Poll: shhhhhhh! "x" or "sh"

[jkhsu]

If you feel there is such a huge mistake in teaching, how come teachers and schools don't know about it?

[BertR]

@jkhu: If any decent teacher would like to explain how to pronounce it he'd better tell you how you have to position your tongue, and so on, and won't refer to words in a different language that have a slightly similar but not not completely similar pronunciation.

Actually I really doubt that the statement "x = the English sh" is that widespread among Chinese teachers. For what's worth, at least I have never heard it before seeing your posts (and I have met many Chinese teachers :-) ).

PS: How many times did you already post that video?

[renzhe]

I don't see a huge mistake in teaching, just a couple of youtube videos aimed at a below-intermediate curious potential learner level with corresponding simplifications. Chinese shools do not have tens of millions of native English speakers with linguistic training, they have people who speak some English and have to convey rough pronunciation to pre-adolescent children.

All the Mandarin phonology teaching materials (and the IPA ones) I have ever seen teach that x (=[ɕ]) is formed with the tongue behind your lower teeth and arching the tongue, making it a close sibling of 's'. It might subjectively sound somewhat like [ʃ], but the way they are produced is very different, at least if you do it the 'textbook' way.

At the same time, I will be honest and share this paper (well, lecture notes with references) I've run into, which questions quite a few of the "traditional" Mandarin phonology teaching positions. For example, it argues that:

- some native speakers pronounce [ɕ] with the tongue tip behind rear teeth, making it more similar to [ʃ], perhaps the youtube girl is one of them

- there is a lot of variation with [ʂ], some of it looks flat out like [ʃ]

- the English 'p' is almost as aspirated as the Mandarin one (I have doubts about this one)

- etc...

http://online.sfsu.edu/~wenchao/presentations/phonetic.pdf

[creamyhorror]

I wonder one of you guys who think the English sh is closer to sh could send a recording of "she" with the pinyin sh and x. Here is a sample to show you how ridicules sh would sound. x also sounds wrong but much more bearable.(I even exaggerated its sharpness a bit)

Pinyin sh is a bit exaggerated and weird, like someone with a thick accent. The sharp x sounds completely inappropriate to me.

Don't forget that many speakers don't use full retroflex, so their sh falls anywhere between English 'sh' and full retroflex sh.

For those of you who voted that the English "sh" is closer than the Chinese Mandarin "sh", you're basically saying this video is wrong and that all the schools in China teaching people how to pronounce the English "she" using “西" for example are wrong. If you really feel this way, why don't you get people to change how Chinese or English is taught? At lot of people teaching Chinese Mandarin use similar examples as these videos.

I do think there's a lot of misteaching out there (the girl in your video being an example). When I briefly taught English in a village in Jiangxi last winter, I corrected a lot of pronunciation that was trained by relatively inaccurate methods/guides. At that time I didn't know Chinese people were being taught English 'she' was 西/xi, else I would have specifically stressed otherwise to the kids. In the South, pinyin sh is quite possibly practically the same thing as English 'sh'.

Similarly, learners of Chinese are being taught that xi is close to "she", but that really depends on the accent. I guess this taught equivalence is the reason why I have the impression foreigners often pronounce xi as English "she", which is just wrong to my ears. Better to say "syee" and sound like a CCTV reader or, at worse, someone with a bit of a southern accent.

By bringing all this stuff up on this forum, at least people searching the web may find out that the CCTV standard for xi might actually be something close® to English "C"/"syee" rather than "she". I already gave a bunch of examples showing this in the previous thread, but I welcome any counterexamples from CCTV or other "gold standard"-type sources.

[jkhsu]

Who wants to contact Columbia University in the USA to tell them they are wrong?

http://afe.easia.col...ce_language.htm

[Guest realmayo]

jkhsu: that link: they say that "x" is pronounced like the English "sh". But didn't you see how they said you should pronounce the Chinese "sh"?

