Questions about tones.

[Jeremy Andrews]

Well, I've been putting some effort into learning Pinyin and tones.

I was reading/listening to this. The main thing that gives me concern is the third tone. All the information I've found says that it's supposed to start out in the middle, fall, and then rise. But when I hear it in sentences, it sounds more like a low and level tone. Am I mishearing this or something?

The main consistent feature of the third tone I've identified, is duration. Words spoken in the third tone seem to linger on the tongue a bit longer.

Conversely, the fourth tone seems very abrupt. So on top of the falling sound, which sounds almost like an exclamation or anger, a rapidly spoken tone is often fourth. The "neutral" tone is also short, but it's clearly level, which helps differentiate it from first and third.

Meanwhile, the first and second tones have about a medium duration, but what really sets the second tone apart is that it rises, almost like an inquisitive sound in English. While the first tone is high and level.

So, the conclusion I've come to, is that the Chinese tone system seems to be about both tone AND duration. So, my mental map looks something like this:

First tone: Medium length, high and level. Kind of like an extremely half-hearted effort to break glass with a high-pitched tone, by someone who can't sing and isn't trying very hard.

Second tone: Medium length, rising. Sounds sort of like asking a question, or like you're subtly trying to let someone know you've caught them in a lie.

Third tone: Long length. Can either fall and rise, or be low and level. Audibly lingers longer than other tones.

Fourth tone: Short length, falling. Sounds like anger, or trying to make a point forcefully.

Neutral tone: Short length, level and medium. Sounds a bit apathetic and dismissive.

This seems almost too easy, though... is this really how it works? I want to learn how to listen out for tones VERY carefully before I get too deep in learning the language. I'm willing to do as much work as it takes to get them right, even if it delays me from doing other things.

[anonymoose]

The rising of the third tone only appears at the end of a sentence (supposedly, although it's not always obvious), or when said in isolation.

[陳德聰]

You are right to focus on duration, though I am not convinced it plays as strong a role as you have suggested.

 

The 3rd tone can be produced in three different ways:

 

first half of a "3rd tone", 

second half of a "3rd tone",

full 3rd tone

Duration is key, considering that the 3rd tone is the longest tone, and in situations where duration is obligatorily short (eg. fast speech) you will lose the full features of the tone contour and be left with what I imagine you are identifying as a "low level tone".

[sparrow]

Try to find a recording where you can hear the tones.

 

If you're using the Integrated Chinese book, it should come with a CD or online file for this. There should be a section devoted to the third tone used with different tone combinations.

 

Otherwise, let me know and I can write up a bunch of syllable combinations using the third tone and you can get a friend/teacher/whomever to record themselves reading it—first slowly, then quickly.

 

The best way to learn tones is not to intellectualize it but to internalize it by listening and copying, as this is how babies do it.

 

With that said, your analysis is good and the third tone can be tricky. Pieces get chopped off or suppressed, depending on the tones of the surrounding words, the speed of speech, and the emphasis used—staccato speech in particular, used to dramatize words, can distort third tones.

[Jeremy Andrews]

I don't actually have any books on Chinese, nor am I in a Chinese class. All I really have is Rosetta Stone, and that About.com page I linked regarding tones. I also watched some YouTube videos on the subject between working with those.

However, I feel like Rosetta Stone isn't being strict enough about pronunciation. I can sort of hear myself making slight mistakes, and it's been bothering me enough that I've repeated the first lesson several times hoping to catch myself, rather than moving on. But it's really hard to gauge how close my pronunciation is, even though I'm getting better at listening for the right sounds.

I don't fully trust my own ears/mouth, and I was hoping the recognition software in RS would help me correct myself, but it's not working well enough. I don't know anyone who speaks Chinese, so I have to do this all by myself, using whatever recordings I can find. I don't have access to a native speaker who can provide feedback. But I don't intend to give up.

I really hate the pronunciation part... I feel like no matter how many times I try, it just gets worse. I can't stand the sound of my own voice, honestly. I really believe that I could learn characters, and learn to hear Chinese, but still be unable to speak it verbally. Seriously, with every language I try to learn, reading/writing comes easy (even with new alphabets), listening comes a little slower, but pronunciation is what kills me and makes me want to give up.

