Accent improvement: more natural-sounding tones

[Tamu]

I've been working a lot recently on improving my accent in Chinese. I wanted to share what I've found and get feedback and ideas from everyone.

I want to focus specifically in this post on the practical issues I've come across in producing natural-sounding tones.

 

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I've been shadowing the speech of native speakers. I use TV shows and documentaries a bit, but my main source until now has been people I record myself. In the last few months, I've been having around 30 hours each week of in-person conversation.  Private tutors are a third to half of that; the rest comes from random people I meet in cafes, restaurants and internet. I've been recording the conversations. Afterwards, I go through the recordings, drill new vocab and constructions, and analyse their speech. I pick out interesting sentences, snip them out, and then practice mimicking each sentence hundreds to thousands of times.

It's a well-known idea I've seen called shadowing, mimicking, imitating, merging, echoing. It's a really powerful technique. I've read several posters here report great success using it with Chinese. The idea is to work on each little part of a sentence in extreme detail until it's right, move on and do the same with the each successive part of the sentence, then put it all together until you perfectly match every aspect of the original recording.  Do this with one sentence, then another sentence, then another sentence, over and over and over, thousands of times. Gradually the language's speech patterns become internalized and your speech becomes significantly more natural.  I've done it before with other languages. My experience is that it can seem boring and brute-force, and it requires a steady and pretty obsessive long-term commitment, but it really works: it's very effective at internalizing natural, native-sounding speech patterns. It's also the main and best way I've found to massively improve and internalize non-pronunciation components of language like grammar patterns, word choice, etc.

I record my shadowing and listen to myself. But my ability to perceive small variations in Chinese speech is not precise enough so I use the computer to analyse and try to get the graphs of my speech to exactly match theirs.

I started using (mainly) Praat and (less so) SpeakGoodChinese. Praat especially has been a great help. I've found it's a bit of an art sometimes to get analysis of Chinese which is practical for improving one's own speech, so I've worked a lot at getting a good set-up for Chinese. Regarding tones specifically, the visual feedback from tone graphs has really helped me progress; otherwise I'd just be flying blind about very subtle differences.

I also play for the people I meet both the speech of other native speakers of different backgrounds, as well as speech from foreigners speaking Chinese, then listen to native speakers' comments describing the accent. By comparing their descriptions of the speech with the computer tone graphs, I've gotten a better feel for native speakers' perceptions. I've found that their perception of speech isn't always what I would guess based on the computer's acoustic analysis, so listening to their descriptions has helped me align my own perception to better match theirs. It's also helped me to start to understand a little the complexities of the sociological/cultural associations different people make with different ways of speaking.

Fwiw, this whole exercise just leaves me more in awe of the human language ability. The level of detail which the average native speaker I meet can hear and describe is phenomenal. Knowing how precise are their perceptions really motivates me to keep improving.

Recording conversations and working on mimicking native Chinese speakers' speech in this way has done wonders for my Chinese skills in non-pronunciation areas.

But for pronunciation, I found that shadowing full sentences was not working for me as well as I wanted. The level of the sentences was not too difficult in non-pronunciation terms: I was able to both understand the native speakers' sentences at normal conversation speed and create similar, understandable ones myself. But I found that the lexical tones of Chinese were really hindering my progress at using this technique to improve my accent.

The problem for me is that a Chinese tone incorporates BOTH lexical information AND all the other functions that non-tonal language intonation has. Chinese is the first tonal language I've studied. When I analysed my own speech, I found that my non-tonal brain was great at mimicking the features of Chinese which also exist in non-tonal languages like the speed, syllable timing, changes in loudness, and overall rhythm/flow. But the tones of my individual syllables were rarely natural in pitch/contour.

I found two types of fundamental problems related to producing tones:

- For about 10% of words, in my mind I thought I was producing a tone correctly, but the actual tone I produced was lexically flat-out wrong or was not clear enough. E.g., I know a syllable should be 2nd tone, I truly "felt" that I'm saying 2nd tone... but what I actually produced ended up in reality as kinda-sorta 3rd tonish, kinda-sorta 2nd tonish. When I said a word slowly or there was enough context, native speakers could figure it out, but in normal speech or in my shadowing practice, I was often just flat-out wrong.

- In another 50% of words, I found issues where my tones were "lexically accurate" in the sense that they were good enough to be understood, but they were not good enough to be natural-sounding. It made my speech weird, and besides being a bad accent, the weirdness often gave people the wrong impression of my mood, attitude, emphasis, etc.

I had fallen into the trap of thinking that I'd already mostly gotten my tones "right" and could move on to "higher" pronunciation issues of overall intonation, rhythm and stress. I was already having long conversations in Chinese and native speakers understood what I said with seemingly no problem. I also did little tests saying characters in isolation, so that there was no context to rely on, and native speakers could also correctly understood what I said with no problem. So I thought I was fine.

It's really obvious in hindsight, but it turns out I was stupidly making the assumption that a tone is either "right" or "wrong". But of course that's not the case: it's a continuum from "utterly incomprehensible" to "high level native". My speech was comprehensible in lexical terms, and I was gaining "fluency" in the sense of speaking more smoothly... but it was "fluency" in my own weird language, conveying moods, emphasis and impressions I don't want. And since I couldn't hear the differences, I wasn't correcting myself, and all my speaking and shadowing practice was reinforcing and fossilizing these understandable-but-weird tones.

Everyone's goals are different, but in my case I think it's a really fun challenge to improve my pronunciation as much as possible. So I went back to scratch to work on getting my basic tones to match the real-world tones which native Chinese speakers produce in spontaneous speech. The topic of "real-world tones" opens up a huge number of complicated linguistic and social issues and has really given me more insight about the culture, history and language. But for this post, I'm just focused as much as possible specifically on ideas and questions about the practical issue of accent improvement as a foreign learner.

 

 

English intonation as a proxy for Chinese tones
Textbooks use the moods of English intonation to describe Chinese tones: 2nd tone = English questioning, 4th tone = English scolding, etc. 