[creamyhorror]

Who wants to contact Columbia University in the USA to tell them they are wrong?

http://afe.easia.col...ce_language.htm

I'm afraid arguing from authority isn't going to get us anywhere. Just look at that page:

q | ch, as in "check" | Qing Dynasty is pronounced "Ching" Dynasty

zh | "j" | Zhou Enlai is pronounced "Joe Enlai"; Zhou Dynasty is pronounced "Joe Dynasty"

It doesn't get more rough and approximate than "Joe Enlai" or "Ching Dynasty". That page clearly isn't aiming for accuracy in pronunciation.

[yonglin]

I voted sh, but now that I'm thinking about it, it really depends on how "she" is pronounced. Consider for example the audio on this page (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary). The male ("US") voice pronounces "she" closer to the pinyin x- (almost unnaturally so, if you ask me...), while the female ("UK") voice pronounces "she" quite close to the pinyin sh-. (I'm not quite convinced this is a UK/US difference though...?) In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the disagreement in this thread probably comes more from the English than the Chinese pronunciation.

If you didn't teach "she" with "xi", then what would you teach it with? There is no Chinese syllable with sh- and the -i in "xi" together, so if you desperately want to approximate it with a Chinese syllable, that's about as close as you get.

[creamyhorror]

I voted sh, but now that I'm thinking about it, it really depends on how "she" is pronounced. Consider for example the audio on this page (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary). The male ("US") voice pronounces "she" closer to the pinyin x- (almost unnaturally so, if you ask me...), while the female ("UK") voice pronounces "she" quite close to the pinyin sh-. (I'm not quite convinced this is a UK/US difference though...?) In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the disagreement in this thread probably comes more from the English than the Chinese pronunciation.

The UK voice is certainly the more canonical, correct pronunciation to me (though I'm also used to hearing the variant pronunciation used by the US voice). I was suspecting it was a difference in English 'sh' pronunciation as well.

If you didn't teach "she" with "xi", then what would you teach it with? There is no Chinese syllable with sh- and the -i in "xi" together, so if you desperately want to approximate it with a Chinese syllable, that's about as close as you get.

十一, slurred into a single syllable.

[Gharial]

By the power invested in me by my computer keyboard, I hereby declare Pinyin 'sh' a retroflex, Pinyin 'x' a palatal, and that anybody pronouncing English 'sh' as a retroflex, in so attempting to do a doubtless very poor impersonation of Sean Connery, will as a punishment be made to don a very hot, sweaty and stuffy panda suit whilst running around shooting scenes for a sequel to the awful The Avengers movie, until they expire and thus do the Chinese language-learning world a huge favour.

HRH Prince Gharial of Rupert

[Demonic_Duck]

By the power invested in me by my computer keyboard, I hereby declare Pinyin 'sh' a retroflex, Pinyin 'x' a palatal, and that anybody pronouncing English 'sh' as a retroflex, in so attempting to do a doubtless very poor impersonation of Sean Connery, will as a punishment be made to don a very hot, sweaty and stuffy panda suit whilst running around shooting scenes for a sequel to the awful The Avengers movie, until they expire and thus do the Chinese language-learning world a huge favour.

Doesn't change the fact that English "sh" still sounds closer to pinyin "sh" than "x"

(Well, I say "fact", really it's just my opinion, but judging by the poll results most people here agree.)

[Gharial]

Well, the poll question at least is 'Which Chinese sound is closer...', not 'Which Chinese sound sounds closer...' (but perhaps I missed something in the six hundred pages of riveting debate there's been on the subject). Plus a sound is the product of its place and manner of articulation blah blah blah, so if you get them right the sound itself will also be alright/all right...still, I guess that most learners can get a reasonable idea of how to produce certainly the easier of a language's phonemes just from listening (rather than reading phonetic descriptions, looking at mouth diagrams etc).

[Demonic_Duck]

Well sure, I can agree with that. I just think if Chinese people pronounced "she" as "sh-i" rather than "xi" it would sound closer to the English pronunciation (even if it wouldn't strictly be right). That said, I'd probably understand either pronunciation in context, assuming the speaker's pronunciation was otherwise decent.

[bunny87]

my pronunciation doesn't differentiate much between /x/ and /sh/ (cause i suck). rather than neither, i needed a "both" category.

[imron]

and that all the schools in China teaching people how to pronounce the English "she" using “西" for example are wrong.

