q after ch comes out like j

[Meng Lelan]

This has me absolutely baffled so I wonder if any of you pronunciation purists can help. A Chinese teacher is having trouble with an American student who says "出去“

wrong, it comes out more like 出句. Not sure how to help here. Advice anyone?

[roddy]

Assuming he can get the 去 correct in isolation, have him slow down and leave a gap between the two so he's got time to get it right. Then gradually speed it up until he gets it wrong, slow it down back to a level he can handle, then have another shot. Repeat this until he can do it properly, or goes off to study Spanish instead.

For extra value, have him push toy trains around as he does this.

[Meng Lelan]

But this isn't a preschool class.

Oh， and the Chinese teacher says the "u" is bad too, the 去 sounds like the English word "chew". I'm not sure how this should be corrected.

[anonymoose]

So if 去 sounds like "chew", where does the j come in?

In my personal opinion (and I'm sure others will disagree), if he can get the "u" sound correct on both chu and qu, then he can just pronounce ch and q the same, and it won't be too serious an error.

Or tell him to learn Spanish instead.

[Don_Horhe]

I agree with anonymoose - get him to pronounce and distinguish u/ü correctly and it will make it a whole lot easier for him, since pinyin /q/ is often regarded as an allophone of /ch/ when followed by front vowels.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~duanmu/ELL05.pdf

[Meng Lelan]

So if 去 sounds like "chew", where does the j come in?

That's the same thing I was thinking. That was where I got lost and came here to post this question... I said to the Chinese teacher (actually a language exchange partner of the student he's teaching, I'm sure he doesn't have any teacher training), that the 去 ought to come out sounding like "chew". And he very much disagreed with me, saying it shouldn't sound like "chew". So that was when I became confused. Was I wrong to say that it sounds like the English "chew"? Also - producing the the Chinese "q", the tongue lies on the floor of the mouth right behind the lower teeth - is that correct? Also I was wondering if the student in question would benefit from software like AI Chinese or is there anything on the web that can compare his pronunciation of “出去” with the standard pronunciation?

[xiaocai]

Probably what he meant was they sound similar to each other but not the same.

[ironlady]

Okay, here's how to actually fix the problem.

q and j are the same sound, with only one difference: voicing. (Well, technically in Chinese it is not a voicing difference, it's an aspiration difference, but for the purposes of most Western students, varying the voicing makes the sounds close enough to pass.)

Voicing means that the vocal cords are vibrating while the sound is being pronounced. Say "bat" and "pat" with your fingers on your throat -- you should feel that the "rumbling" of your vocal cords starts during the "b" sound in "bat", but not during the "p" sound in "pat". The relationship between "b" and "p" is the same one (for this discussion, as stated above) as that between "j" and "q".

All vowels in English and Chinese are voiced. So it's natural that when you have to pronounce an unvoiced segment between several voiced ones, the voiced-ness can "rub off" (sort of like 'an object in motion tends to remain in motion' for the mouth). So the easy fix for the 'q' sound is to tell the student to use a puff of air with it (aspiration). The reason is that concentrating on that puff of air will automatically give him a separation between the segments, so that the voicing chain will be broken naturally.

Oh, and if he's American and knows the old "Chia Pet" commercials, singing "chi-chi-chi-Chia" doesn't hurt, either. :rolleyes:

The vowel in "qu" does not exist in English, but we have a vowel that is just like it except for one feature: roundedness. Vowels are classified according to height, frontness and roundness. The vowel "i" in English (phonetically speaking: the vowel in the word "beet") is a high, front, unrounded vowel (try it: feel how high your tongue is in your mouth compared to, say, "bet"). The sound we're looking for in "qu" is a high, front, rounded vowel. So it's easy to teach this separately by telling the student to say "eeeeeeeeeee" and then round his lips as though he's saying "oooooooo" as in "soon" -- but without moving anything else in his mouth.

[Hofmann]

While that might work for 出去, I prefer not to tell them something I/they will have to fix later, like voicing. They might say "but my teacher said there are voiced obstruents (or something to that effect)" and someone will have to tell them their teacher was wrong.

[ironlady]

Well, accuracy is a good thing, but I think that for classroom teaching, it can be taken too far. And even uttering the words "voiced obstruents" in an ordinary Chinese class should be a crime punishable by something terrible.

99.999% of Chinese learners will never care, or need to care, whether consonants are in fact voiced or actually aspirated. When you get that one Future Language Teacher of America, s/he will deal with it just as we did back in the day when they told us how photosynthesis worked in 9th grade, then "took it back" and made it more complicated in 11th grade.

If you were teaching Minnan, which has a four-way distinction in consonants (ph/p/b/m) you might have to get into it. But not for Mandarin. It just doesn't matter, in practical terms. Yes, I'm a linguist, but I'm a teacher when I'm teaching Chinese, not primarily a linguist. I believe that my job is to use linguistics in practical ways to help my students develop proficiency, not to teach them linguistics.

The point of language teaching is to enable students to pronounce the language accurately and make themselves understood while understanding others. It is not to teach linguistics. Most people don't know or care about linguistics, but they do use language competently.

[Meng Lelan]

Ok ironlady's post (the first one) helped. Now I want to know the difference between ch and q. I got my NPCR book and read off the definitions of ch and q to the Chinese teacher/language partner of the student in question, and he said the NPCR explanation of the difference between ch and q was wrong. He said that tongue placement had nothing to do with the difference between ch and q. Anyone help me out here please?

[Hofmann]

ironlady,

Most of the students I've had contact with (although they're university students) care about the difference between voicing and aspiration.

Meng Lelan,

The difference between "ch" and "q" is the place of articulation (and in this case, tongue placement). In ch, it is pulled back so that the tip is about 1/3 of the way back on the hard palate. In q, the middle of the tongue is pushed up behind the alveolar ridge and against the hard palate.

[Don_Horhe]

Take a look at zh/ch and j/q. There's a more user-friendly explanation here.

[Meng Lelan]

Oh, now I remember that user-friendly site on Sinosplice....thanks to all who helped here.

[roddy]

Invite your friend and her student to join us!

[ironlady]

Q is the "happy ch". Have the student give a horrible, wide, grimacing smile and it will come out.

CH is the sad (solemn, serious, whatever) ch. It is pronounced by swallowing the tongue while saying "ch". This prompt will get 95% of students to pronounce it correctly; the other 5% need to see a diagram of the sagittal section and how the tongue tip curls back and all that.

[Meng Lelan]

Invite your friend and her student to join us!

Friend? Hardly, not the way he went crazy over my repeatedly failed attempts to diagnose the speech problem in his student. I'm just going to send him what tips we came up here and then take him off my Skype.

It is pronounced by swallowing the tongue while saying "ch".

You know what, I tried doing that and practically choked myself. If Chinese phonetics sends anyone off to Babaoshan it's probably going to be me.

[Hofmann]

You know what, I tried doing that and practically choked myself.

That's why I don't like the diagrams that show what retroflex consonants supposedly feel like. I don't think it's better than just drawing the diagrams accurately.

[ThePeaMonster]

q and j are the same sound, with only one difference: voicing. (Well, technically in Chinese it is not a voicing difference, it's an aspiration difference, but for the purposes of most Western students, varying the voicing makes the sounds close enough to pass.)

This is completely wrong. First, they're equivalent in English and few other Germanic languages. In most European languages it's not the case.

Second, the difference is important even for English speaking students, because not all voiceless sounds in English are aspirated. Many people keep them aspirated only in stressed syllables, so for example the second P in "paper" is NOT aspirated. That is the cause of the problem with "出去“.