 

It's an obvious observation, but I've realized that English tones to indicate mood are definitely not the same as Chinese lexical tones. As a first approximation, English tones get you in the right area, so I understand why it's easier just to teach it this way. The concept of Chinese lexical tones is so hard for non-tonal speakers that getting close at all is often good enough. And it's so hard for learners to hear the details of Chinese tones that English "mood tones" are what we often think we're hearing anyway. But when I analysed my own tones speaking English, I found they are vastly different than Chinese tones in every way: pitch range, contour/shape, change in loudness, everything. And importantly, the same "mood" in English has quite different tone variations based on the subtleties of what the speaker wants to express, so it's hard to even know which exact English "mood" to say in order to get a Chinese tone.

For example, the graph below shows the tone when I say "really?" 5 different times. Each time is a question, but each has a different mood that every native English speaker would very easily perceive. I only did 5 examples, but I could have done a dozen more variations, each with its own nuance. The 5 below are roughly in order of increasing incredulity, but each has its own shade of exasperation, frustration, positive surprise, negative surprise:

The graph below shows the same tones juxtaposed against a Chinese speaker with similar vocal range to me saying the word 无聊 wúliáo in a natural conversation [My speech is the blue line on white background; the native speaker is the orange line on black background. The scale is the same in both.]:

There are resemblances between some of my English "really?" tones and the Chinese 2nd tone, but the differences are big. Even if I can remember and reproduce which exact mix of emotion in an English question word represents the best proxy for a Chinese 2nd tone, I still found that the differences in pitch and contour are so big that Chinese speakers instantly hear it as weird. Starting point, ending point, contour... all different. And that's before tackling the issue that Chinese tones themselves vary in pitch and contour based on emphasis, mood, etc.

I learned 4th tone as being similar to "scolding, commanding". But at least in my own English speech, I found the same problem of determining which exact English emotion I'm supposed to say to approximate Chinese 4th tone. Here are 5 variations of me saying "No!" in a harsh scolding tone. The second and fourth are the closest to a feeling of "really angry and commanding":



This is very basic stuff, but for me at my basic levels it really was a revelation to see on the computer the differences which Chinese speakers were hearing.
 

 
Musical tones
I have no musical ability at all.

 

I'm not "tone deaf"; truly tone-deaf people have trouble hearing emotional prosody in their native language (interesting research here on this effect). But I can't exaggerate how bad my singing is. I found this is a major problem in trying to mimic the lexical tones of native Chinese speakers. So I used the computer to measure my vocal range in normal English speech and the vocal range of Chinese speakers who have more or less my voice register. Based on that, I plotted out where in my register a normal 1st tone should be, where a normal 4th tone must start, where 2nd tone starts and ends, the bottom of 3rd tone. Then I did voice training by using a computer piano to drill myself to sing that tone.

The process I used was to have the computer replicate the tone-only of native speakers' real-world tone contours. I used all the 2-syllable tone combos. From the conversations I'd recorded, I picked out several samples of each tone combo from several different native speakers. My idea was to get used both to inter-speaker variance in how different speakers' produce the same tone, and to intra-speaker variance in how the same speaker produces the same tone in different ways at different times.  The computer played them as tones only, i.e. not as words but just as a musical tone. Then I tried to sing along with them as exactly as possible. Over and over and over.

I found that hearing it as a musical tone only, without words attached to it, helped a lot. (It also helped that I could listen to and then analyse the same tone/tone-combo hundreds of times in a row, day after day; no native speaker would have enough patience and concentration to bear with me through that lol). I didn't say any words, just sang an "ah" along with the music. My idea was to really try to gain an understanding of where my pitch levels are, to get the physical ability to instantly match many different contours and pitch levels of the same tone combo, and to get the intuitive "feel" for it mentally and acoustically. Using the pitch-analysis software to record and analyse myself, it took a few hours each day for about 4 weeks to reach the point that I can get very close to matching the right pitches and contours on my own without using the virtual piano.

I'd imagine this was much harder both in time and effort for me than it would be for learners who are more musical... or who can at least sing a tune lol. I'd be curious how other learners have dealt with this issue. In particular, have you found that music/singing background significantly help in both hearing and producing natural-sounding real-world tones?

Fwiw, there's an interesting effect described here that native speakers of tonal languages are significantly better at recognizing music tones without reference notes ("perfect pitch"). All this tone work showed me why!


Specific issues I encountered in saying words:
 

 

Initials
I found that in many Chinese syllables which begin with consonants, I made a pitch change which was very short in time but very large in pitch.

Here's a graph my pronunciation of 天 tiān. As my tongue and mouth start to form the initial "t", my pitch is very high, then somewhere as the "t" is ending and the vowel is starting, I very quickly settle into whatever pitch it should be.

In this case, it's about .015 seconds from the high tone until it settles in to the main pitch. Not enough that I noticed when listening to my own speech, but enough that Chinese speakers easily notice. Chinese speakers don't produce perfectly smooth textbook graphs in real speech, and I actually observed this same effect in native speakers' speech. But their version was very different than what I was producing. Mine was longer in duration, greater in pitch variation, and occurred more frequently. Because of the feeling of a drop in pitch from high-to-low at the start of the word, people told me that it gives a 3rd-tone flavor to 2nd-tones that can occasionally cause understanding issues. With 1st tones, it sometimes gives a 4th-tone flavor, sometimes  doesn't cause any understanding issues, but in any case definitely is odd. 3rd and 4th tones aren't affected as much because they're supposed to have an initial drop, but my drop was way too much and sounded weird.

Most of the cases I found were like this tian example, dropping from a very high pitch down to the tone of the word. In a few cases, it was the opposite, rising from a low pitch up to the tone of the word.

I don't know why it was occurring. Any ideas? I can think of a lot of reasons which come from English and Chinese pronunciation differences. Some of the cases could have been voicing effects on the preceding and following vowels, but a lot of the cases I found didn't seem to have anything to do with that. It seems it also varied based on the pitch of both of the preceding and following tones as well as the pitch/intonation of the overall sentence. I really don't know.

To fix it, I found it useful to play a steady 1st tone on my virtual tuning fork and repeat all the Chinese initials at that steady pitch, then move on to repeat all initials to match the tuning fork set at starting levels for standard 2nd, 3rd and 4th tones. I found it helped to concentrate on creating a mental feeling of having the tone "in place" before I start to say the consonant.