[roddy]

You could post something here if you like, or start a new topic just for your samples. I wrote up this how to a while back, but to be honest it may now be easier to use something like Soundcloud. Audacity's a hell of a powerful tool though, you should try using it at some point if you haven't. 

 

From the sound of things you've got a pretty good ear and are spotting and thinking about stuff that lots of other learners would miss. Put in a steady amount of effort and I think you'll do fine...

[renzhe]

You are completely right about one thing. Tones are not only about pitch contours, but also about duration and intensity. Different tones have different durations, but also the intensity changes. For example, fourth tone starts strong, while the second tone tends to get stronger towards the end.

There is very little material discussing this from a theoretical point of view. I'm sure that some linguist out there has formalised all this, but it never appears in textbooks for learning Chinese.

陳德聰 gave a good description in post #3. Third tone is "complete" (canonical) when alone, at the end of an utterance, and/or stressed. It is pronounced rising ("second part") if followed by another third tone, or short falling ("first part") everywhere else, especially in the middle of an utterance. This tends to be the most difficult tone for most of us.

One correction about the neutral tone. Its pitch is defined by the tone preceding it. It can one of 4 different pitches: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Neutral_tone

[Jeremy Andrews]

One correction about the neutral tone. Its pitch is defined by the tone preceding it. It can one of 4 different pitches: http://en.wikipedia....gy#Neutral_tone

Ugh. And here I thought once I figured out the third tone rules, it would be smooth sailing. :/

For a tone that supposedly "isn't there," it sounds like it's going to make my life a lot harder. Four different permutations entirely based on context, which may differ based on dialect... sigh. I wish they hadn't claimed Mandarin has only four tones.The fifth one is the most painful of all.

I think I had better focus on learning ONE dialect of Mandarin, and give up on understanding the others. There's just too many complexities involved to understand more than one unless you grow up around all of them.

I read recently about someone who said that after 20 years of studying Chinese, they could just barely be understood by native speakers (and were proud of that accomplishment). I'm going to be really angry in 20 years if I have to settle for those kind of results and that level of time investment...

I might just have to accept that no matter how hard I try, I may never get this... I'm sure I'll get the writing part, but speaking/listening may be little more than a pipe dream. My hearing sucks and I have to ask people to repeat themselves often in English.

[roddy]

I don't think you need to be that discouraged. First off, pitch of neutral tone isn't going to result in people completely failing to understand you - be aware of it by all means, but it doesn't need much worry at this stage. Second, it may be "Four different permutations entirely based on context", but there's only four contexts. And as for differences in neutral tone pitch across Chinese dialects - that's a dissertation title, not a beginner textbook chapter.

 

I would recommend focusing on Mandarin, unless you have specific reasons (in-laws, usually) for wanting to learn some dialect or other. Otherwise you're just going to confuse yourself. 

[Jeremy Andrews]

Oh, that wasn't what I meant by dialect, though it is often used that way when talking about Chinese. I consider Cantonese to be another language entirely, not even a dialect. I definitely meant Mandarin, but there's the Beijing Mandarin, Northeast Mandarin, Jianghuai Mandarin, etc. All of them sound different enough to confuse me if I try to learn from random sources who speak differently. I know this because I already stumbled onto material in these different accents/dialects, and it threw me off until I realized they sounded different from each other due to speaking with accents. So I'm planning to focus on learning just one so I don't have to worry about the differences between them right now.

I'm not confused on that aspect at all. It's just that I have to figure out how to mentally process the whole idea that a single unmarked syllable can sound four different ways... based on the tone that came before, somehow. And as long as I can find and focus in on a single accent, I should be able to get it eventually. This is just going to take me a while to listen, analyze, and adapt now... because I wasn't expecting there to be four variations of neutral tone to listen out for. It was just a little overwhelming to have that thrown in when I thought I had it down.

I know I'm being kind of exacting, but I really don't want to develop a habit of speaking sloppy Mandarin with bad tones that no one understands, which I've heard is what almost everyone does involuntarily. I need an idea of what I'm listening out for while looping recordings, otherwise I might not be able to hear and reproduce it.

[sparrow]

Dear Jeremy,

 

Don't be discouraged. Tones are not as difficult as they appear to you right now. Trust me.

