The tones: only rythms and slightly different vocals?

[lockdoc]

Hi everybody,

I always find it very hard for the tones, now I might have discovered something for myself which I want to ask you if it is this way?

Tones:

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When I often hear words with more syllabus I get the feeling that all the chinese people do while pronouncing them is to have a certain rythm.

Now this is really hard to explain now without actually "speaking" to you.

Tone-3 followed by Tone-1:

This combination seems to have 3 parts:

1.) getting into pretty slow

2.) jumping out real fast

3.) then having a long constant flow (for the Tone-1)

Just like the english word "exegurate"

The "ex"-part presents the Tone-3 and the followed "e" would be Tone-1 (neglecting the "-gurate" Part)

Another explanation would be. Imagine you have a whip in your right hand, when you want to strike the whip,

you go move your hand slowly towards to your body and then strike forward really fast.

For 紧张 it would be 紧 moving towards your Body and then 张 striking out.

Ok please try to understand how I mean this and let me know If you can. I am trying to not to have to think about the tones as "tones" but as rythms, which would make it much more easy.

Vocals:

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The second observation I made is that depending on the tones, that one word like "zhong" has different versions of the "o" sound depending on the tone.

the 中 zhōng seems to have the sound of the german u in (ungern) - sorry I really do not find an english example.

Whereas the the 看中 kànzhòng the "zhong" part is more like "Bong" (the thing where you smoke with - sorry as well here, could not find a better example)

Vocals T-initials:

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If a word starts with a "T" and has a second tone, they sort of speak it as "TR" like in 疼

Can you state this as a general rule?

So I hope somebody can understand what i am talking about.

If not please let me know and i try to find other examples or draw pictures or something else.

best wishes

潘图

Update 1: I attached a wav for the zhong sound

Update 2: I attached a wav for the tang (trang) sound

Update 3: I attached a wav for the jiezhang

zhong.wav

tang (tr-sound).wav

jiezhang_exegurate.wav

[Hofmann]

Recordings would help.

[abcdefg]

I always find it very hard for the tones, now I might have discovered something for myself which I want to ask you if it is this way?

I'm not entirely sure, but what you may have just discovered is that producing understandable speech is a "package deal" -- it's more than just mechanically stringing together a bunch of words that have the correct tones.

Inflection and intonation count for a lot as does the rhythm of the utterance, what parts you say slowly and what parts you rush, where you pause for breath, what parts you say louder and what parts you say in a softer voice.