 

Middle
I found that I had a break in the middle of some syllables. It occurred occasionally but regularly. 2nd and 4th tones were the most affected, 1st and 3rd less frequently. It was a 0.01 second non-continuous gap that I had no idea I was doing. Here's an example in a 2nd tone I tried to say in a conversation:

It wasn't an artifact of recording. Native speakers immediately heard it. It didn't cause any understanding issues because the tone was still very clear lexically... but they all said it was just odd-sounding.

I might've kept doing this forever if I hadn't found it, but it was relatively easy to fix once I realized the problem. I focused on maintaining a tone throughout each syllable and not "accidentally" letting my voice pause.

I'm still not sure what was behind this. Any ideas or similar experiences?

 

Finals
I had a very noticeable tendency to drop the pitch in the final instant of many syllables. This was unrelated to the tone of the following syllable; it occurred before any other tone or at the end of phrases. Here's an example in a 2nd tone:

It wasn't an artifact of recording. I couldn't hear it, but native speakers did. Depending on the word and context, it could occasionally cause problems in understanding the word, but usually it was just perceived as weird.

What seemed to be happening is that I was linking my volume and my pitch: as I was "turning down the volume" as I finished saying a syllable, I was also reducing the pitch.

The only fix for this was just practice, using the feedback from seeing the graph on the computer to teach myself to "turn off" the volume of the syllable while still maintaining the correct ending pitch.



1st tone
I had huge problems keeping the 1st tone flat and stable. Here's an example from my speech:

Sometimes it caused understanding problems, but surprisingly often it could be understood even without context. But it was a big part of the bad accent which native speakers heard.

The stability was my biggest 1st tone problem, but I also had in my 1st tone the problems described above with big pitch drops in the initial and non-continuous gaps in the middle of the vowel.

The fix for all this was practice with the virtual piano tuning fork work described above, drilling myself to maintain a stable and continuous tone from start to finish. I was amazed at how bad I was at first. I imagine it's because of my horrendous singing ability and other people wouldn't have such an issue, but it really was difficult for me to keep a stable tone at first. It took several practice sessions on 1st tone specifically every day for about 4 weeks until I finally got it completely under control.

One other issue I found in trying to match the real-world 1st tones I recorded is the pitch. When I started studying Chinese, everything I read emphasizes that the 1st tone is at the top of the vocal range. So I was really trying to sing it way up there. Turns out that in my case, I was way too high in pitch. The first tone varies its pitch depending on the overall sentence, but it's rarely as high as I was making it.

I found 3 issues behind my too-high 1st tones:

- I consistently overestimated how high the 1st tone was in native speakers' speech. I thought they were saying a 1st tone at a much higher (relative) pitch than they actually were, and in shadowing them, I was producing my misperception of their pitch rather than mimicking the actual reality. I found some research indicating that English speakers learning Chinese tend to hear only the pitch level of a Chinese tone and tend to miss its contour, so perhaps my over-focus on pitch level made me hear it as higher than the actual frequency?

- When I started Chinese, I had read a lot of research that English speakers learning Mandarin have a narrower pitch range than native speakers. So I think I overcompensated for this tendency by using an extremely wide pitch range, particularly making my high tones very high.

- I'm living in Taiwan and want to speak Taiwan Mandarin. I'd love to get ideas on this issue as I'm not nearly advanced enough to really analyse this well, but from what I've found it seems Taiwan Mandarin tones are often lower in pitch and have a narrower pitch range than mainland standard Chinese.  I found this myself when analysing conversations I recorded. I've also found that when mimicking mainlanders' speech, Taiwanese massively increase their normal pitch range, particularly raising the pitch of their first tone and the starting point of their 4th tone (they also exaggerate the retroflex consonants and erhuayin). All the learning resources I used when I started studying are mainland standard Chinese, including my first introduction to tones, and it seemed I was still using this mainland tonal range/height despite being constantly exposed to Taiwan Mandarin. Taiwanese told me that lowering the height of my high tones really made my speech more normal-sounding and less stressed-out.



2nd tone
My biggest self-misperception was in my 2nd tone. I often thought I was saying a 2nd tone, but it didn't rise at all and was mis-understood as a 3rd tone.

The problem depends a lot on the following syllable. Words with 2nd-1st tone combos were always completely wrong, e.g., 聊天 always ended up sounding like liǎotiān. 2nd-3rd combos often were often unclear as well. 2nd-2nd and 2nd-4th never had problems.

I couldn't hear the difference at all in my own speech. When I listened to my shadowing of native speakers, it sounded right... but every native speaker told me I was wrong.

With the help of the computer, I found my problem was in the relationship between loudness and pitch. [i'm using loudness and pitch to mean the psychological measures of how we perceive physical properties of sound: loudness the measure of how we perceive amplitude, pitch the measure of how we interpret frequency.] The speech of the native speakers' 2nd tone which I was trying to shadow sharply rose in frequency and rose a bit in amplitude, but my non-tonal brain was mimicking a tone rising a lot in amplitude and not changing at all in frequency. My brain was tricking me that I was producing correct pitch and loudness, but native speakers (accurately) heard what I produced as a low, flat pitch with a big increase in loudness, which to them corresponds to a 3rd tone said really loud.

Self misperception is really tricky to fix. I practised a lot with the computer piano playing the tone-only replication of the exact contour of speakers' 2nd tone, particularly the 2nd-1st combo. It wasn't too hard to train myself to hear the pitch changes in both native speakers and in the computer piano. But it was a lot of work to fix my own speech. When practising, I found that I really, really believed that I was saying a nicely-shaped 2nd tone contour, but every time I looked at the graph of what I tried to say, there was no rise in frequency (pitch) and only a rise in amplitude (loudness). It was such a psychological block that I even thought it was a computer glitch and I tried to "repair" my computer. But my computer wasn't wrong about my 2nd tone; the reality was that I really couldn't get it up.

The computer was essential in fixing this. Without the accurate visual feedback, I would definitely have fossilized and spent the rest of my life saying 聊天 as liǎotiān, utterly convinced that I was spot-on.

When I finally was able to consistently get clear, rising 2nd tones, I then found that the contour was still not right.

I had the general idea that in normal-speed speech, one individual tone is said too quickly to really hear much more than its basic shape, i.e. steadily rising from low to high. But I underestimated humans' language ability. Even in very fast speech, native speakers can perceive very subtle variations in contour. This affected me in all the tones, but I found my biggest contour differences were 2nd tones. Even after I finally was producing a rising tone that was always understood as 2nd tone, native speakers still found it weird. My rises were not the same shapes as theirs, and they heard it.

