Arghhh tones! Ranting and questions...

[LiLiKe]

Well ok... I Have been studying in china for about 6 months now and am slowly getting to the stage where I am starting to get flow in my chinese.

This is well and fine I guess, but I have recently realized that my chinese are far from good. People that are not my teachers or my friends just doesn't understand what the hell I am saying.

My tones are apparently completly messed. So the last month I have been practising my tones everyday to try to correct my speach.

Today I understood that I have accually not improved at all and that my speech is even worse that before (that is saying a lot!).

I am going to be here for quite some while and cant stand the thought of never being able to get understood...

Ok that was the rant, here comes the questions...

Is it even possible for a person that is basicly tonedeaf to use tones when speaking?

Has anyone of you has any success with first learning toneless chinese and then advancing to using tones?

If you speak a lot of chinese and hear a lot of chinese will the tones come natural or do you have to constantly keep them in mind?

Thanks in advance!

/Lilike

[skylee]

If you speak a lot of chinese and hear a lot of chinese will the tones come natural

I think so, for this is how children learn to speak, I guess.

[TCcookie]

I'm going to venture a baseless theory to your first question, mostly just to see how people respond to it. ;)

I think being "tone-deaf" has nothing to do with speaking tones! Languages naturally evolve for convenience in expression, and I think the large amount of tonal languages out there says something about human capabilities regarding tones. There are "tone-deaf" people in all cultures, so I doubt that the perception of pitch per se has little to do with *language* tone proficiency.

I have noticed as I become more and more used to chinese that volume and stress seem to play as important a role--if not more so than--pitch in tone distinction. I would like to hear what people have to say about this (not meaning to hijack the thread; I think responses would have practical bearings on your questions). I have noticed, paralleling the pure "relative pitch" expression of tones, a "volume" or "emphasis" expression. What do you think?

First tone: Level volume or even stress, of course.

Second tone: Rapid crescendo of volume.

Third tone: This one seems more relative-pitch-dependent than the others...

Fourth tone: Sharp, accented staccato. This one is the "loudest."

[taibeihong]

My own humble opinion: Don't disregard the tones, hoping to switch later from "toneless" to Chinese with tones. Learn them NOW, with every new word you learn. When you hear lots of Chinese and practice it a lot, you will go from the stage of sounding very artificial to sounding more natural IF you have learnt the tones of the words. BUT, IF YOU HAVEN'T, you will be limited to imitating the pronounciation of words people say around you (and you can't be 100% sure you've heard them correctly all the time), you'll still be mispronouncing words you see on paper but haven't heard, and you'll have a horrible time trying to learn at once the tones of the hundreds of words you'll have learned. Maybe you can find a tutor that specialises in teaching how to pronounce and memorise tones?

[JoH]

Lilike, I am tone deaf too, so I sympathise entirely. I am sure that being tone deaf does make a difference when you are learning chinese as a second language, even if it doesn't make a difference for native speaking children. I can't say, even after five years of learning, that my tones are great, but people can understand me - so don't give up hope. ; )

The one thing I am sure of is that you will never improve your tones by practicing single syllables. My recommendation is to take a tape recording of one of the first passages of chinese you learnt (something where you know all the words already) and practice with that... listen to it over and over and try to pick out tone combinations. ie identify all the 2-3 words in the passage and try to compare how they sound, then do the same with all the 3-2 words in the passage etc. Once you have a clear idea what a 2-3 word sounds like, try and pick out others when you hear people speak.

Hopefully you will get to the stage where there are at least some 3-2 (or whatever) words that you can pronounce correctly, then you can use these words as a reference when you learn new ones. It is better, in my experience, to try to match up new words with ones you already know, than with some abstract idea that 'it's a third tone and then a second tone'.

Also, if you find 'trying too hard' makes it worse, don't be afraid to speak 'toneless' chinese sometimes to get your point across. BUt also have some time each day when you practice tones (in whole sentences, or combinations). I think its good to have some 'fluency' practice when you just try to get your message across, as well as some more 'formal' pronounciation practice.