 

Chinese is said to be one of the harder languages, but in my opinion, this is inaccurate. I believe Chinese is actually among the easier languages in certain ways, though it is harder in others. Tones and pronunciation can be hard up to a point, but if you get a handle of them, their difficulty pretty much goes away. And you can get a decent handle of them in a few weeks of daily practice. I'll make a second post about tones in an attempt to simplify them for you.

 

Let me say a few things about languages and Chinese in general.

 

Have you studied other languages? The Romance Languages (French, Spanish, etc.) are verbal languages. English, German, and many others are as well. These languages depend very heavily on tense and verbs change depending on how they are used. This makes things very difficult. And these languages have gender. If you're not familiar, look up Spanish verb conjugation. Spanish in particular has subjunctive tenses, which deal with feelings of "probability"; it's obnoxious for students.

 

Chinese, on the other hand, has no verb tenses and no gender. To eat is always to eat, regardless of who is eating or when they're eating. (To be more precise, 过 and 了 complicates things a little, but it's not such a big deal—certainly much simpler than verb conjugation and tenses.) This makes Chinese easier in one sense. 

 

What's difficult about Chinese is the pronunciation, the tones, and the characters. If you have a teacher, within two weeks, you can get a good handle on the pronunciation and a decent handle on the tones. After two more weeks of giving a little extra attention to pronunciation and tones, you pretty much won't have to worry about them ever again, except for small corrections here and there.

 

Let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm 25 at the moment, but when I was 17, I went to China for my senior year of high school. I had never studied Chinese before arriving in China. I was one of 50 kids going on this program. Eight of these fifty were like me—we had little to no Chinese before.

 

In my junior year, I picked up a thin book from my school library that discussed Chinese language and culture. Inside, it mentioned that if attention is paid to pronunciation and tones in the first few weeks, life will be much easier. I took the advice to heart.

 

When I arrived in China, I spent a good amount of my Chinese studying time on pronunciation. After about two weeks, my pronunciation and tones were quite good and often received complements on it. I didn't need to think much about it anymore, except for some mistakes here and there. All of my eight classmates progressed and got a decent handle on tones and pronunciation—even the lazy kid who was at the bottom of the class for lack of effort. And the other kids in the program were definitely ahead of us as well.

 

Within three months, I was able to book tickets, contact tour guides, and plan a trip to Xi'an when my mother came to visit in December—and all by myself without the help of my Chinese teachers. All of my classmates were capable of this, perhaps with the exception of that really lazy kid. When my mother arrived, I was her translator. I took her around Beijing and Xi'an, helped her talk about her heritage and joke around with random people we met (strangers in China who are interested in English can be very friendly to foreigners), helped her buy things. I wasn't fluent, but I was good enough to talk about a wide range of topics.

 

I want to remind you that this is from zero Chinese to three months of Chinese. THREE MONTHS—not twenty years.

 

In my final three months, I remember getting phone calls from Chinese people. They wouldn't realize I wasn't a Chinese person until a few minutes in—or perhaps they were being kind. Maybe Chinese people in general have been kind to me, but I have heard many times from Chinese friends, tutors, and professors that my accent and tones are among of the best they've heard.

 

 

This is not to brag, but to stress the fact that if you put your attention in the right places, you will get results, and the results can be adequate—indeed more than adequate—and it doesn't need to take forever.

[renzhe]

Understanding accented Mandarin is not as hard as you imagine. Concentrate on the standard accent, and as your listening improves, you will understand more and more accented speech.

As for complexities and context, it helps to work on tones in pairs or triples. Most people concentrate on single tones in isolation in the beginning, and this is the right thing to do. But once you start getting the hang of that, concentrate on two-syllable words, then short phrases, and try to copy the melody and pitch contour exactly. When that starts working, you can move on to sentences.

Many students suffer because they don't move beyond characters, and continue seeing Chinese as a string of single characters forever. The key to fluency is thinking in logical groups of characters and words. This solves the tone sandhi problem, but requires quite a shift in thinking.

