How to improve my intonation (aka tone, rythm, 语调)?

[ouyangjun]

As someone who is always trying to improve and sound more native (I have a long way to go), I often ask for feedback. The feedback I've been getting is that my 语调, which translates into tone or intonation (but is not the tone as in 声调1234, but refers to tone as in rhythm, pitch) does not sound native, and this is where I need the most practice.

Honest speaking, I've never practiced my 语调, in my native tongue (English) this comes naturally, but in Chinese, it appears I'm off the mark. Has anyone ran across the same challenges, and if so, what did you do to correct it? Any advice is appreciated.

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia covering intonation in Chinese:

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that pitch contours within a word distinguish the word from other words with the same vowels and consonants. Nevertheless, Mandarin also has intonation patterns—patterns of pitch throughout the phrase or sentence—that indicate the nature of the sentence as a whole.

There are four basic sentence types having distinctive intonation: declarative sentences, unmarked interrogative questions, yes-no questions marked as such with the sentence-final particle ma, and A-not-A questions of the form "He go not go" (meaning "Does he go or not?"). In the prestigious Beijing dialect these are intonationally distinguished for the average speaker as follows, using a pitch scale from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest):^[9][10]

• Declarative sentences go from pitch level 3 to 5 and then down to 2 and 1.
  
• A-not-A questions go from 6 to 9 to 2 to 1.
  
• Yes-no ma questions go from 6 to 9 to 4 to 5.
  
• Unmarked questions go from 6 to 9 to 4 to 6.
  

Thus questions are begun with a higher pitch than are declarative sentences; pitch rises and then falls in all sentences; and in yes-no questions and unmarked questions pitch rises at the end of the sentence, while for declarative sentences and A-not-A questions the sentence ends at very low pitch.

Because Mandarin distinguishes words on the basis of within-syllable tones, these tones create fluctuations of pitch around the sentence patterns indicated above. Thus the sentence patterns can be thought of as bands whose pitch varies over the course of the sentence, while changes of syllable pitch cause fluctuations within the band.

Furthermore, the details of Mandarin intonation are affected by various factors, including^[9] the tone of the final syllable, the presence or absence of focus (centering of attention) on the final word, and the dialect of the speaker.

[yonglin]

I would think that the best way to internalize intonation is to do a lot of listening, and then imitate. Some people *blink blink* on these forums recommend listening, then recording yourself, comparing yourself to the recording, and then repeating this process until you sound close enough.

In my experience though, most native English speakers tend to have way too much sentence "intonation" (exaggerated, "weird" pitch changes over a sentence), because they keep the intonation pattern they have in English. It may be useful to keep in mind that once you have the tones down, sentence intonation in Chinese is way "flatter" (perhaps more subtle would be a better way to put it...?) compared to English (and I think, most European languages).

Thus, if people actually remark on your intonation, I somehow suspect too much of it could be the problem. Of course, without an audio sample, the best I (or anyone) can do is really just a guess!

[Hesham119]

I agree with @yonglin You have to listen and imitate, you can do that with your course book and audio, imitate phrase by phrase

thats what I did when I first started, and still doing it till now

step by step it will come naturally, you wont even think about it when speaking