Lessons: Tone practice and theory

[Scoobyqueen]

Currently I am focusing on improving tones especially for speeches. I have a teacher and we go through political speeches reading each sentence and basically finding

[Gleaves]

I have found tone drills very useful. Some links - lingomi, sinosplice. I try to spend five minutes a day working on the different tone combinations.

[Scoobyqueen]

Thanks Gleaves for sharing your thoughts. .

[abcdefg]

Last year I helped a Chinese friend prepare for a university speech contest in English. Her English is good enough day to day, but she still got lost trying to do this project in an "oratory" style.

Being English, it was more a matter of phrasing and emphasis and where to pause than issues with actual tones of the syllables or words. Sometimes her statements sounded like questions and her questions sounded like statements, so there still was something of a "sentence tone" problem.

I tried to find some simple examples of English oratory she could use as models for her memorized talk. The one she liked best was "I have a dream" by Martin Luther King since his style is so exaggerated and uses such obvious dramatic devices. Plus it was easy to find audio and text for it on the internet.

Wen Jiabao's speeches always strike me as sounding good, though I'm not at a level to say whether or not they really constitute excellent oratory or not. He seems more animated and less "robotic" than Hu Jintao, which is the feature I like. This doesn't really specifically address your issue with the tones. Sorry for getting a bit off topic.

[zhouhaochen]

dont worry, I - and I am sure many others - have had the same issue. I basically changed my name from 安德思 to 周浩辰 because I just couldn't deal with the second followed by first tone combination - made my tongue twist.

Spent almost a year with a tutor correcting every tonal mistake I made (I had sinned at the early stages of my learning experience and that came to show), which is a horribly frustrating thing to do. She was pretty close to quitting several times and we were both quite relieved when I went back home and we could finally stop.

She is a good friend today, but still has a fear of foreigners learning Chinese - but it really did help me in the end - just took a very long time.

I didnt do speeches though, just my normal text book stuff, I dont think it would matter much though as the tones stay the same.