Keep trying anyway, you will get there in the end.

JO

[roddy]

I've been thinking about starting a similar topic. I'm currently going back to scratch on tones, having simply not done it properly the first time round (Note to those beginning: If you are only going to spend a year or so speaking Chinese, don't sweat it. If this is a long term thing though, please, please spend time on it right from the start, because it's a hell of a slap in the face when after almost half a decade of Chinese learning you find yourself going mā má mǎ mà all over again).

I think if there's one time you are going to pay for a Chinese teacher, this should be it - and it needs to be someone who can tell you not just 'Wrong', but 'Wrong, you started too high', or 'Wrong, the two first tones were at different levels', etc.

There aren't just matters of pitch here, but also length and I was interested to see what TCookie wrote about volume, as this was something I was thinking about the other day - I was finding the end of my 二声 sounded awkwardly loud to me, but my tutor was telling me it was spot on. I think the non-pitch aspects of tones are covered only briefly if at all in most introductory textbooks, and it's valuable to get hold of something more advanced on pronunciation, even if only to make you aware of the issues, even if you can't reproduce them accurately (I had no idea until recently that the neutral tone takes on different pitches according to the preceeding tone )

Anyway, to get back to the OP's questions

Is it even possible for a person that is basicly tonedeaf to use tones when speaking?

Yes. If you find it hard to hear your own tones, try something that will give you visual feedback like Voice Print - this gives you real time feedback on where the pitch of your voice is (it's apparently very popular with transvestites who want to learn to speak like women). If you play in a recording of a third tone, you get a classic third tone dip and rise on the screen. You can then fix that on the screen and play your voice in live to try and get your trace on the screen to mimic it. That program is only 10 day shareware, but I may yet fork out the $50 to be able to use it again. The free Speech Analyzer is also great for working with voice files (thanks to Carlo for a tip in an earlier post by him).

Has anyone of you has any success with first learning toneless chinese and then advancing to using tones?

Not yet, but after a year or more of being aware of the problem and just not knowing where to start, I'm starting to tackle it. It's going to be long and painful, but hey - we're not learning Chinese for fun now, are we

If your tones aren't getting any better after the specific practice you mention, I'd look at how you are studying - perhaps the software tools above will help, or if you are studying by yourself you can find a tutor.

If you speak a lot of chinese and hear a lot of chinese will the tones come natural or do you have to constantly keep them in mind?

I've been told that my tones are sometimes accurate. Given that I don't even know what the tones are for most words, I must have picked up the pronunciation. However, it's only sometimes, and I, at least, need to take things a lot more systematically before I can claim to be finished.

A quick, almost off-topic, query to those people who describe themselves as tone-deaf - are you actually, medically, tone deaf? I mean, can you tell the difference between the rising intonation question 'John's coming?' and the falling statement 'John's coming'?

Another quick note - one of the search functions of the HSK Wordlists allows you to pick out words with certain tone patterns. Ie search *1*1 and you will find all words with two first tones - I'm finding this very useful for producing lists of words for pronunciation practice.

[Myriam]

FIRST TONE : Say it at the top of your voice range. Note it remains level.

SECOND TONE : Start at your normal voice range and finish at the top.

THIRD TONE : This is a falling-rising tone. TIP : drop your chin and rise it again.

FOURTH TONE : Start at your normal range and finish at the bottom. TIP : stomp your foot gently.

From :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/start/

[wushijiao]

If you are only going to spend a year or so speaking Chinese, don't sweat it. If this is a long term thing though, please, please spend time on it right from the start, because it's a hell of a slap in the face when after almost half a decade of Chinese learning you find yourself going mā má mǎ mà all over again).

I couldn't agree more. I really wish I had a wacky "Back to the Future" DeLorean to fix this problem. I think my tones are bad because:

1) I didn't work hard enough at the start. I should have been more systematic about it. Communication was my main goal then.

