Starting to speak-Advice

[deremifri]

As my Chinese grows I find myself able to come up with vocabulary which allows me to convey my thougts. However, while practicing with my Chinese friend (who very very fortunately takes great pleasure in correcting me), I very often get to hear that what I said was very comprehensible but still sounded weird. Athough usually a better alternative is suggested, I am still in the dark as for why what I said was wrong. This is increasingly getting me frustrated and dissatisfied.

Is this normal? I usually learn by looking up vocabulary during reading or listening. Often I memorize only the words without the context so this might be the cause here.

 

A simple example:

I wanted to express that I study very often:

我通常学习。

I dont remember what the correct way would have been, but to me there is no grammatical point why the above sentence would be wrong.

 

How can I remember the correct usage of words? Should I not speak so much in order to avoid fossilization and instead try to focus on memorizing whole sentences?

 

[lyun]

In Chinese ，经常as usual / usually / often　通常ordinary/normal/ usually/regular, they have the silimar meaning,but  there are a little different  between them. you don't focus on grammatical point, you can  read a lot of Chinese newspaper,gradually you will see the difference.

[li3wei1]

Quite often there is no easily explainable reason why one thing sounds normal and the other doesn't. If there is, it may take a native speaker, who's never thought about, some time and effort to try to explain it to you. Sometimes there is no reason at all, it's just the way it is. For instance, it's grammatically correct to say "I frequently study", but it doesn't sound as normal and natural as "I study very often". Can you explain why? Would such an explanation be of use to a student of English?

 

I'd say, just keep talking with your friend, accept his corrections, and you'll gradually start sounding more native.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I think it is a very common situation. As li3wei1 pointed out, our respective mother tongues are full of such rules, too, we're just not so aware of them. It's not really "grammar rules", I believe, but rather the endlessly more difficult art of speaking well
 

How long have you been studying Chinese, and how? Maybe you're just not getting enough listening input yet?

[Nathan Mao]

Active skills are always more difficult than passive.

 

Speaking less will not help.  Waiting until you have complete, perfect sentences will not help (because you will lack flexibility).

 

The most important thing, to me, in language is communication.  If you can get your point across, who cares if it sounds a little stilted?  You're speaking a foreign language!  You are already ahead of at least 80% of people in the world.

 

So keep speaking.  Keep making mistakes.  Pay attention to how other people say the same concepts you are trying to say.

 

This is where finding Chinese pop music that you enjoy is extremely helpful: if you study the lyrics from Chinese pop music until you understand them, then listen to an hour every day, you will be hearing correct grammar over and over and over until you get a sense of how to say things.  The limits are that sometimes the lyrics are poetic and not what people said, and that the topics are somewhat limited...not many songs about getting your car fixed, for instance.  But word order, common grammar patterns, set phrases...these are all things you pick up by listening to natural language materials.  Music gives you the repetition without feeling like as much work.

[deremifri]

@Ruben:

 

I have been studying Chinese for a year now with varying degrees of intensity. I tried out several methods: textbooks, chinesepod, picking up the language while staying in the country. The audio input I have been getting was actually rather big, but most of it was incomprehensible to me.

The method I eventually settled on is listening to already familiar audiobooks in Chinese while looking up words from the text at the same time. I usually save the words I look up with perapera (pop up dictionary).

 

@Nathan Mao: I see the point in listening to a certain segment over and over, however I am unsure if music is the right choice here. Assuming the word order is not only correct but also natural, most of the words are just pronunced wrong since the tones are missing. I do not want to internalize not correct pronunciation. Does rap music (if it exists) conserve the tones?

[Ruben von Zwack]

 

Does rap music (if it exists) conserve the tones?

 

To my knowledge, no. The only Chinese pop (rather: rock, indie...) musicians that I am aware of who preserve the tones (to a degree) are Secondhand Rose:

. When you switch off the English subs, you can see the Chinese ones.

[Nathan Mao]

In my opinion, tones are overrated.  They are one aspect of pronunciation, but not an indispensable one. 

Can you understand a Chinese person speaking English even if they pronounce all "th"s as "s"?  Of course.  In extremely rare circumstances, you might suffer momentary confusion whether they meant to say "think" or "sink".  99% of the time it is no problem.

It's the same way with tones.  If you are giving a one word answer to something, whether you use the correct tone or not might make a difference if the topic was sufficiently ambiguous.  99% of the time, however, Chinese speakers will understand what you mean.