 

I found 2nd tone pitch and contour in a word varies significantly based on what the tone is of the other syllable in a word. For example, below is a graph of the word 经常 jīngcháng. A native speaker said it in a normal sentence; the word is slightly emphasized in the sentence. In shadowing the sentence, my timing was spot-on the same as the native speaker, and I was finally getting a clear rising 2nd tone. But my 2nd tone contour and pitch was off. There's absolutely no problem for native speakers to understand, but I was told it just sounds very "uncomfortable".  [My speech is the blue line on white background; the native speaker is the orange line on black background. The scale is the same.]:

 

The fix was just more work with the computer tone-only to get my 2nd-tone contours to exactly match native-speakers'.


4th tone
My issue with 4th tone was the pitch range. I made a tone which started very, very high and dropped to a very-low position. As described with the 1st tone above, I found that (at least in Taiwan Mandarin) the actual tones of native speakers in normal speech are lower and the range narrower than what I was saying.
 
The graph below shows the 4th tone I was saying compared to that of a native speaker with a voice range very similar to mine [My speech is the blue line on white background; the native speaker is the orange line on black background. The scale is the same.]:

I was shadowing a sentence of his speech. When I played for several native speakers the recording of his sentence and of mine, they all said he sounded natural but I sounded stressed. They all indicated this one syllable in the graph above as the reason.

Their reaction was eye-opening for me. This one syllable is a duration of .08 sec in the middle of a 5 second sentence. My tone was "correct", in that every speaker told me it was easily understandable, no chance of misunderstanding. But every person who heard it correctly identified it as starting higher, ending lower, and being faster than the same syllable said by the native speaker.

There is a lot of variation in 4th tones depending on speaker and context, so I practised many different types so I could both hear and produce the right shapes.

One case I found particularly interesting was 4th-4th words. There's a smooth elegance to a native saying a 4th-4th combo that I didn't have. I was shadowing a sentence with the word 世界 shìjiè. The graph below shows the discrepancy between my tone and the native speaker [My speech is the blue line on white background; the native speaker is the orange line on black background. The scale is the same. ]:

Here's a different native speaker I recorded. I was very lucky that I happened to get a clean recording of this speaker saying the same word 外面 wàimiàn two times less than 30 seconds apart. Here's a juxtaposition of the two utterances. According to native speakers who listened to the recording, the second instance emphasizes the word more, but both are natural and neither has a stressed or over-exaggerated feeling:

Once I realized all these 4th-tone problems, I worked a lot with singing the computer tones to be able to produce the right contours and levels. The benefit of the 4th-tone improvement specifically was instant: several people told me that it made my speech sound significantly more natural.


Neutral tone
I've found neutral tones to be particularly complicated and I'd love to get any ideas from others.

Taiwan Mandarin has significantly fewer neutral tones than mainland standard Chinese, but it still has them and they occur quite frequently. I've found an enormous range of how the neutral tone is expressed. It depends on the previous tone, obviously, but I've found that it also depends on the following tone. Sometimes it seems like a 3rd tone. Sometimes it's something totally different. And it's not always consistent among different speakers or even within the same speaker's own speech.

I really worked on the real-world examples I have of different combinations of {preceding tone-neutral tone-following tone}. At first it seemed to me that the neutral tone often is just a quick sound a bit more towards the centre than the ending of the previous tone. In other words, following a 1st and 2nd tone, I made the neutral tone down a bit from the ending point of the previous tone; following a 3rd and 4th tone, I made it up a bit. That seems to be what I've found from analysing what I've recorded. But sometimes I've found the neutral tone is as slow as a full syllable, sometimes it's a lot lower than I would guess it should be, sometimes it's like a quick tone with a dip and rise at the end, sometimes following a 2nd tone it seems to be a short high-tone. And sentence-ending neutral-tone particles seem to have their own separate properties.

Even when I closely shadow a native speaker and the acoustic analysis of my speech closely matches that of the native speaker, people sometimes tell me my neutral tone still sounds slightly weird. But the explanations they give of why it sounds weird are different: I've been told to make it higher, lower, rising, falling, faster, shorter... all for the same recording.

So, sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm off, but I can't figure out why. It's the only tone I've found where a very close computer match to native speaker's speech still doesn't always sound right to people.

I thought that it could be the variance among speakers based on background, gender, the local dialect usage and influence, etc. Or it could be there's something I'm messing up somewhere that's not captured in the acoustic analysis? Or that I'm misreading the analysis?

I've read research on this topic and understand that it's very a complicated issue which touches on a host of related areas. I have lots of graphs I could post of what I've recorded, but since they've gotten me nowhere, I thought to just ask what the experience of other learners here has been.


Nasalization
This isn't directly a tone issue per se, but for me it seems very tied up with tones so I'm including it here.

I found I had quite large problems with my vowels and sonorants being perceived as over-nasalized. Descriptions I heard from different people included "nasalized", "stuffed up", "speaking with a cold", and "speaking from the back of the mouth instead of the front".

I knew that English nasalizes vowels which come before (and sometimes after) nasal consonants. But I never realized that some English speakers can have partial nasalization of MOST vowels and sonorants even when not near nasal consonants (i.e., vela lowered throughout the whole sentence rather than just at nasal vowels and consonants).

The degree of nasalization seems to depend on the speaker's dialect/background and his tone of voice. I've found from testing myself that:
a) I at least partially nasalize at least 75% of English vowels and sonorants not adjacent to nasal consonants;
b) I strongly nasalize any vowels adjacent to nasal consonants;
c) I massively nasalize a vowel or sonorant if it carries any emotion (questioning, scolding, excitement, etc).

What this means for Chinese is that since EVERY syllable carries a tone, I subconsciously end up nasalizing many vowels.

It becomes even more strong for 2nd tone and 4th tone. I don't know if it's because they actually resemble English emotional tones, or simply because I initially learned them as "question tone" and "scolding tone" and I still carry that over subconsciously.

And I really massively over-nasalize Chinese vowels adjacent to nasal consonants.