2) I was in Henan, which is Mandarin speaking, but has flatter tones.

3) Probably 40-50% of my time studying Chinese is reading the papers or books. Although reading improves my vocab, reading speed, knowledge of China...etc, it doesn't reinforce tones or correct pronounciation. But that's my fault for not modifying my study habits.

With that said, I wouldn't say that I'm that bad at tones listening-wise. I can usually identify which tone is being said and I find it much easier to understand Chinese people who emphasize their tones. Maybe that has something to do with people using different sentence stress patterns, as TCookie pointed out. I don't know.

Fourth tone: Sharp, accented staccato. This one is the "loudest."

This is certainly true of 大, which to me at least, seems to have its own tone.

[wushijiao]

Has anyone of you has any success with first learning toneless chinese and then advancing to using tones?

By the way, I would also really like to hear what people have to say about this. When studying Spanish I knew a lot of people who at first had very "gringofied" accents, but they were later able to modify it as they became better. I wonder if this is the same as tones, or if this only belongs to pronounciation, as far as Westerners are concerned.

[nipponman]

to the OP:

Is it even possible for a person that is basicly tonedeaf to use tones when speaking?

Has anyone of you has any success with first learning toneless chinese and then advancing to using tones?

If you speak a lot of chinese and hear a lot of chinese will the tones come natural or do you have to constantly keep them in mind?

Thanks in advance!

/Lilike

Not sure about the first one.

Now the second one I can help on. When I began learning chinese, I realized that speaking and writing are linked and that you had to learn the tones with the characters. But I like you wanted to learn the tones later so what I did was kinda dumb, but I learned the character like this 龍: long2 and say long2 (not long in the second tone, but actually long and then the number 2 ) Well, as you might be able to guess, this didn't work out too well, and I eventually realized, you must get the tones right from the start. You can't seperate these intrinsically related elements of the language and learn them seperately. If you were successful at this, you have more problems than solutions.

Everyday, ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4, but ma5 is hard. Because as roddy says, it can change based on what is before it and I still don't get it.

I think I have trouble with the 3rd tone because when I say dei3, the only dei in the language, my friend says that it is third tone not fourth.

On a side note, I am surprised that some chinese pronounce 逮 as dei4, not as dai4. hope that helped a little.

[roddy]

Because as roddy says, it can change based on what is before it and I still don't get it.

It was news to me. Here's what my 汉语普通话语音教程 (新疆版 ） has to say about it.

Using the 1-5 notation, with 1 being the lowest pitch and 5 the highest. . .

A first tone is a steady 5. A 轻声 (and note that the Chinese is 轻 - ie light, not neutral as it is often translated) after a first tone is a 2 (but the 轻声 is very brief - it's shown on the graph here as a dot, not a line - and doesn't move up or down at all.

2nd tone is 3 rising to 5, and the following 轻声 is a 3

Now with the third tone (and I'm starting to think the third tone is akin to Santa Claus and free lunches - nice idea, but there's no such thing) it gets silly. The third tone in isolation is 214. However, as it's followed by the 轻声 it becomes 21 and never gets up to 4. And the tone of the 轻声？4, of course.

Fourth tone is 51, the following 轻声 a 1. That at least is simple enough.

I think, now I know this, that I can hear it in slow speech. However, I'm probably fooling myself.

I think we may have had a topic on the changing 轻声 before - can anyone find it?

Roddy

PS If anyone's interested, the ISBN of this book is 7-5619-1110-6, from BLCU press. I'm not sure how many editions for different ethnic / language groups there are, but this Xinjiang edition has some analysis of the difference between Uighur and Chinese, which I haven't read because its of absolutely no interest to me.

[JoH]

to those people who describe themselves as tone-deaf - are you actually, medically, tone deaf?

Well, I have to admit I have never actually been medically confirmed as tone deaf, no. I can tell when someone's asking a question (in English I mean), but I'm not sure that if I didn't already know that questions rise at the end, I'd be able to tell you what was happening to the tone, if that makes sense?