I'm not sure how much exposure you've have to the English teaching system in China, but there are widespread and systemic problems with the way pronunciation is taught, where yes, incorrect pronunciation is not just taught, it is taught as if it is the correct way to pronounce things. These mistakes are often being ingrained from an early age, meaning that by the time a student gets around to having a teacher who can correct them, it can be very difficult for them to actually change their pronunciation.

In my opinion, the worst example is the one I mentioned earlier about the 's' in 'usually' (ʒ) which is taught as being close to the pinyin 'r' (I'd be interested to hear how your Chinese friends said they were taught to pronounce this sound). The first time I encountered this, I had no idea what the person was trying to say, and it took several attempts before I finally realised they were saying 'usually'.

Other problem sounds are 'th' (both voiced and unvoiced) and 'v', for consonants, as well as vowels such as the 'i' in smile (which is actually a diphthong, but I digress) which often ends up sounding like 'smell'. It seems these sounds are rarely taught correctly and the issue stems from being taught pronunciation based on Chinese that is 'close enough' or 'similar' to the English.

In the grand scheme of things, 西/she is not one of the bigger pronunciation problems because it is far closer in sound than the examples I listed above, and it doesn't impede understanding like those ones do, but just because it doesn't impede understanding, doesn't mean it's correct, and just because the way it's taught is widespread doesn't mean it's correct either.

my pronunciation doesn't differentiate much between /x/ and /sh/ (cause i suck)

That will be the problem then. You're supposed to blow air out to pronounce these sounds, not suck it in

[WestTexas]

all the schools in China teaching people how to pronounce the English "she" using “西" for example are wrong.

Maybe they just teach them that because many (most?) Chinese can't differentiate between s/sh, so they can't use an sh word to teach it.

By the way I've been teaching here for two years and have had hundreds of students. I've had less than 10 students who I could talk to on the phone in English and not instantly know they were Chinese. The Chinese don't do a great job of teaching pronunciation, is the point.

The criteria that the 'sh' sound should be as in 'she' is completely arbitrary btw, yes it sounds more like xi because of the vowel sound there.

sh is the sound of shhhhh

x is more like a snake hissing.

IMO at least, I'm actually not a snake so my pronunciation of the snake sound might be wrong.

[anonymoose]

When I first started learning Chinese, I was always confused about how x should be pronounced. （In those days I didn't have much audio material and resources on the internet were scant by today's standards.） I kind of had the impression that x was somehow between s and sh, but never really knew what that meant in practice. Then I had an epiphany when discovered that the x sound was represented as hs in Taiwan, as x really does sound like a merging of (English) h and s.

[imron]

'she' is completely arbitrary btw, yes it sounds more like xi because of the vowel sound there.

+1 for this.

[Jose]

For those of you who voted that the English "sh" is closer than the Chinese Mandarin "sh", you're basically saying this video is wrong and that all the schools in China teaching people how to pronounce the English "she" using “西" for example are wrong

I think the "she" example is a bit misleading because, as others have noted, there is no syllable made up of "sh" + "yi" in pinyin, so the closest you can get to the English syllable "she" in pinyin is indeed "xi" because of the vowel. But then "xi" is also the best pinyin match for English "see" and even "he" (just think how names like Sylvia, Sicily, Hilton or Hillary are rendered in Chinese). In fact, because there are few Mandarin consonants that can occur before the "i" and "ü" vowels that always follow "x", there is considerable leeway in how the consonant can be articulated by native speakers.

Instead of choosing "she" as the benchmark for the poll, we could have used "shoe". In this case the lack of real minimal pairs for "sh" and "x" plays to the advantage of "sh" since the English vowel is similar to the vowel in "shu", and not to the one in "xu". I wonder if those who insist that English "sh" is closer to Mandarin "x" would really explain the English pronunciation of "shoe" to a Chinese speaker using 需 (xū) as an example and then adding that the vowel is more like 乌 (wū). I find it simpler, and also more accurate, to compare the English pronunciation of "shoe" with the Mandarin pronunciation of 书 (shū).

[Guest realmayo]

It was a simple question. The three sounds in question are all different. The question was which of the Chinese ones was closer to the English one.

Most people have gone for "sh".

That's it. Finished! Nothing more to xi here.