Trouble Remembering Tones, How To Overcome?!?

[hongputaojiu]

Hi everyone

I'm in my 4th semester of chinese at university. I have previously lived in China for a couple of years, although I'm not there at the moment. My teachers/tutors tell me that my pronunciation is pretty good, but when it comes time to write the correct tone on pinyin in class and exams I often get it wrong.

It seems weird that I can use the characters at least at my level of upper elementary/low intermediate in speaking situations, but not remember them when thinking about how they sound in my head, or hearing myself aloud. Am I tone deaf?!?

Any suggestions on how to overcome this?

thanks 红葡萄酒

[fengyixiao]

Even a native speaker can't always remember tones.

[Scoobyqueen]

How about asking a native which percentage of tones you get right. That should give you a good indication of your tone understanding. Pronounciation is one thing and tones is another. Maybe your teachers mean you pronounce well but dont get the tones quite right.

[anonymoose]

I think in the end it just comes down to memorising, by rote if necessary. If you have much opportunity to speak in Chinese, obviously that will help, as you will be able to consolidate it in your mind. But unfortunately I don't think there are any shortcuts to remembering the tones.

[edelweis]

I am not sure whether this will make any sense, anyway...

during ear training (for music), at first you can't distinguish the various intervals, even though you can reproduce them (sing back the melody). It requires training to be able to recognize that this interval is a 2nd and that interval is a 5th.

At first you have to sing the intervals out loud and continue with a song you know that starts with that interval (a classical example for French music students is that, if after singing the interval you can continue with the tune of the national anthem, then you know it's a rising 4th).

Later, you learn to "sing" silently (in your head) and recognize the "song you know" silently.

A last step (which I never reached :rolleyes: ) is supposedly to be able to bypass remembering the song's name and get straight to the interval's name.

If your pronunciation is good, let's assume you can reproduce the tone correctly.

I think you could attempt to select a few words that have typical associations of tones, say

1＋1 ＝ 今天

2＋1 ＝ 明天

etc.

Memorize the tone marks for those reference words.

Then drill yourself with flashcards containing the words you're expected to be able to write pinyin for. Read the characters aloud, remember a reference word which sounds like this word, deduce the tones, check the answer.

In a 2nd step try to do that silently.

Also you could try getting your hands on some basic pinyin material (most beginner textbooks have some, FSI etc) and take pinyin dictation.

[Erbse]

Read a lot of text loud. Every time you aren't 100% sure about the tone, check the dictionary.

I do it this way. I don't remember 有 is 3rd tone. Instead I remember how 有 sounds, and if someone asks, I mumble the word to myself and then realize, oh it's 3rd tone.

[hongputaojiu]

thanks guys for your replies.

as I thought it is mostly memorisation required. I do try to repeat it aloud and listen to myself.

I did a self test just before my last exam focusing on this skill, as 5% of the test was marking the correct tone on a passage. I found that I scored 65% correctly, but my average across the course covering all aspects of the language is 87%. Most errors were second and fourth tone. I don't know if that means anything or not.

thanks again and best of luck with your studies too!

cheers

红葡萄酒

[Glenn]

This isn't an issue where you write the pinyin with the tones you're hearing and not the actual tones, is it? In other words, are you accounting for tone sandhi when you take dictation and write a 3 as a 2 because it sounds like that in speech, or write yídìng instead of yīdìng (一定), for example? Or is this just a case of not knowing what the tone is supposed to be in the first place?

[XiaoXi]

Well that's weird in too many ways. Personally I find the people that get tones on pinyin wrong the most in my class are the teachers. Moreover, why would you have exams for pinyin?! Pinyin has no use in the real world - and in my opinion no real use at all but that's another matter. Pinyin is an aid to learning if you need it but its certainly not something to learn and be graded on. That's a very odd school you go to.

Any suggestions on how to overcome this?

Yes, go to a different school.

[DrZero]

I would suspect that your overall command of tones is poor. I have quite often seen people who studied Chinese for several semesters at university come away with a decent vocabulary, but poor tones. It may be that they are not corrected enough.

I believe that if you had a good ear for the tones, and good pronunciation of them, you would not have problems writing the correct tone marks. I would be quite easy. It is for me. (I am not bragging. Just stating a fact.)

So I'd say, do more tone work overall.

