Frustrated by mismatched pronunciation.

[Jeremy Andrews]

I've been listening to some Chinese TV shows and trying to get better at hearing words. But it's not working out very well.

 

The problem is that the pronunciation given by dictionaries and language programs sounds extremely different from how the people in the show speak, to the point that I can't even understand them or hear a similarity.

 

For instance, the Chinese dictionaries online all pronounce 喂 as "way," but the people saying it in the show make it sound like "wah."

 

There's also 陈川, which the dictionaries say is pronounced "chenshwan," but the people on the show are pronouncing it as "nuhow," or something. I really can't hear anything that sounds remotely like what I'm supposed to be hearing.

 

The name of the series is supposed to be Fu Chen 浮沉, but I can't find any information on it at all. So I have no idea where in China it's supposed to be, and thus whether they're even speaking Mandarin at all. Could this be one of those other variants of Chinese? It does have hardsubbed Chinese characters... which seemed like a good thing at first, but now I'm not so sure.

 

Does anyone know why the pronunciations aren't matching up at all? I'm really confused...

[gato]

What dictionary are you using? Do you know pinyin?

[Jeremy Andrews]

 

What dictionary are you using? Do you know pinyin?

 

Well, I'm using this one to look up the characters themselves:

 

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/sinograms.html

 

And then this one gives me audio pronunciations of said characters, once I enter them into the Chinese to English function:

 

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/chinese-dictionary.php

 

I've tried using Pinyin a little, but it really doesn't help me much. I find that paying a lot of attention to it causes me to make more mistakes and become confused as to the subject of the sentence. It makes words that sound different and have different meanings SEEM like they're the same because of the spelling.

 

On top of the fact that Pinyin's Romanization isn't even close to English and forces me to think about how each letter is pronounced differently from English every time I see a letter, the accent marks all look very tiny and similar, so I'll hear the word wrong in my head before I process it, and thus get the wrong tone half the time. Whereas I can actually get closer to the right sound if I go in "blind," and listen to the pronunciation several times over without reading any Romanization.

 

I probably should learn Pinyin better, though, if only because I'll need it to explain to other language learners what I'm trying to pronounce.

 

The 喂 character that sounds like "wah" from one speaker, and "way," from another, is "wèi" in Pinyin.

 

The 陈川 thing is "chén chuān" in Pinyin, but the two phrases I'm hearing sound NOTHING alike, to the point that it seems futile.

 

I hope that helps.

 

 

[tysond]

I just had a quick look, seems like you are watching episode one:  http://tv.sohu.com/20120630/n346958236.shtml

 

I just watched the first few minutes, it's in standard putonghua (Mandarin).  It's not a dialect, doesn't seem to have a significant accent. I'm pretty sure it's set in Shanghai.

 

It's a bit noisy but I hear wéi and chén chuān.  The tone on wei is all over the place because people are lazy with that particular word, but that's natural and it doesn't sound any different to how people say it in my office every day.

 

It's different because in one case you are listening to perfectly formed standard syllables coming out of a computer "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" and in the other case it's humans doing real speech, with emotions and emphasis and connections and delays and so on.  "Heeeeeyyyy... Aaaanddy, what'cha doin? Can ya' ev'n heeaaar me?".

 

If you can't hear it yet, I don't think it's futile.  When you start it's hard to hear all the different sounds in another language.  The gap between English sounds and Chinese can be large.  I believe you actually need to train your brain to hear sounds that it is not used to hearing (much like a musician easily hears chords, rhythms and tuning that non-musicians can't really hear).  It takes time and exposure.

[Jeremy Andrews]

Thank you, tysond. That is EXACTLY what I was watching. I guess I just need to keep listening more. It's good to know that this is standard.

 

One reason I'm doing this whole "loop every sentence of a TV program until I can hear every syllable" thing, rather than relying entirely on software like Rosetta Stone, is because I really want to be able to understand the actual spoken language. Hearing a perfect, slowly-spoken version of what you're listening for... doesn't help at all in recognizing the real thing.