[Demonic_Duck]

I think if you put in the effort with your pronunciation early on, it won't bother you too much down the line, although there will always be the odd word that you didn't learn properly/forgot the proper pronunciation. In that case, as long as your foundational knowledge of tones is good, it's easy to correct. If the vast majority of your tones are solid, it's much easier to notice when there's a particular word you're shaky on. For instance, upon buying some cans of 燕京 beer earlier, I had the nagging feeling that my pronunciation wasn't how other people said it. Sure enough, when I asked the shopkeeper, he confirmed Yànjīng (contrary to what my dictionary says - sometimes the dictionary pronunciation doesn't match up to how it's actually said in real life).

 

I read recently about someone who said that after 20 years of studying Chinese, they could just barely be understood by native speakers (and were proud of that accomplishment). I'm going to be really angry in 20 years if I have to settle for those kind of results and that level of time investment...

I think that depends how much time and effort they put into their learning for those 20 years. If it was 20 years on-off study living in a non-Chinese speaking environment with little access to native speakers, putting in half an hour a week of study (unless they were too busy with other commitments), it's no surprise. If it was 20 years living in Beijing and having daily lessons, then there obviously must have been some dire problem with their study habits.

 

I think living in China and studying full-time, you should expect to be decently conversationally fluent in half a year, or less, depending how intensive your study is and how good your habits are. Living in China and working full-time in an English-speaking Environment but also putting in a good amount of study, expect a year or so. Living outside of China but with some access to native speakers and putting in the effort, I'd say two years would be a reasonable ballpark, although to be honest I'm not sure how reasonable this is.

[sparrow]

Jeremy, I'm going to tell you everything I know about tones:

 

First

Flat tone.

 

Second

Rising tone. Don't be lazy! Make sure your voice goes up enough.

 

Third

Falling-rising.

Third + Third = Second + Third: nǐ hǎo should sound like níhǎo.

Third + Second = Half a Third Tone + Second.

 

Fourth

Falling tone.

 

Fifth

Neutral.

Changes subtly depending on what's around it, but I don't really know how. I do it automatically from following examples.

 

That is literally everything I know about tones. That is all you really need to know.

 

 

Now, how do you actually learn tones and pronunciation?

 

Super-Beginners

Drills. Sorry, it may be boring, but spend five minutes a few times per day and you'll be good. More on this in a second!!

 

Beginner–Intermediate

When reading a text, mark the proper tones on top of the characters as you read. You should always be reading aloud, and loudly as you can.

 

 

So, I created a spreadsheet with a list of all the syllables in the Chinese language. The spreadsheet uses this list to randomly generate pronunciation lists. Make a copy to your Google Drive and it will randomize the lists. The second page in the spreadsheet has unchanging pronunciation sheets in case you don't want everything to change all the time.

 

The columns marked by blue are difficult tone combinations that you can focus on.

 

Here's the spreadsheet. I wish I had this spreadsheet when I first started learning Chinese.

 

 

Basically, pick a couple columns and see if you can get a native speaker (from this forum or someone who lives nearby) to read out the list into a recording device. Have them pause between each pair of syllables so you'll have time to repeat.

 

You said you don't know any Chinese people, but you probably have a school, college, or even Chinese restaurant nearby. You can pay someone $5 or $10 to make a recording for every sheet. Or maybe they'll do a few columns for free—I would!

 

Listen to the recording and repeat after each pair of syllables while reading from the printed sheet. In one or two weeks of daily practice, your tones should be freaking awesome. This is similar to how I practiced pronunciation and tones when I first started, but I only had the few dozen combinations from the preface of my textbook. This spreadsheet gives you hundreds!

 

If you have any questions, let me know.

[roddy]

That sounds like a lot of unnecessary messing about. Do pronunciation drills with the vocab you're learning as you study, perhaps with audio flashcards (ie, with Pleco) and kill two birds with one stone. Then maybe seek out further examples of combinations you find difficult. 

 

And that spreadsheet - pu3nao3? ruan1que3? Are these words?

 

If you really want to do this kind of stuff, look at the materials for the 普通水平测试, This looks like reinventing the wheel, with extra feet. 

[sparrow]

It sounds worse than it is. Jeremy has just begun studying, so this is the best time to put in an extra 15 minutes into accent and tones. It paid off in spades for me—I never worried about tones after my first two weeks, except for some mistakes here and there.

