tone mistake

[Scoobyqueen]

I have often wondered how tone mistakes sound to a native ear.

[roddy]

To be honest, it probably depends on how you're getting it wrong. You could be completely toneless. You could be saying the wrong tone, correctly. You could be getting the right tone slightly wrong (ie, first tone wavering at some point, second tone not getting high enough, fourth tone starting too low, etc). There's a whole range of potential processing delays, irritations, confusions and amusements.

[li3wei1]

It also depends on the context, and the words that share the same spelling (but not tones) that the listener might be confusing. It also depends on the speed at which you're talking. The faster you go, the more blurred the tones become, especially third tones, and the listener has to rely on context, and a mistake, unless it's really painfully obvious, will slip through.

[valikor]

Agreed with Roddy. Sometimes I can understand people who are completely toneless, but when speaking with different people (who have a lot of correct tones), I will get mixed up when a wrong tone is used, since I'm assuming that they mean what they said.

That being said, people who are completely toneless will often have more basic vocabulary, if we assume that people improve over time... it obviously would be much easier to understand "let's get some beer later" in incorrect tones than it would to listen to someone's exegesis of ancient Daoist texts--with incorrect tones.

My tones are sort of okayish, and I personally think that incorrect tones sound horrendous. However, I wonder if that's also partially because incorrect tones often accompany poor sentence flow/rhythm and other pronunciation problems. (When Chinese people with non-standard Putonghua have incorrect tones, it sounds much better to me than when foreigners have incorrect tones, so I'm not sure).

[abcdefg]

In the last several weeks I've traveled to parts of far west and deep south Yunnan, spending lots of time with people who have strong regional or minority accents. It has seemed at times like non-standard Putonghua is about the only kind there is.

Although this might not be a linguistically desirable conclusion, one thing it has done is to make me more relaxed about my own pronunciation. I still try to use proper tones just out of habit, but often the local person I'm talking with speaks worse Chinese than I do and I'm less likely to assume that any and all misunderstanding are automatically my fault.

Agree with @Valikor above about the importance of speech rhythm, phrasing and flow. And like @Li3Wei1, I also find understanding is enhanced when I talk at native speed.

[Hofmann]

It's like changing a vowel. Also, the difference between a native speaker's nonstandard tones and a learner's wrong tones is that the native speaker's tones are regular and predictable with rules. A learner's wrong tones are likely mistakes which occur randomly.

[Theodora]

I think there's a distinction between using the wrong tone and using bad tones as a foreigner. I couldn't work out why I kept being directed to 鸡蛋 (ji dan) in the supermarket when I was asking for 西餐 (xi can).

It's because I thought that 餐 was fourth tone. When my tones, and my consonants, for that matter were worse than they are now, however, I had successfully used that precise error to get to the Western food, albeit in a different city.

If I were to guess at the reason why, it would be that they were hearing tones over consonants because my tones are now better, native speakers do blur that set of consonants a lot with the different accents, and, of course, the tone also shapes the sound of the vowel.

So they heard 请问 ?i1?an4 在那人, and filled in the blanks with the most obvious thing I could be asking for: eggs.

[Scoobyqueen]

Hoffmann - I really appreciate your response. It is a good comparison.

Thanks also to other contributors. Theodora - I found your contextual example interesting.

[Theodora]

Thanks. For the record, I also think it might also depend on what city you're in, and how used the interlocutor is to bad Chinese.

IMO, though, tone mistakes are worse than the common consonantal mistakes. My ji/zh, xi/sh, q/ch are still really not very good, but I think that matters less to Chinese who aren't used to foreigners but are used to the regional variations on these than the tones.

I'm typically comprehensible first time off the bat, even though my grammar sucks and my consonants suck and my vocabulary is abysmal and I structure my sentences like "any Westerner speaking Chinese", and I think that's because my tones and my vowels on those tones are OK, with the exception of the umlauted "u".

Apologies if this has been posted here before http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3025796.stm but this seems to suggest that tones are heard in a separate part of the brain from the rest.