 

My ultimate goal is to be able to communicate with Chinese people, so it makes sense to listen to something more like everyday speech, even if it's a lot harder to understand at first.

 

I may also need to play it a bit louder, and get better quality speakers. It's possible parts of the sound are being cut out, either by the computer or hearing issues on my part.

[Guest realmayo]

Most people find that starting in small blocks and building up is the quickest way to progress: these days that tends to involve pinyin, a textbook, lots of focused practice on listening to and producing the sounds correctly, ideally a real-life or skype teacher or language exchange partner. Your way -- of diving in at the deep end -- is unusual and because it might take a long time to see real progress, might make you disheartened about your studying. 

But if it's what works for you, good luck! And if this TV-listening is something you're doing in conjunction with a more structured course, you get the best both worlds.

[tysond]

I would completely recommend getting headphones - I listened to that clip with headphones, if I used my laptop's speakers or a cheap speaker I'd probably have more trouble hearing over all the noise in that first scene.

 

Agree with realmayo...  You are playing in hardcore mode.  Training for a marathon starts with running 10 minutes without stopping. 

If you are frustrated now, it will continue for quite a long time if you only use full adult native material.  

 

Recommend mixing it up with easier stuff - use the native materials to get exposure to the real sounds by all means.  It's really useful to copy what they are saying as best you can (maybe don't even bother looking up the pinyin).

 

But use slowed down, perfectly pronounced stuff to get to grips with basic sentences and words so you can successfully understand chunks.  Real Chinese people do say basic phrases too, and sometimes they even pronounce them slowly and clearly.  Zhongwen Red/Green and Slow Chinese are significantly easier starting points.

 

Either way, good luck!

[renzhe]

Mandarin listening comprehension is a nightmare, and perfecting it is a year-long process. So your experience is nothing unusual. The more you do it, the better it gets.

I do urge you to learn Pinyin. You will get nowhere without being proficient with a standard romanisation scheme. Nowadays, Hanyu Pinyin is the most widely used standard, so there's little reason to learn something else. It will take a couple of weeks of practice, but it's well worth it in the long run. Find a good pinyin chart with sounds and go through it every day until you develop a feeling for how it should be pronounced. Without this, you will get nowhere. Using "English" spelling for Chinese will ruin your accent forever and make your life more difficult.

I also agree with realmayo that you might be jumping in too deep. Modern textbooks are not that bad in terms of realistic pronunciation, and starting with clear speech makes a lot of sense. You first develop a sense for canonical pronunciation before you start learning the noisy (and often regional) distorted versions you hear in the real world.

[smartmandarin]

hi,

 

You can try "yellowbridge.com"

the pronunciation is pretty accurate.

 

I'm not sure which TV show you are watching, but Chinese people do have different accents from different regions of China.

And it also depends on your level of Chinese.  If you are just a beginner, then TV shows would be kinda hard for you.

Try using CDs MP3s practicing your listening first, or even go out on the streets talking to real Chinese and pay attention to their accents.

 

jiayou!

[lechuan]

I spent a lot of time learning pinyin when I started learning Mandarin. The better one gets at learning the proper pronunciation, the better one is able to hear said pronunciation. The brain tends to match sounds you hear to the closest sounds you already know. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to understand other speakers who have slight variations in accent. If you don't know all the sounds correctly, chances are you're brain is going to be confused, or match it up what you hear with the wrong sound.

Case in point: Before I started learning Mandarin, I learned a Mandarin song by listening over and over and imitating the speaker. I thought I was quite close. Later after learning pinyin and listening to the song again, I was suprised at how much I had gotten wrong, and how much easier to hear what's correct when you know what you're listening for.

It's well worth the time investment to properly learn Pinyin. Even if it appears to be slowing you down initially, it will accelerate your learning speed and accuracy. Without Pinyin you're losing out in a world of listening materials, and possibly not learning how to pronounce things properly.

[imron]

I've tried using Pinyin a little, but it really doesn't help me much.