 

You can slow down your fluidity significantly by trying to get every tone exactly correct.  Instead, listen to the way Chinese speak.  Match their flow.  I guarantee you: if you follow tones exactly when saying "好好儿的“, you won't sound correct. 

 

That doesn't mean to not study tones.  Study, memorize, drill tones very hard for the first few years.  But you will actually sound more Chinese by modeling how Chinese speak more than ensuring you have all the tones 100% correct.

 

So back to music: Can Chinese people understand most of what is being sung, even without tones?　Absolutely.  That is in indication of the relative importance of tones, or lack thereof. Context matters more.

 

Final thought: Your initial issue was that your word choice wasn't appropriate.  Listening to music (or even better: reading and/or singing along with Chinese music videos) helps with that.  If you decide tones are more important to you than to me, work on them separately.  There is nothing about studying lyrics that hinders tone learning, just little that helps, either.

[Nathan Mao]

Let me emphasize what I said previously:

Music gives you plenty of necessary repetition without feeling like work. Since it doesn't feel like work, you can do more of it without feeling worn out.  That leaves you more time for other Chinese practice. Win-win.

 

It's unavoidable: Repetition is really the only way to improve.  You have to work on language so much that most of your comprehension and use is automatic. Like practicing the same kung-fu move over and over and over and over and over and over and over until it is dull and dry as dust and you would rather do anything than another front kick...but then when you get in a stressful situation, your body reacts and you respond so fluidly that you really couldn't do an incorrect front kick in that situation if you tried.  That's when you see the mind-numbing repetition pays off.

 

That's where you want to be in Chinese.  Right now, you are still at the point where it is still a little awkward to use the language.  Repetition is the best way to get it to be fluid, natural, and correct.  I was just trying to offer a way to make it easier to get in more repetition.

[deremifri]

@Ruben von Zwack:

 

Thank you. This is amazing. How on earth does this only have 249 views?

 

@Nathan: You are very right, mimicking the way native speakers speak is of course the best method. However, this does not equal speaking without tones.

I guess it just depends at what you are aiming at. When it comes to English, I do not consider my pronunciation to be important because it is just not so interesting to me. However, I have a different attitude towards Chinese. I like the musical aspect and the tones, although they are hard, and I would like to be able to produce them.

At any rate, the usual reasoning "communication is the most important thing" is obviously true, and tones or a correct pronunciation in general will help you to get the meaning across much more efficiently.

Nobody advises an English learner to write:

"Me not like tones"

Each his own. In general, music is not so much my cup of tea, anyway.

[abcdefg]

In my opinion, tones are overrated.  They are one aspect of pronunciation, but not an indispensable one.

I used to secretly agree with that heresy, but I've recently "got religion." New teacher is beating my up about my tones, and what she says makes sense.

 

I now think that the tones are often as important as, or even more important than the initial and final sounds in a word, especially in normal or rapid speech. Admittedly, I cannot quote a scholarly source for that opinion, and "My teacher sez" doesn't carry a whole lot of academic weight.

 

Agree, however, that they are not the only ingredient in good pronunciation.

[Nathan Mao]

[shrug]

I can pass for native Chinese on the phone, and have been able to for a few years now.

But if you made me turn a paragraph of Chinese into pinyin + tones, I'd probably get less than 30% correct.

Then again, I am a musician with a pretty good ear.  And I did obsess over tones for my first two years of study.  Maybe the advice to de-emphasize tones should only be for advanced speakers?

 

I do know that I listened to some pop music yesterday that I had not listened to in 4-5 years.  The last time I heard the songs I understood maybe 10%.  This time I listened for comprehension of meaning and got 80%, without tones at all (because it was being sung).

 

But people are different.  Maybe what works for me works ONLY for me.

[jmido8]

I thought tones were pointless until I went to China and literally no one understood anything I was saying. I was even ignorant enough to think it was just Chinese people dismissing me as a foreigner and not listening hard enough. However, a friend convinced me of the importantance of tones and after spending months of 1v1's with a teacher relearning the tones, this problem has mostly disappeared. My tones still aren't great by any means and i'm still working on them but it's nice not having to repeat myself 50 times and end up pulling out my dictionary to show people every word i'm trying to say.

[Wang2014]

I ran into the same problem as you when I really started speaking in Chinese. I assume you don't want to "just get your point across", but that you want to speak as closely as to a native as possible.