Chinese speakers very clearly hear my over-nasalization. Even in words which are supposed to be nasalized (e.g., chéng), people tell me that my vowel is nasalized too much, too soon. I found it interesting that several people have used the same hand motion to describe their perception of the correct sound as one that starts at the bottom front part of the mouth, slowly travels along the bottom of the mouth and then at the very end rises up to the back upper part of the mouth and nose. They describe my sound as already starting in the back upper part of the mouth and then instantly going way up into the nose.

It's been very hard for me to not nasalize while saying a rising or falling tone. I couldn't hear it at all at first; gradually, with huge amounts of practice, I can now hear it and have started being able to eliminate it. All my vowel-pronunciation problems seem to be connected to this issue: eliminating the nasalization very much improves native speakers' perception of my accent.

I haven't found much discussion about this issue, but I think I must be missing it somewhere. I found academic research about nasalization in English and (separately) research on nasalization in Chinese, but nothing about how English-speakers nasalize in Chinese. I mentioned the issue in a post here when I was starting to explore it (at the time I thought it was limited to just 2nd tone), but no one on the forum seemed to have similar problems. I also found a post about front of the mouth vowels vs. back of the mouth vowels mentioned in this thread on the forum; I'd be curious if realmayo and heifeng think that it's the same issue I'm describing here.

I also think that it might be part of the accent I hear in Chinese speakers' English vowels. As heifeng puts it in the thread above, Chinese speaking English sound like they "really spit things out from the front of their mouths which to native English speakers sounds a bit harsh sometimes." To test if this actually is the same effect, I worked a bit with a Chinese speaker on her English pronunciation. We found that nasalizing her vowels a bit reduced this sense of harsh spiting from the front of the mouth and significantly improved my perception of her accent. On the other hand, I found the exact opposite advice on the internet for Chinese learning English. For example, here it tells Chinese speaking English to "avoid nasal sounds, i.e., speaking through your nose. English sounds are more towards the front of the mouth and not in the nasal cavity."

Fwiw, Chinese native speakers have pointed out this nasalization issue when listening to recordings I've played for them of other foreigners speaking Chinese. I was surprised that even some foreigners who speak what I consider very advanced-Chinese were said to contain this over-nasalization.

Could this be an effect related to Taiwan specifically? All the people I speak with know Taiwanese and use it to varying extents. The local Taiwanese language has nasality vowel contrasts. And there's lots of investigation of Taiwan Mandarin speakers' production and changing of syllable-final -n and -ng. I really don't know how all this would affect speakers' perception of nasality in Mandarin. Any ideas?


Unexpected tone changes
I know real-world tones will be different than textbook cases; that's the whole point of why I've been training with real-world tones and not the citational forms where people just say a single word. Real-world tones are fascinating to study. It's been really interesting see how tones vary in pitch and contour based on emphasis, mood, preceding and following tones, etc. And there are funny cases like 一个人, which I've seen as yígerén, yìgerén and yīgerén (i.e, 一 pronounced in 2nd, 4th, and 1st tones).

But I've found cases where the tone contours themselves are really far off from what's expected. I know there are lot of complex linguistic and social effects going on here, and it's more advanced than where I'm at, so I thought to just mention this and see if anyone has any thoughts as it specifically relates to improving the accent as a foreign learner.

The biggest surprise is that I've found many examples of a dipping 2nd tone. It seems similar to the traditional textbook description of 3rd tone (2-1-3) or even just a falling tone with a slight rise (2-1-1.5). Some speakers never do it, while some speakers do it regularly. In a few examples where I've found this, I've practised shadowing the speaker's sentence including the unexpected 2nd tone contour, and then played the recording of my sentence for other native speakers. They tell me it sounds natural.

 

Here's an example from a recording of a 40's Taiwan woman. In a normal sentence in spontaneous speech, she said 生活 shēnghuó several times. The huó has a definitely unexpected contour. Below is a graph of one of them. The next word she said in this case is 会 huì; I included that in the graph to give you a good perspective on her huó. Fwiw, when I played recording of her speech for other Taiwanese, they all agreed that this particular woman has what's considered (in Taiwan) extremely "standard" Mandarin.

Another unusual tone contour is a sharp falling 3rd tone. There's lots of advice even in introductory pronunciation guides that the 3rd tone in normal speech doesn't have any rise at the end (particularly in Taiwan), so I expected that. I did find that it usually appears as a flat low tone. But I often find examples where it appears as a falling tone similar to a lower-pitched 4th tone. The graph below is a nice example because it shows a 3rd tone followed by a 4th tone. It is the word 武器 wǔqì said by a Taiwan 30-ish man. It's from a conversation I recorded; when I play the sentence for other people, native speakers tell me they perceive it as said in a normal way, no particular stress or emphasis, and that the pronunciation sounds correct.

Here's a graph of a different speaker. He said the phrase 我别无选择 wǒ biéwú xuǎnzé. He said the same phrase at 2 different times in the same conversation, so it gives the nice chance to compare and confirm that the contour of his 3rd tone on xuǎn really is shaped like this and not an artifact. I played the recording for other native speakers, everyone told me that both times he said it, it sounds perfectly normal. Interestingly, people believe they're hearing a textbook-3rd tone, and are quite surprised when they see the graph showing a falling tone. When they then listen again, they do hear the falling tone...but still say it has a "3rd tone feeling".

 

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I've spent a huge amount of time in the last 2 months just on these very fine points of pronunciation and intonation. It's definitely made me ask myself whether it's really worth it, especially as I was mostly understandable already before starting this.

How much is good enough? How much does it really matter? How do I even really know how native speakers perceive my speech? Pronunciation work isn't perfectly correlated to overall language level. It's possible to be very advanced but with strong foreign accent, or not-so-advanced but with great accent. How much improvement comes from pronunciation work specifically and how much comes through immersion, use and advancement in overall language skills? I found that immersion and extensive shadowing work was not improving my accent, specifically on the individual tone level, as much as I wanted... but is it worth sacrificing work on other aspects of the language (e.g., my rate of acquisition of new vocab and characters has definitely dropped) for marginally smaller and smaller accent improvement?

 

I'd be interested how other learners here think about these issues.