I can tell when two tones are different if they are said straight after one another, but I generally couldn't tell you whether one was higher than the other or whatever. For instance, when I say a new word wrong in chinese class, my teacher will often repeat the word back to me, and I'll then repeat it back to him, getting it more or less right. But then I still couldn't tell you which tones we've both just used. (OK, maybe if it was 1-1 or 4-4, but that would be it.)

I appreciate that this might not make me technically tone deaf, but just crap at chinese.

Thanks for the voice print link by the way Roddy, I've been looking for something like that for a while.

[nipponman]

aiya! I hope this information is not required!

[carlo]

Have I said this already? Those of you who are studying in China should check

汉语语音教程, by 曹文, BLCU (ISBN: 7-5619-1057-6).

which is up to now the best I've seen. From easy to advanced, in one book.

The problem with tones is that they are usually not taught well, so it's easy to reinforce bad habits through practice. The interaction between stress, rhythm (prosody) sentence intonation and tones in Chinese hasn't been fully worked out, and recent research developments haven't reached textbooks for foreign learners yet. A great place to start is the home page of one of the gurus in the field, Prof. Shen Jiong at Beijing Uni (http://chinese.pku.edu.cn/yuyinyj/shenjiong.htm), which is also a contributor on 北大中文论坛。Note his one paper in English.

As any non-native speaker of English will tell you, it's as difficult to develop a reasonable approximation of English intonation (complete with primary and secondary stresses) as it is to master Chinese tones in connected speech. Some people put a lot of effort into it, some people don't, but to put it bluntly 'toneless Chinese' sounds a great deal like broken English.

There are quite a few programs out there for voice analysis that are cheaper than Voice Vista / VoicePrint. SFS Speech Filing System has a weird interface (like Praat) but it's quite powerful, and free. Wavesurfer is also free, and easy to use. My current favourite is Speech Analyzer, by SIL: very stable and versatile. The full version sells for about US$20 IIRC.

[roddy]

recent research developments haven't reached textbooks for foreign learners yet

I've heard of these, although only in passing. Will be interesting to see how these filter through.

Thanks for the software tips, I'll be having a look at those.

Roddy

[Altair]

Is it even possible for a person that is basicly tonedeaf to use tones when speaking?

As far as I am aware, "tone deaf" is a phrase that refers to people who have great difficulty in matching and recognizing pitches as well as in carrying a tune. I do not think it is truly a medical condition.

Standard English actually has far more tones than the four or five that are conventionally attibuted to Mandarin syllables. If you can speak English, you can reproduce and recognize tones. The problem is that the use and distribution of tones in English and Chinese is dramatically different. The problem is not in our ears or throats, but in our minds. This can make it quite a difficult problem.

Also, remember that tone-deaf five-year-old Chinese kids probably do fine with tones. Figuring them out has little directly to do with intelligence or an individual's inherent speech apparatus.

Has anyone of you has any success with first learning toneless chinese and then advancing to using tones?

I agree with the consensus that this probably a very bad idea. Toneless Chinese would probably be like reading vowel-less English. W--ld p--pl- b- -bl- t- m-k- d- w-th--t th-m? (Would people be able to make do without them?) Perhaps, but your spelling would probably never recover, and the people on the receiving end would not be very happy interacting with you or your words for long. Missing a tone here or th-r- is usually no b-g deal, but every so often you will take a sh?t at a tone , get it wrong, and leave your listeners in tears laughing.

If you speak a lot of chinese and hear a lot of chinese will the tones come natural or do you have to constantly keep them in mind?

I think this depends on the person. The problem with learning languages as adults is that we do not begin with a "blank slate." But this is also our advantage over children. All said and done, I think that adults and children learn language at about the same rate, but they learn very different things and have very different problems in the learning process. Mere contact with Chinese can help teach tones in the same way that children learn them, but conscious and unconscious preconceptions about language and what sounds and feels "right" more often than not prevents adults from learning tones merely by "osmosis."