[Hofmann]

I suspect a lot of this has to do with your mindset and how you learn characters and words. There are many students who approach them with the mindset "Tones are crazy details in a weird language which are so foreign to me that I'll never get them right." Closer to the actual situation is "Tones are just another property that differentiates utterances, just like vowels and consonants." And don't buy the can't-teach-an-old-dog-new-tricks bullshit. You don't have to have grown up using tones to differentiate utterances to learn how to do it. Also, when you learn the pronunciation of a character or word, you have to check if you know every aspect of it, that is for every syllable, know the initial, final, and tone. (Sometimes tones are considered part of the final but leave that for later.) If you have difficulty feeling the difference between certain tones, find a way to temporarily make them feel different. For example, move your hand according to the pitch of your voice, imagine how it looks in a spectrogram, and if diacritics in Pinyin is too subtle, learn a romanization system that uses letters to differentiate tones.

[XiaoXi]

Yes all good points. I think the problem is, and this is a problem a lot of people have with learning Chinese, is that they picture the pronunciation of the words and the tones of the words as two separate things. People criticise the Pimsleur method for having two much English and this is certainly true but other than that its a very good learning method....because there is no pinyin. You simply repeat what you hear so you naturally say the word with the tones and learn it that way all in one go. At the beginning of my learning of Chinese I began with Pimsleur just as many others have but went on to other methods afterwards that utilised pinyin. I found that the words I'd learnt with Pimsleur I could pronounce the tones correctly no problem and without even thinking...but words I'd learnt and imagine the pinyin for, I always had to think and often forget what the tone should be for which particular word.

The best method is always: read the characters while listening to a native voice speak the content. Or simply listen to a native speak Chinese and repeat. Don't think about tones, don't think about pinyin. This is exactly the reason natives have trouble with pinyin and tones with pinyin, is because they don't even think about pinyin when they speak or write. A very good reason you shouldn't either!

[Shi Tong]

I suggest that your first step in this is to check wheather or not you're pronoucing the tones correctly and in the right order. You can do this easily by either posting a "hum" of yourself on here (in the sample page on this forum), and say the tones in order and how you think they should sound (1,2,3,4) using any phonetic sound you like, and await comments from people (especially those of much "higher" level or native speakers). Or do the same thing with your Chinese teacher.

Ask them to be harsh, because you might be making a small mistake which is leading to a misunderstanding on your part between two (or more) of the tones.

They're really quite distinctive, so I dont think you should be thinking that two of them are "similar" excepting that the 3rd tone can sometimes have a similar "raise at the end" property to that of the 2nd tone.

From here you can do two things:

If you are pronouncing and know the difference well according to your sources, then you're probably making the mistakes when you're speaking too quickly or thinking about 2 or 3 zi words.. words like 没关系 (méi​guān​xi) can be misleading, because, for example, in Taiwan and from Taiwanese teachers, I'm sure they pronounce 系 as xī​.. and according to everything I can see on an online dictionary it's either light tone or 4th.. so this makes "no sense", but I would always say that it's xī.

There are more examples (可以 kě​yǐ).. that I always hear as (可以 kě​yì​).

If you're not pronouncing these tones correctly, or you cant get the order right/ you cant remember which tonal sound relates to which "number", ​then you need practice in other ways.

One way I found good was to choose a sound "a" or "pi".. anything really, then pronouncing these sounds in tonal order-- so saying "pi1pi2pi3pi4" to yourself and then repeating this millions of times. Then you need to apply these tones (remembering which sound goes with which number) to the words you know, making sure that you pronounce these always with the tones as you go.

But first step first I think-- and see if you're "doing it right", then tackle things accordingly.

[Sarevok]

I sometimes have trouble remembering the tones for characters/words that are not used that often... today I encountered the word 遥控 after some time and found myself thinking "Was it yàokòng or yáokòng?" Perhaps this has to do with my not using Chinese in my everyday life during the last two years (since I left China in summer 2008), as 遥控 could be still considered quite frequent, it's not some obscure place-name or such. But then again, I haven't had any such problems with 遥远 and always pronounce it correctly as yáoyuǎn. This may sound kind of weird, but it seems that botched it right in the learning process when encountering that particular word for the first time. Those incorrect tones just stuck in my head and it is difficult for me to re-learn them. Well, it doesn't happen that often, but still...