For me, it's that the process is really enjoyable. I'll never make it to near-native level, but I really like the challenge of trying to improve my pronunciation as much as possible. It's incredibly frustrating, but in a good way: the pleasure for me is in surmounting the obstacles little by little, and with each step gaining deeper appreciation for the subtlety and beauty of the language.

The technology also makes it fun. I like that I can literally "see" my progress by comparing the acoustic analysis of my speech over time. It's a huge problem to get honest evaluations of accent from people directly, so there's a real sense of satisfaction to actually know objectively as a fact that I've made good progress in my speech.

For sentences which I've massively practised shadowing, I'm now able to say them pretty naturally and native-sounding. I'm very conscious of how hard it is to get honest evaluations of my own speech from people, so to test if I'm good enough, I've done this a few times: Record myself. Alter the voice so it's not obviously me. Throw that recording into a group of recordings I collected of both native speakers and of foreigners at various levels of Chinese ability saying different things. Then play a game of asking people to identify who's foreigner and who's native. It's not a perfect scientific experiment, but it seems good enough to give me confidence that I'm doing these massively-practised sentences well.

Now my next step is to smooth out my pronunciation in normal conversation, i.e., non-shadowed speech. I posted a sample on this forum; as 陳德聰 points out, my speech tones and pronunciation are now pretty spot-on, but my overall speech sounds citational and stilted. When I analyse recordings I've made of conversations, I find that all my tones and pronunciation are also usually pretty consistently good now even in long conversations. My speed of speech is decent for short sentences, but slows down too much in longer back-to-back sentences.  My big hurdle now is prosodic phrasing: I'm not at the level yet to be able to also build in overall smooth sentence intonation, flow between phrases, downdrift and tone resetting, etc... hence, stilted.

I'd love any suggestions people have for dealing with this next step. Ideas I've had:

- One issue I've realized thanks to 陳德聰 is that I shouldn't limit the source of sentences I shadow only to conversations I have with native speakers. I use them because they're natural and spontaneous and, for me personally, it's just more fun and motivating to use people I've met as my models. But I've realized that a huge part of their speech is explaining concepts to me, so their style is explanatory or citational. Plus even if they're not doing it consciously, it's clear that they speak in slightly unnatural ways to me sometimes because I'm a foreigner learning Chinese. So I figured I need to expand the range of sources to shadow. I'm adding in speech I pull from talk-shows now to try to get more native-to-native spontaneous speech to use in shadowing exercises. It's not as interesting or motivating for me as local speech I record myself, but it seems the easiest source of native-to-native spontaneous speech.

- My prosody isn't great for questions. I don't have Chinese question intonation internalized, and English intonation patterns really creep in. So last week I went through conversation recordings I have and pulled out a few dozen questions which native speakers asked. I've found different intonation patterns depend on the question type, e.g., verb-不-verb, 吗 questions, indirect questions, etc. So I divided them by question type, and have started shadowing each question-type group separately.

- I'm also shadowing heavily over-dramatized speech to try to correctly internalize how stress and emotion is expressed. I set up a meeting with a radio DJ who has a phenomenal voice expression, and he recorded for me some monologues, first in normal voice and then over-dramatized. Hearing/seeing the same speech done at normal voice and then in a over-dramatized manner has really helped me pinpoint differences and begin to internalize it. I still can't mimic well his or actors' patterns of emotional speech, but I'm getting a little better at it.

 

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As I've started to understand better through computer analysis and my own pronunciation work what's involved, I've really gained a massive respect for those learners, including on this forum, who've started Chinese as adults and have achieved near-native natural-sounding speech in long, free-flowing conversation (i.e., not pre-memorized, pre-practised speech). It's related to overall Chinese skill obviously, but there are many separate issues involved which demand a lot of separate work. It's especially impressive when native speakers judge the foreigner's speech as not just being a native-speaker with a different regional accent, but as being the same accent as the local region. Considered by locals to match the local accent: it's really a phenomenal achievement.




[Edit: added additional graphs]





 

[davoosh]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this as I'm very much interested in the acquisition of native-like levels of pronunciation (even if I haven't really tried that with Chinese) in foreign languages. Thanks for sharing your experience and insight.

[Meng Lelan]

Just browsed through your post and was reminded of a Sinosplice post here about what Dr. Liao said about tones not always being "perfect" and recommended that learners should try not to stress themselves out trying to attain tone perfection. 

 

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/12/10/toward-better-tones-in-natural-speech

 

Wow...even looking at your graph of your fourth tone had me stressed out...looks like a steep deep cliff...I was grasping my desk. Were you feeling stressed and tense about making the right fourth tone?

[querido]

"It's definitely made me ask myself whether it's really worth it, especially as I was mostly understandable already before starting this."

 

I think that if you have a special interest in it you certainly didn't waste your time. Only two months, on something that fascinates you? Not a waste.

[abcdefg]

I've been working on improving my speech this year, making it more natural and native sounding. Have put nowhere near as much sweat and muscle into the project as you have and also did not employ a computer. I salute your devotion to the project.

 

My humble attempts have been with the assistance of a teacher who is mainly a singer of Chinese opera. She coaches junior singers and only teaches language when she needs extra income. I've recorded and shadowed some of her speech. We have also used lots of poetry to try and help me get better at expressing different degrees of varyious emotions.

 

I downloaded some famous people doing theatrical renditions of well-known poems and used them as a model. We start with exaggeration, then dial it down. My teacher has also corrected my degree of nasalization, which is sometimes too little and sometimes too much. Nasalization is something I don't find discussed very much. 

 

These efforts have probably helped, but I have a long way to go. The biggest problem I have to surmount is that I am already understandable in daily, normal-speed conversation and, in my secret heart of hearts, I think that's good enough. I don't aspire to perfection as strongly as you do.

[li3wei1]

Whether or not it was worth it for you, it taught the rest of us something. I think if you added the recordings you could whip it up into a multi-media presentation that people would pay you for, anywhere where they train teachers of CFL or at language schools.

[roddy]

That was quite the write-up - many thanks! Might be the longest single post I've ever seen on here...

[c_redman]

That post was all kinds of awesome. I feel smarter for having read through it.

So what is the software you used for the pitch analysis?

[Tamu]

Meng Lelan -

 

You had me laughing out loud with this:

 

 

Wow...even looking at your graph of your fourth tone had me stressed out...looks like a steep deep cliff...I was grasping my desk.

