fixing tones

[Silent]

Based on the great feedback that I got on my pronunciation sample I've discovered that often I pronounce a different tone then I thought/intended to pronounce. For a good tool to visualise this see here. I notice two issue's. First of all general lack of control of the tones I pronounce which I guess is just a matter of excercise. Second that the pronunciation of the sounds interfere with the pronunciation of the tones.

Now I've been doing some excercises. I see clear improvements, but improvement is very slow. I'm wondering do people recognise this and has anyone tips or tricks to improve my tones faster?

[kdavid]

When I first started learning Mandarin, I immersed myself in the language by only making Chinese friends (I was in China). Unfortunately (for my pronunciation), all my friends were girls. After a couple months, others started to mention I sounded very effeminate. This was undoubtedly due to the fact that I was learning exclusively from women.

In order to correct this, and also help fine tune my pronunciation as a whole, I hired a speech therapist. His sole responsibility was to make me sound as native-like as possible. Our lessons were largely centered around reading aloud, drilling vocabulary, and conversation. He meticulously corrected my errors, and as a result I made big improvements across the board, including sounding more like a Chinese man.

If possible, you need to find a native speaker, preferably someone from NE China, and have them correct your pronunciation. Mastering a language requires loads of speaking practice, and this is especially true with a language as pronunciation-intensive as Mandarin.

Good luck!

[navaburo]

This is probably obvious, but repeating after a native speaker (recording) helps tremendously. I find that, even if I pronounce a word myself aloud, I forget the tones five seconds later if I don't here it spoken. (The recordings in Pleco have been helping.)

[icebear]

In order to correct this, and also help fine tune my pronunciation as a whole, I hired a speech therapist. His sole responsibility was to make me sound as native-like as possible. Our lessons were largely centered around reading aloud, drilling vocabulary, and conversation. He meticulously corrected my errors, and as a result I made big improvements across the board, including sounding more like a Chinese man.

As in, a speech therapist that would normally work with native-Chinese, right? Curious how much that cost a hour...? Sounds like a good approach to me.

[renzhe]

Silent, thanks a lot for recommending Praat, I was unaware of it, and it looks great.

Alas, it seems that my relaxed vocal range is too low for its spectrum analyser, I don't see any third tones unless I speak like a chipmunk

On the plus side, my tonal contours (in the chipmunk mode) look considerably better than I had expected.

[Silent]

Not yet the golden tip I had hoped for, but maybe that quick win doesn't exist.

@Renzhe, I think praat was mentioned here a while back. If not, I at least found it in a search inspired by a remark over here:)

For your third tones you might fiddle a little with the settings. In particular in the view screen (the one that appears when pressing view and edit) at pitch, pitch settings.

[imron]

I don't think the quick win does exist. You've just go to practice a lot until your muscle and vocal memory are developed enough for these sounds. I think the key is just to practice every day. 20 mins of practice every day is better than 2 hours practice once a week.

It's important though not just to practice blindly. Always be recording and assessing your progress, and trying to make sure that your tones are correct relative to each other, e.g. your 4th tone starts in the same place as your 1st tone, your 2nd tone starts slightly higher than your 3rd tone and finishes as the same place as your 1st tone, and so on.

After lots of practice, you'll get much better, but even then, you'll still keep finding things you need to work on.

I hired a speech therapist. His sole responsibility was to make me sound as native-like as possible. Our lessons were largely centered around reading aloud, drilling vocabulary, and conversation. He meticulously corrected my errors, and as a result I made big improvements across the board, including sounding more like a Chinese man.

Do you still have his contact info, and does he provide Skype lessons over the Internet? He might have quite a receptive audience here.

[renzhe]

Thanks Silent, that actually helps. The lowest pitch is is 75Hz by default, and I can actually hit 75Hz while speaking, which is unusually low. I've changed the lowest pitch to 30Hz and it seems better now. It still doesn't reliably catch the third tone, but it could also be the cheap microphone.

As for golden tips, I don't think there are any. But I think that it helps to concentrate on one thing that is wrong, and practice it until you fix it, instead of trying to fix several things at once. That can make a huge difference. Otherwise, you end up being inconsistent, and end up pronouncing some parts correctly, and others incorrectly forever, because you can't simultaneously concentrate on everything at once.

[imron]

But I think that it helps to concentrate on one thing that is wrong, and practice it until you fix it, instead of trying to fix several things at once.

I second this. This is very good advice.

[renzhe]

Actually, going back to the original post:

Second that the pronunciation of the sounds interfere with the pronunciation of the tones.

This is almost certainly because you have to concentrate on both to speak correctly. Concentrating on very specific issues one at a time will really help with this. If you know that you have the pronunciation down, but the tone needs some work, it's easy to concentrate on the tone. If you know that your initial is too soft, the final is too closed, and the tone is too short, and are trying to fix all three at the same time, it's difficult.

Same thing goes for different characters. If you read a longer piece of text, and then you have to watch the initial in the first character, tone in the second, and the final in the third one, you're going to screw up one of them.

There are two approaches I'm experimenting with. The first one is to take a very short sample (a phrase) and then work on several points at once, by repeating it over and over again, trying to match everything perfectly. It's dividing a text into small pieces and conquering them one by one. The other one is to concentrate on one or two tricky syllables, and then read longer texts, concentrating on pronouncing those particular syllable(s) correctly, not worrying about the rest. It's taking small problems and attacking them one by one.

For example, after imron's comments, I'm concentrating on bringing the second tone up. So I read long texts, but only concentrate on the second tone, analyse it in praat, listen to recordings, look for places it doesn't sound right. I have also started working on PSC texts and working sentence-by-sentence to get the grouping and melody. In a couple of months, I'll see how much it has helped.