When we try to copy sounds in a foreign language, we think that we are acting as tape recorders, but this is very rarely the case, unless a person has had training or makes an extraordinary effort. What we generally do instead is try to match up sounds we hear with what is in our previously learned repertoire of sounds and then reproduce that version. This version will be an incomplete match with what we actually heard and perceived.

First tone: Level volume or even stress, of course.

Second tone: Rapid crescendo of volume.

Third tone: This one seems more relative-pitch-dependent than the others...

Fourth tone: Sharp, accented staccato. This one is the "loudest."

If you got this on your own, you are really quite perceptive. What the linguists say is the following:

First tone: medium length with a level volume

Second tone: medium length with steady increase in volume

Third tone (in isolation): relatively long length with an increase in volume as the pitch drops, followed by a rapid decrease as the pitch bounces back up

Fourth tone: short length with a rapid decrease in volume.

First tone:

Imagine a five-year-old girl asks her dad if she has been good and asks her dad for an ice cream cone. He has been saying no all day, but now wants to signal that he is proud of her and wants to say yes. He fakes that he is giving deep consideration to the request and says: "Well....okay." The "well" will probably be said with the equivalent of the first tone.

First and fourth tone:

Imagine you hear incredible news that actually believe. You signal both your surprise and your belief by saying: "No way." The "no" will probably be said with the equivalent of the first tone. The "way" will probably be said with the equivalent of the fourth tone.

Second tone:

Your sixteen-year-old has denied eating the last of your birthday chocolate. You gentle take hold of his hands and turn over his chocolate-covered palms and say: "Well?....Can you explain these?" The "well" and "these" will probably be said with the equivalent of the second tone, at least in American English. With "British" English, the sentence might well be said with something approaching the Chinese question intonation. This would begin the sentence with a higher than normal picth and then have a sharp, but slight drop in pitch.

Third and fourth tone:

You want to race your friend in friendly way, but are afraid he will blatantly cheat and start running too early. You crack a broad smile and begin a slow, drawn out countdown, giving an exaggerated pronunciation to each word as if forcing your friend to confirm that there is no confusion as to which words you are saying or why you are saying them. You eye him closely the whole time, saying: "One..., two...., three...., go!" The words "one," "two," and "three" may be said with an approximation of the Mandarin third tone. "Go" would be said with something equivalent to the fourth tone. The fourth tone basically corresponds to a barking command tone in English.

The one thing I am sure of is that you will never improve your tones by practicing single syllables. My recommendation is to take a tape recording of one of the first passages of chinese you learnt (something where you know all the words already) and practice with that... listen to it over and over and try to pick out tone combinations. ie identify all the 2-3 words in the passage and try to compare how they sound, then do the same with all the 3-2 words in the passage etc. Once you have a clear idea what a 2-3 word sounds like, try and pick out others when you hear people speak.

I think this is an excellent idea for two reasons. First, producing isolated tones, recognizing isolated tones, using tones in connected speech, and recognizing tones in connected speech are actually four quite different skills. Starting off with the first two is probably wise, but it is insufficient. Using tricks like the ones I mention above can help to produce and recognize tones in isolation, but they do poorly in connected speech since the use and meanings of English tones and Mandarin tones is entirely different. Context is everything.

If you still have difficulty with tones, try this. If you can say the "no....way" I described above, try reversing the order of the words without changing the tones. It will probably be exceedingly difficult, unless you rely on knowledge of Mandarin. If you have difficulty, try saying the phrase twice in succession several times (i.e., "no way" "no way") and then gradually drop out the first "no" and the last "way." The "way...no" that results is something that should have a very Mandarin-sounding intonation and with the same tones of a word like 客厅 ke4 ting1.