 

On your other point, what I found is that I had reached the point where I was able to shadow/mimic/chorus native speakers' sentences and match many other aspects of their speech like syllable timing, overall rhythm, etc... but my individual tones were still off slightly in pitch/contour. My tones were "right" in the sense that they could be easily identified and understood lexically by native speakers, but they still sounded weird and sometimes conveyed a mood, emotion, or emphasis which I didn't want.

 

I saw the sinosplice article you mentioned. The author, John Pasden, wrote a great blog post in 2004 about accent.

 

 

Some of the hardest aspects to master in order to sound truly native-like are intonation and accent. Usually there comes a point when, either through lack of effort or through linguistic inability, non-native speakers stop improving (look at Arnold Schwarzenegger). Linguists call this phenomenon fossilization. (The term fossilization is usually applied to grammar, but I think it can be used for the fine points of pronunciation as well.) It’s understandable that learners would eventually halt their progress in this area; there comes a point when the benefits of added native-like fluency just aren’t worth the effort it would require.

 

I think these questions of accent and intonation enter the mind of any person bent on mastery of a language. Exactly how good do I need to sound? Do I care if I’m always easily identifiable as an American (or just a foreigner) to native speakers? Does my accent affect listeners’ comprehension? Does my accent in their language sound bad to them, or is it charming? If I can reduce my accent with coaching, should I? How much money is that worth to me? And if I did go through coaching, how would I know when to be satisfied?

 

abcdefg -

 

Shadowing poetry read by an opera singer!? Wow!

 

I'd recommend doing a quick analysis using Praat. It's not hard to get set up for just basic tone work. I have no idea what your level is, but it could be really beneficial to see your own speech. As a non-native speaker, you'll never truly "feel" what native speakers feel about accents, you'll never really know how an accent sounds to them. But all this work has emphasized to me in incredible detail how much tones matter both to convey lexical information as well as emotion, emphasis, etc. Seeing the acoustic analysis on the computer can at least give you some idea of how close your tone patterns really are to those of natives. For me at least, it was eye-opening and has been very beneficial in improving my speech and not randomly conveying wrong emotion and emphasis. My non-tonal brain was tricking me, so I could never have improved quickly without the visual feedback of the computer.

 

My post above was on tones specifically, but if you're working on pronunciation as well, I really recommend a short guide John Pasden at sinosplice wrote. It was very helpful to me when I really started focusing on pronunciation.

 

li3wei1 -

Thanks... but I'm just a beginner. If anything, I was hoping to get feedback from the advanced learners here on all the points I mentioned which I'm unsure of. Hopefully someone will know!

 

roddy - Quantity definitely doesn't equal quality lol!

 

querido  -

You're right, investigating something I find personally fascinating is worth it in any case!

 

My questions about whether it's worth it is musing about the marginal improvement that's possible through concentrated accent effort specifically.

 

It's hard to separate a lot of pronunciation-only work from work on other areas. But if I try to limit it to just pure accent improvement work like analyzing speech patterns and singing along with the tone contours, I'd guess I've put in somewhere from 150-200 hours in the last 2 months on that alone. If I'd put that time into vocab building instead...? Or TV?  Or reading? Or...?  I worked on those areas, but how much would my accent have improved from all that additional time? Or is dedicated accent-work necessary?

 

In my case, I think I was fossilizing lexically-accurate but kinda-off tones. I think I needed the work on tones specifically to raise my ability to perceive and produce more accurate contours and pitches. But who knows...  I'd be interested what others here have found.

 

Davoosh - Thanks! Good luck to you too!

[gato]

This looks like a great tutorial for Praat.

 

http://savethevowels.org/praat/

Using Praat for Linguistic Research by Will Styler is a practical guidebook and information package designed to help you use the Praat phonetics software package more effectively in Phonetic or Phonological research. Although it was originally written in the Spring/Summer of 2011 for the 2011 Linguistic Institute's Praat workshop, it's now available for anybody who's interested, and is being updated over time, both as Praat changes and as the author adds new information.

 

The guidebook itself is a 70+ page compilation of walkthroughs, explanations, and tutorials explaining how to use Praat for a variety of measurements and tasks. Although the guide does start with "basic" tasks like opening sound files, measuring duration, formants, pitch, it also covers more "advanced" tasks like source-filter resynthesis, A1-P0 nasality measurement, formula manipulation of sounds and even Praat scripting.

[abcdefg]

The sort of tone work I've been doing with my opera-singer teacher/coach may actually fall under the heading of "remedial pronunciation." She has a very good ear, and the corrections involve things like "The pitch and rise of that second tone were generally OK, but you need to hold it slightly longer in a situation like that." By "situation like that" she means the context of the sounds that come immediately before and after it, the emotional connotation the word carries in that specific use, whether or not it should convey emphasis, or perhaps an emotional message such as approval, fear, anger, disgust and such, its place in the sentence, and so on. 

 

Using your reference to Pasden's term, she is trying to "unfossilize" me. One problem of living in Yunnan for most of the past six or seven years is that my Putonghua is already better than half the native speakers I meet on the street. I'm surrounded by a dreadful mish-mash of micro-regional accents and I get cheap, undeserved praise left and right for my speech being 标准 (standard.)

 

Zhang Dong speaks terrible Putonghua because he learned it from a rural teacher in Simao and his parents only spoke dialect, so he never used Putonghua at home during his formative years. Li Fang, who grew up on the other side of the mountain, speaks Putonghua which sounds quite different from his, because it was infused with Yizu dialect instead of Hanizu dialect. And so on.

 

Interesting thread.

[manjusri33]

Hey Tamu, long time forum reader here that felt obliged to make an account upon seeing your thread. As a beginner trying to avoid fossilizing bad habits, this is exactly the kind of methodical strategy I was looking for to improve tone control, as asking pretty much any native speaker tends to prompt a "your tones are already great!" response. This Praat program is a godsend, but I have to ask; which keyboard program do you use that helps you mimic the tones? I can't seem to find it in the Praat program so I'm assuming you're using another one.
Also, whenever you get that talented DJ to record some phrases with different emotional emphasis, you ought to share it with the masses here as I'm sure it'll be great study material for the more advanced learner!