 

Vocabulary and Grammar definitely help out your speaking, but there is also something that only natives can give you, which is, the feel of the language. Spend as much time as possible with natives, ask them to correct you any time you make a mistake, write down what their suggestion is, and then try to use it that week until it becomes natural. And massive input, both passive and active. Reading loads often helps me internalise different patterns and use them as a native would.

[Demonic_Duck]

I can pass for native Chinese on the phone, and have been able to for a few years now.

But if you made me turn a paragraph of Chinese into pinyin + tones, I'd probably get less than 30% correct.

Then again, I am a musician with a pretty good ear.  And I did obsess over tones for my first two years of study.  Maybe the advice to de-emphasize tones should only be for advanced speakers?

If you've successfully internalised tones well enough that you can produce them correctly without thinking (and thus have trouble reproducing that knowledge on a theoretical level), that's great. However, clearly tones are important, and if you ignore them at an early stage, you will suffer for it. By all means, internalise the process of learning tones as a part of pronunciation ("宝" is pronounced "bǎo", not "bao with a third tone"), and if that gets to the point where it's second-nature and you barely need to think about it, great. But for the love of God, don't claim that this is evidence that tones don't matter!

 

Does rap music (if it exists) conserve the tones?

 

To my knowledge, no. The only Chinese pop (rather: rock, indie...) musicians that I am aware of who preserve the tones (to a degree) are Secondhand Rose:

In fact, rap music generally conserves the tones pretty well, as it's essentially rhythmic speaking, without a sung melody. Having said that, my knowledge of Chinese rap music is basically restricted to MC Hotdog (Taiwanese rapper, stupid name but the music's fun if you're into that style).

 

Secondhand Rose are a simply incredible band and I can't recommend them enough, though their singing style is very unlike normal speech. In many of their songs they do utilise a very interesting "speak-singing" style which does preserve the majority of tonal information. From a language-learning point of view, what this means is that (to take an example from the song posted) you can learn that "繁忙" is "fánmáng", but not how you would pronounce this in normal speech.

 

This isn't by any means to put you off learning Chinese via 二手玫瑰 though - their songs also contain lots of cool, interesting, and often a little bit rude colloquial vocabulary items (particularly ones from north-eastern dialect (东北话)). Not for bread-and-butter learning, but will certainly add spice to your Chinese.

[tysond]

I just recently discovered MC 热狗 and despite the ridiculous name, and kind of cheesy feel, I really enjoy the music.  

 

Cannot stress enough the importance of tones.  If you just want to order a beer at a bar, it doesn't really matter.  

You are at a bar, there's not much else you could be asking for, and every other foreigner is using beginner Chinese to do the same thing.

 

If you want to order a mixed drink or a cocktail, you are losing context rapidly...

Every error will cause confusion, and it multiplies with each error.

It's better to over-pronounce than be misunderstood (at first).  Later on you can take shortcuts based on context.

 

My litmus test is taxi navigation.  My wife's strategy is simple - name a very well known landmark and 左拐， 右拐 from there.  

She has a near photographic memory for city streets so it works for her.

 

I prefer to state the actual name of the building and address, because I want to practice speaking clearly.

If you mess up the tones, you will struggle enormously... particularly in Beijing (not so bad in Shanghai in my experience).

On a good day the driver will think for a bit, repeat what you say correctly, emphasizing the correction, and ask for your confirmation.

 

Even then, there is a rhythm of how to pronounce the address that goes even beyond tones.

If you mess up the rhythm you might get them repeating what you say with the right rhythm, then they will drive.

 

Get it all right, tones, rhythm and initials/finals (least important)... and the driver will say nothing, drive off, and you'll arrive precisely at your destination.

Friends will be impressed, because you are actually speaking Chinese, not using pidgin Chinese to achieve your result.

[abcdefg]

My litmus test is taxi navigation.

 

Agree that's a good one.

 

Even then, there is a rhythm of how to pronounce the address that goes even beyond tones.

 

Seems we all make more or less the same discoveries, just at different points along the path.

[Adam_CLO]

If you're fortunate enough to be living in a Chinese speaking area, one great way to learn how to "speak the way natives to" is to listen to how they answer common questions and use the same sentence patterns. If you do that enough times, you'll find yourself unconsciously using words and phrases that you heard others use and that you feel "sound right" in the current situation.

 

For example if you were standing in line at a fast food restaurant, while you are rehearsing what you want to say to the cashier when it's your turn, you may hear others do their ordering. They may be using words, expressions and sentence patterns that you weren't planning to use. Try to use those in your order. Once those patterns become natural to you, expand to other patterns that you hear others use.