On top of the fact that Pinyin's Romanization isn't even close to English and forces me to think about how each letter is pronounced differently from English every time I see a letter, the accent marks all look very tiny and similar, so I'll hear the word wrong in my head before I process it, and thus get the wrong tone half the time.

All of this is caused because you haven't spent enough time with pinyin yet.  It will also all go away once you've learnt it properly.  Just don't think of it in terms of English, instead learn to associate the Chinese sounds with the pinyin letters.

 

You are really doing yourself a disservice if you try to learn Mandarin without learning pinyin.

[Jeremy Andrews]

Thanks for all the advice, guys.

 

I got some headphones, and it helped a lot. It was the speakers after all. I can hear every word now, with enough time and replays.

 

I'm doing this whole listening thing in conjunction with Rosetta Stone, and Rosetta Stone doesn't exactly "teach" you the Pinyin. You can see either the Pinyin or the characters, and I find looking at the characters more helpful, given the choice. They help highlight differences in similar words that don't immediately stand out in Pinyin.

 

I actually force myself to go through each lesson twice, once with the Pinyin, and once with the Simplified Chinese characters to make sure I learn everything I can. But the Pinyin just isn't "clicking" at all, even though my pronunciation is improving. I'm spending so much time on this that I'm hearing the repetitive Rosetta Stone voices in my head and seeing Chinese characters when I try to sleep...

 

Will I just "get" the Pinyin eventually if I keep working with Rosetta Stone this way? Or do I need to try something else for that aspect of it?

[imron]

Just because you are learning from one resource (Rosetta Stone) doesn't mean that you can't also use other resources at the same time :-)

Find a website that explains pinyin thoroughly, and go through it until you are comfortable with it.  Maybe even read a couple of different websites to get a few different perspectives.  It will take a few hours to get the basics, and maybe a few weeks to get totally comfortable with.

Just remember:

• Pinyin is not English - although there are some overlap, don't try to find equivalents to English.  Use a site that has a soundboard of all pronunciation and work from that.  Over time the pinyin pronunciation will seem natural.
• Don't think of pinyin as being made up of letters.  It is made up of initials and finals.  Different letters may or may not have different pronunciations depending on what 'final' they belong to.  Don't worry about that, learn to see finals as a whole, rather than individual letters.

Finally, from what I've seen, Rosetta Stone isn't really that great a way to learn Chinese.  If you are serious about learning Chinese, a good textbook series will be far more useful.  New Practical Chinese Reader is one that many people seem to recommend.

[Demonic_Duck]

The 喂 thing is just lazy speech, much like English "yes" -> "yeah" or French "oui" -> "ouais" (the latter of which, coincidentally, sounds an awful lot like 喂). I have no idea how you're hearing 陈川 as "nuhow", though. Also, the correct pinyin should be Chén Chuān, not chenshwan.

 

Perhaps you're trying to run before you can walk with the listening comprehension. The language in this program is very colloquial and not at all easy for a beginner to understand. If I were you, I'd stick to graded stuff designed for non-native speakers (slower, clearer, in language that you can understand) until you can pick out the sounds and words from that kind of material with reasonable accuracy. Then you can move up to easy native-level materials. The easiest native-level thing I've seen comprehension-wise is the Chinese dub of Dora the Explorer (爱探险的朵拉), which is actually intended for teaching Chinese kids English, but it contains little enough English that this doesn't interrupt the flow too much. Then there are the Chinese dubs of the Japanese cartoons Chibi Maruko-chan (樱桃小丸子) and Crayon Shin-chan (蜡笔小新), the former of which is a bit easier but the latter of which is more entertaining (at least if you have a childish sense of humour like me). Comprehension-wise, the easiest non-animated TV programme I've seen is 家有儿女, although the language in this is a fairly big step up from the others I mentioned and is also rather colloquial. I think you could see it as the Chinese equivalent to "Friends" (though the premise is different), in that it's a middle-of-the-road sitcom from a few years ago that's comparatively easy for foreigners to understand (still a fair way above beginner-level, though).