[Shi Tong]

I know what you mean Sarevok, and this is why I think it's so important to learn Chinese characters along with the spoken language. I only realised the other day that huida (reply) was 回答 huí​dá and not 回打 huídǎ​, because I had always assumed (for some reason) that 回打 meant that you were writing back to someone (replying) and 在打字.. illogical, but it made sense to me for many years!! ;)

If you can remember that one of the characters in a two character word (like 遥控 and 遥远) use the same character (遥) then you can have a much better chance of remembering the tone, and I often learn these words in sequence on purpose (不得了 bù​dé​liǎo, 觉得 jué​de, 感觉 gǎn​jué, 情感 qíng​gǎn) to give me an anchoring feeling on the tone and the pronunciation of the character I'm trying to learn anew.

[renzhe]

Remembering the correct characters will indeed help you remember the right tone, but ultimately, it's a memory aid.

In my experience, the tones won't come naturally until you've spoken the word many times and heard it even more often, until it is burnt into your memory. Ultimately, it's a facet of the spoken language and needs to be spoken. Lots of listening (like TV shows) and talking with someone who will correct you will help. Recording yourself reading a passage and comparing to a native speaker is also really helpful.

What you are aiming at is speaking the words naturally, with the correct tones, without having to think about the characters or pinyin tone marks. And this comes with practice and experience and paying attention over a longer period of time. I have found that my tones are best with words where I don't have to remember the characters or tone marks, but I simply hear them in my mind, and this takes exposure and use.

In the meantime, make sure that you can hear and pronounce tones in isolation and in words, make sure to pronounce a new word a few times (correctly) when you encounter it, make sure to try to use correct tones when you speak (as far as possible, it will take a while before your tones are perfect).

[Sarevok]

<rant>

Remembering the correct characters will indeed help you remember the right tone...

That is generally true, but sadly, not always so. In some cases, like certain words containing 答，转，要 etc., the characters can be a hindrance if you doesn't have a really thorough knowledge of them, i.e. knowledge of all their possible readings and corresponding meanings. 破音字 be damned... eternally But I suppose that would cause this blasted language to lose some of its fun

...and this takes exposure and use.

Which is exactly what I was lacking during past two years, even though I try to listen to something Chinese (Chinesepod, Deutshce Welle, TV Shows...) all the time. Passive listening (exposure) is only one part of the process, it takes frequent active IRL usage to thoroughly internalize the vocab.

I hope to rectify some of these issues during my stay in Tianjin next semester (I got the Confucius Institute Scholarship for one semester, but I will definitely try to prolong my stay there... hell, I　would even take an English teaching job if there were no other options).

</rant>

[Shi Tong]

Sarevok,

I think the quantity of 破音字 is very low though, especially when you're using a 破音字 for something you might want to say once a day, compared with the massive useage of the other tone used thousands of times a day (like 好 for example!)..

TV shows have their place, but I also think they can be over complicated and use too much coloquial stuff and/ or official which you would not be necessarily using every day.

If you're watching these programs, have you tried answering the people on the TV or getting into a conversation with them on your own? Sounds wierd (talking to the telly), but I do think this means you'd be vocalising your Chinese, which may be why you're having trouble.

[calibre2001]

To me tones are something you either get it or don't. Not getting it doesn't mean you'll never get it though. In fact it took me a few years to finally 'get it'. I remember the teacher teaching me ma1,ma2,ma3,ma4 like she would a kid. It was really strange for me and I felt like I was talking donkey. I never got it (and still don't!). It was only years later when I had chinese friends when I began to understand how the tones sounded like in real life. I couldn't mimic it at first but I could hear it. Finally with practice could I finally mimic it to a reasonable degree. So I think real life exposure with a keen ear and work is crucial for getting tones right.

[Shi Tong]

calibre.. I remember my wife telling me her name *at the time she was my girlfriend* and she kept telling me it was "Chén​shī​qí​".. to which I replied.. "oh.. Chén​shī​qǐ​".. after many screamings of "no it's Chén​shī​qí" and an explaintion that if I pronounce the last name as qǐ it was "wrong"..

That's when I got it, and I went from there. It was the first thing I learned.

So I agree with you.. a lot of hard work to an ear which didn't hear it "first time" will definately get you there, and tones are learnable.. I was just lucky to have that "instant" (10 minute) recognition of the principle!