 

And no, these are not words. They are random combinations of syllables and tones as an exercise for beginners. There's no reason to spend time compiling obscure words for a beginner who won't use them for years or ever, all just to practice 20 variations of 3rd tone + 2nd tone.

 

It's a mouth exercise. That's all it is. Seeing as tones and pronunciation are the only challenging aspect of Chinese (in my opinion), I think it's worth it. 

 

 

(P.S. I wouldn't say characters are challenging. They just take time. They're memorization, reading, looking up, and using words.)

[roddy]

You just grep them out of a wordlist of some sort - textbook vocab, frequency list, HSK list, whatever. i used to have something online for the old HSK lists which would give you plenty of any tone combination. John Pasden has something, lemme find it...here. And if you come up short on any - well, it can't be a very important combination. 

 

Nobody's saying this ISN'T a good time to do pronunciation drills - but I can't see how drilling meaningless nonsense over real words is an advantage, and it's no extra effort. I can see you're pretty attached to this approach, but to be honest I'm not seeing the advantage and I've never seen anyone do this before. Redo your spreadsheet with words from the HSK wordlists, and then I think you'd have something worth working with. 

 

Oh hang on, wow, I found my old files - here. These were based on the old HSK lists. Shame I saved them in alphabetical order rather than that of the list they appeared on. And they're characters.

[sparrow]

Roddy, those lists are awesome. It's not difficult to take those lists and convert them to pinyin with tones, then organize them depending on tone combinations or randomize them. Thanks very much!

 

I'll update the spreadsheet in a few days when I have the time. Thanks.

[Jeremy Andrews]

I've gotten a book to help me learn Mandarin, but I'm still having problems with the neutral tone and tone sandhi in general.

I can sort of follow sentences that don't use the neutral tone, and which don't involve sandhi based on the third tone. Those are the two things that keep throwing me off.

I just can't get used to it. I can hear something that sounds like a second tone, but it's not the same meaning as a second tone. The neutral tone has no consistent sound, and I'm supposed to just adapt to listening for that on the fly as soon as I see what proceeds it.

The whole situation honestly makes it feel like many Chinese words have no consistent meaning, they just change the tones around based on rules, so that you can't rely on a certain sound having a certain meaning, even if spoken with the correct tones. You really have to think hard the whole time you're listening to something. You have to think about pronunciation, you have to think about tones, and you have to calculate how tone sandhi affects a word to even understand the meaning.

It's as if sometimes, different tones change the meaning, but in other cases, different tones still have the same meaning. It's too context-dependent.

Chinese really just seems to pack far too much auditory data into a small space. It reminds me of what happens with a computer when you compress a file too much... you're forced to do a TON of processing before you can read it. That's what this feels like.

I can't even comprehend what I'm hearing well enough to repeat it.

[陳德聰]

The problem is the way in which the information has been presented to you. You learned that "3rd tone" is a certain shape of pitch contour, and so you are miffed when that shape changes as a result of natural speech. Let me draw some parallels from English:

 

tie

water

bat

tree

Above, the letter "t" makes 4 very distinctly different sounds in different phonological contexts. That's even more sounds that the 3rd tone has. The difference between the English "t" phonological changes and the 3rd tone sandhi is that the results of Tone 3 Sandhi are distinct rising and falling tones that are not exactly the same as 2nd tone and 4th tone.

 

好像 hǎoxiàng

The 3rd tone here doesn't sound like what you practiced so hard to hear as 3rd tone, but it also doesn't sound like any other tone!

 

The 3rd-tone-sounds-like-a-2nd-tone tone may be indistinguishable from a 2nd tone (though sometimes it is not as high as a 2nd tone) only ever occurs with a 3rd tone after it. So then the only ambiguous context would be trying to differentiate between 2-3 and 3-3 pairs. I can't think of a lot of words where this actually causes any ambiguity.

 

想法 xiǎngfǎ

I can't think of a word like "xiángfǎ" that would confound this.

It's too context-dependent.

Chinese is a highly contextual language; you're just going to have to live with that.

I don't want to discourage you from your studies, but maybe instead of thinking that Chinese is "too" this and does "too much" that, you can recognize that different languages to different things, and that Chinese people do that "TON of processing" all day every day and get along just fine.