 

Also, I agree with imron about using other resources alongside Rosetta Stone. From what I've seen/heard of it, there's a lot of important stuff that RS leaves out. It doesn't cover basic grammar, which you will most definitely need to know in order to make novel sentences in Chinese (translating word-for-word will lead to blank stares nine times out of ten).

 

As for pinyin, there are plenty of resources online that you can use to learn it. You just have to remember that you can't pronounce it as if it's English any more than you can with any other foreign language that can be written with the Latin alphabet. You wouldn't pronounce "s'il vous plait" as /sɪlvu:s'pleɪt/ if you were learning French, so don't try to pronounce "jiàn" as /dʒjæn/ when you're learning Chinese. Dedicate a couple of hours of focused study time to it, and you should be golden.

 

Some people recommend skipping pinyin altogether and instead using zhuyin fuhao, A.K.A. bopomofo (this is the most common phonetic system used in Taiwan). Personally I think this is unnecessary, I learnt with pinyin since the beginning and didn't suffer any pronunciation problems because of it. I think the extra time to learn an entirely new writing system would very likely outweigh the time saved unlearning your instinct to pronounce pinyin as if it was English. However, if for some reason you really can't seem to shake this instinct, it's definitely another option to look at. Personally I'm learning it at the moment anyway, though my main reason is to make my life more difficult and prevent me from using pinyin as a "crutch" when looking up dictionary entries. If there's any problem with pinyin, it's that it's too easy!

[roddy]

Just a quick note on: 

"Hearing a perfect, slowly-spoken version of what you're listening for... doesn't help at all in recognizing the real thing."

but then the real thing is difficult "to the point that it seems futile."

 

I'm not sure how much value there is in listening to very fast, very hard stuff as a beginner. If you do, it should probably be with very low expectations - picking out a word a sentence should be considered a success, or answering some very concrete question. But if you're finding something futile and frustrating, it may be time to lower either the difficulty, or your expectations.

 

Edit: And you know what, that chén chuān does sound pretty fuzzy. 

[Jeremy Andrews]

I have actually been able to pick out single words. I picked out "Xie Xie" several times and guessed that it means "thanks," despite never having explicitly been taught it. I also picked out the word and character for person almost every time, which is "ren2," and looks like a person walking. If you'd consider that a success, then I guess I did okay. I only started working with Rosetta Stone the day before I posted this message, actually... and I had no prior exposure to Chinese before that.

 

The truth is, my goal is to be able to hear and understand stuff like this. I don't necessarily expect to be able to do so right away, though the accent thing did have me really worried.

 

I'm actually not working with this so much as a learning tool right now. I'm using it more as a measure of where I am. I'll be watching it periodically as I learn to see if I understand any more of what's being said than before.

[sparrow]

@JeremyAndrews:

 

Quick suggestion: If you have questions about specific parts in a recording, give us a link to the recording as well as the approximate time in that recording where the dialogue occurs.

 

Pinyin is incredibly useful. Learn it well. There have been many times where I heard "j" when it was supposed to be "zh"—Pinyin was what helped me make the distinction.

 

Also, the actors in this program really "curl their tongue" 卷舌 and speak quickly. You will hear a lot of distorted speech that are almost like "short cuts". This is really common in Beijing. I remember when I first learned how people shortcut 不知道 bu4 zhi1dao4 "I don't know", which ends up sounding more like bu4er1ao4.

 

An example from this TV series occurs at 4:58. The sentence begins 不过 , and is supposed to be bu2 guo4, but she pronounces the two character as bu2 wo4.

 

 

 

I'm actually not working with this so much as a learning tool right now. I'm using it more as a measure of where I am. I'll be watching it periodically as I learn to see if I understand any more of what's being said than before.

 

My opinion is that you ought to use this TV show as a learning tool—even to just listen to in the background. Your listening won't really develop to understand casual speech unless you expose it to a lot of casual speech.

[sparrow]

Okay, so Jeremy, I fast-forwarded the episode a bit. At around 20:00, it switches to Jiangsu province. The Mandarin they're speaking is heavily accented.