There are two important problems learning tones from textbooks. First, linguists have actually not figured out how they work in complete detail. (They actually have similar problems with the concept of "stress" and "rhythm," even in a well-studied language like English.) That means that any description of tones that is under twenty pages in length and without copious footnotes is leaving something out. Even if you learn what is known or what you are willing to stomach, you will have to rely on using and hearing the language to fill in the gaps by osmosis.

What Roddy posted about 1 to 5 notation is also what the linguists say, but the pitches are actually independent of neutral tones (轻声). Here is a condensed version.

First one: 55

Second tone: 35

Third tone: 214

Fourth tone: 41

The next layer of analysis says that some of these tones change when they precede or follow other tones. This is called tone sandhi. (Sandhi is a word that comes from Sanskrit that means something like "putting together")

In order of importance, the main rules of tone change (i.e., tone sandhi) are as follows:

1. A third tone preceding anything but a pause or another third tone becomes a "half third tone," pronounced only with the 21 drop and without any rise in pitch at the end.

2. A third tone preceding another word that is listed in the dictionary as a third-tone word is pronounced in the second tone, unless they are separated by a pause. (e.g., 很好 hen3 hao3 > hen2 hao3)

3. A second tone (whether originally a second tone or a third tone) can be pronounced as a first tone if it follows a first or second tone and precedes any of the four tones within the same spoken phrase. (e.g., 谁能来 shei2 neng2 lai2 > shei2 neng1 lai2)

4. A fourth tone that precedes another fourth tone in the same spoken phrase does not drop all the way to the bottom.

The next layer of analysis concerns neutral tones (轻声). Full tones are pronounced with stress, but the neutral tone is not. This means that it is usually short in duration. In isolated words or phrase, it does not occur as the first syllable of a word or phrase. Its pitch depends on the syllable that precedes it. Here are the rules (Remember that full tones need at least two numbers because of their length, while the neutral tone needs only one):

After a first tone, the neutral tone is half-low (i.e., 552), as in 他的 ta1 de5).

After a second tone, the neutral tone is middle (i.e., 353), as in 红的 hong2 de5).

After a third tone, the neutral tone is half-high (i.e., 214), as in 我的 wo3 de5).

After a fourth tone, the neutral tone is low (i.e., 511), as in 大的 da4 de).

The next layer of analysis is that only stressed syllables get their full tonal values and as many as 50% of the syllables in a typical sentence have reduced stress or are unstressed. The rules for what to do with these less stressed syllables seem to be extremely complex. Textbooks deal with this issue by urging students to pronounce Chinese with the meaning in mind, rather than as isolated syllables. This variation in stress is also realized in changes in rhythm, volume, and the length of syllables.

[nipponman]

Eloquently done, Altair! I didn't know the 3rd and 4th tone sandhi.

nipponman

[trevelyan]

Today I understood that I have accually not improved at all and that my speech is even worse that before (that is saying a lot!).

Relax. Six months isn't much time at all, and what is probably happening is just that you're being more self-conscious and that's affecting the smoothness of your speech. It doesn't mean your accent is worse.

The best thing to do in these kinds of situations is just to find a wall and punch it.

[Lorenzo]

I find it helpful to think of the first tone as the sound of ringing a bell. It resonates for a second at a high pitch.

I'm a little confused by what some of you have said about the fourth tone. Listening to my teacher, what I perceived was a sound that was shorter in duration--as someone said above, "clipped" or "staccato"--but my teacher said that was not a good perception. She said it has the same duration as the other tones, it's just that it sounds shorter because it is falling.

If it makes any other beginners feel better, I am having a very difficult time with tones as well. My teacher will ask me to repeat what she says, I will diligently repeat it and believe it sounded just as she pronounced it, and of course she will say I didn't get it correct and we will do it again. I will say it again, and it will sound the same again, and she will again tell me I didn't get it and make us do it again. At some point, though I still think I am saying it exactly the way I first said it, she will finally say, "good" and move on. What did I do differently on the third attempt?--I will never know. Very frustrating.

[channamasala]

but hey - we're not learning Chinese for fun now, are we

i am...