in an Internet pissing match, and I have made the point I wanted to make, I will now exit.

[chrix]

As you sow, so shall you reap

[adrianlondon]

The tone of people's posts is also important. ;)

[Guest realmayo]

haha, a 虎虎 discussion.

It's so obvious to tell if somebody's tone is off by even a little and consequently whether they're a native speaker or not.

Sometimes I wonder if some people are saying tones are more important than anything else. I mean, plenty of, say, French people, speak English very well, but with a definite French accent, not least in being unable to pronounce "th" ... but they are 100% comprehensible, and basically fluent. So what if "then" sounds like "Zen"?

So are dodgy tones worse than a French accent? Would you really be misunderstood more by confusing tones than by an accent?

[chrix]

Well, if you mispronounce things, you can potentially confuse your listeners, especially if you merge things like "z" and "th". Anything that draws attention to the way you speak also distracts from what you have to say.

It also depends on how much listeners are used to foreign accents. It could be argued that Americans (at least from cities) might be more so than Chinese.

[renzhe]

Well, few people manage to learn a language so badly that their speech is totally incomprehensible.

On the other hand, few people ever manage to achieve a total native-speaker accent, at least the adult learners.

Most people are somewhere in between. And the less confusing your language is to a native speaker, the better you communication will be, the less stressful for all sides, and the more enjoyable your life will be.

So yeah, sure, you can learn Chinese while ignoring tones, characters, measure words (or erhua ) but then you might ask yourself if you're learning the right language. Learning Chinese without tones, characters or measure words is like playing football without a ball. Or a foot. Sort of like American football Yeah, that's what it's like.

OK, this wasn't my best post.

[chrix]

Except for the sacrilegious bit about American football, I totally agree.

Also, it might be hard to quantify what kind of accent/mistakes will be harder to understand, as this will depend on a lot of different factors, and also differ from one "native hearer" to the next...

[anonymoose]

Regarding tones, I think the difficulty of understanding depends on the way in which the tones are mispronounced.

As others have said, it is difficult for an adult learner to achieve absolutely native-like pronunciation, and will always carry an accent. This may mean that tones are not enunciated exactly in the same way that a native speaker would, but they are still clearly distinguishable as the four tones of Mandarin Chinese. In this instance, the speaker will clearly have an accent, but should still be fully understandable.

On the other hand, speakers who mix up tones, saying a fourth tone where there should be a first, for example, are likely to be understood with much more difficulty, because this will be confusing to the listener.

So my advice to learners would be, don't be overly concerned about achieving a perfect accent, but at least make sure you are clear about what the tone of each syllable should be. (In other words, don't just 乱说 tones.)

[taylor04]

Yes anonymoose, its quite interesting really. Even if the context is very very obvious, but I clearly pronounce the wrong tone, It will be more confusing than if I didn't pronounce a tone at all. Oh well though, I'm getting better

[wushijiao]

If you let me listen to a Chinese sentence and ask me to repeat it immediately, I'm pretty sure I'd get most of the initials and finals right, but I'd mess up half the tones. The tones I'd get right would be the ones where I really know the words well. I simply don't remember which tone I've just heard one second after I hear it. It's gone. It's getting better with time and practice, but this is one major battlefield when it comes to learning Chinese.

So, while there is the rather annoying "tones are not importan" language-learning brigade, most people are perfectly aware of the importance of tones, but find it very hard. Like Chinese people find Russian declensions hard, although everyone knows that they are important.

I think Renzhe's comments above are interesting. Specifically, I wonder to what extent time and exposure (input) are the main factors in foreigners getting good at tones. I've met quite a few people in the past year or two who have been speaking Chinese for well over a decade (or in some cases, 30+ years). Generally, their tones seem to be pretty good (although with mistakes, but rarely anything that would impede communication). On the other hand, when I was living in the Mainland, most foreigns that I knew made tons of tone errors, but most had only been speaking for a few months to a few years...and thus they were still at the stage in which they had "learned" lots of tones by supposedly trying to remember a word or character's tone value from reading it in a textbook or dictionary. So, I kind of wonder if tones are just one of those things that essentially requires many years of practice/input. Hard to say, I guess.