I think you're onto something here though, this could be an integral studying method for the adult learner that wants to surmount the hefty barrier of trying to get an ear for pronunciation. Keep at it my friend

[Meng Lelan]

Started using speakgoodchinese today. The advantage of being deaf (and therefore all my native and non-native speech is spoken in a monotone) is my 1st tones are perfectly flat and stable. 

[Baron]

That was an interesting post

 

Tamu - if you haven't come across it already I suggest you take a look at the book 'Tone' by Moira Yip. It's not all about Chinese, but for obvious reasons touches on it quite often. It gives a very good understanding of how tone is actually expressed in a language, and some common elements that appear across tonal languages.

 

While reading the book two things particularly struck me as salient for learners of Chinese. Firstly, is the fact that the pitch of the tone depending on the context. An obvious example is that a 1st tone near the beginning of a sentence is significantly higher in pitch than one at the end. I'd assume it was quite noticeable, but I have noticed that many learners of Chinese seem to have cookie-cutter tones so perhaps those tone box diagrams that always feature in textbooks have mislead many into thinking that x tone is always in x part of your range.

 

The other thing was there was some discussion about where in speech tones actually manifest, and it had some graphs showing how the tonal pattern of a word actually starts in the previous word. So if you chopped a single word from a sentence, it would have a different tonal pattern to the same word chopped from a different sentence, or in isolation.

 

If you're doing some work to prescriptively improve your pronunciation, you'll probably find the book will help you to avoid some assumptions that might hinder your progress.

 

Regarding nasality, I found that to be a bit of an issue. If you try to breathe out softly as you articulate your vowels you might find it easier to avoid. Also, if your native language is British English, make sure when you pronounce 'a' as in 'car' with your tongue towards the front of your mouth and not bunched at the back, much as you would when pronouncing 'e' as in 'bed'. You should do that anyway in 99% of the world languages, but it'll be helpful too for avoiding nasalization.

[querido]

Meng Lelan, have you ever used a visual aid like this before? I would be interested in how you experience it and in what progress you make.

[Tamu]

abcdefg -

 

Unfossilization lol!

 

I'm curious how all the regional accents affect the tones where you are. I've only analyzed the Mandarin of native-speakers of Taiwanese and of Hakka. There are lots of differences in how the consonants are produced, but I haven't found any real patterns regarding tones. In other words, I haven't really seen any way based on tone-only to identify the level of influence of Taiwanese dialect or Hakka dialect in someone's Mandarin.

 

I saw one recent research paper that found changes in tone contours related to age, rather than dialect. Old people's tones were more textbook contours, young people (especially young men) showed more contour change. Local dialect influence was tied to the change through age (old people speak dialect more, young people speak it less), but as an independent variable dialect was relatively insignificant.

 

What I've taken from all that on a practical level as a foreigner learning Mandarin is that, at least here, people might have "non-standard" consonants (and a few non-standard vowels), but their tones and intonation patterns are correct and something I want to imitate. Foreigners learning Chinese have totally different issues than native speakers with regional/dialectal accents. Chinese speakers here (normal people, not linguists) don't focus much on tone because the tones are so clear and obvious to them, but they do think about retroflex because they all have been taught and believe the mantra that retroflex is standard and that they all drop their retroflexes because they're just too lazy to bother. The upshot I've found is that even when my tones aren't smooth, are weird, or are flat-out wrong, people will still praise my speech as 标准 if I make a little retroflex. As you said, it's cheap praise. On the other hand, I've noticed that when I get tones and intonation truly smooth and natural (usually it's for sentences which I've shadowed and pre-practiced massively), the praise is that I sound natural, normal, like a Taiwanese, etc. That's my goal for all my speech.

 

manjusri33 / c_redman:

I started with Praat, SpeakGoodChinese, and Audacity.

 

The link gato gave is a great guide for Praat. There's a lot of depth, but it's really easy to get started. I really recommend using the program to take a look at your own speech, it was really eye-opening for me!

 

I've found that there's definitely an art to using the software, particularly as a learner trying to improve my own tones. There's a lot of complexity and variability that affects the quality of pitch detection. For example, 3rd tones are very tricky because they're low and creaky, there are voicing effects of consonants, many more things which make a basic tone graph look really weird.

 

It's part of the problem I've had with SpeakGoodChinese. It's a great idea to match your speech to a native's and compare the differences, and the developer team is really helpful and proactice, but it's very tricky to implement. Single syllables is more simple, but beyond one or two syllables it becomes a pretty complex exercise to measure the similarities between two samples which vary in time or speed; it essentially becomes a speech recognizer. As I understand, SGC uses a DTW approach instead of HMM, which makes it simpler to implement but limits its ability.

 

Baron -

 

Thanks for the book suggestion.

 

You're right that tones really depend on context. Prosody in non-tonal languages is already phenomenally complex; then throw lexical tones on top of that and watch out! Everything affects the lexical tones' contour and pitch. Emphasis, mood, questioning all affect the lexical tones' contour and pitch. The adjacent tones affect the tone. Whether it comes before or after the focus of the sentence affects it. Etc, etc, etc. I've seen it myself even in my really basic analysis of recordings I've done recently. There's lots of in-depth research in this area which you're probably familiar with; not sure if you've seen it, but one about Mandarin specifically I thought was very interesting is "Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0 contours" by Yi Xu here.

 

It's debatable how well linguists have understood all these issues or ever will. But there's no way to memorize even the parts that are well understood. As a learner just focused on improving my own accent, my idea is that the only way to get more natural is through very concentrated repetition of native speech. Shadowing, chorusing, mimicking, whatever you want to call it. Gradually all - or at least, most - of the nuances and quirks and arbitrariness of native speech will become internalized.

 

Who knows if you ever will achieve true 100% native-like patterns, but it definitely works to get you to much smoother and more natural speech. We do handle it in our own languages after all... so my non-tonal brain was doing ok adapting to the differences with Chinese. My problem, though, is that I was flailing on the lexical tones. I was improving the supersegmental aspects that you mention, like context, emphasis, syllable speed, overall pitch and rhythm... but my lexical tones were accurate-but-weird so the whole thing was still weird.

 

You seem quite interested in pronunciation, that's great! What work have you done on it? How has it been for you?

 

 

 

[abcdefg]

I'm curious how all the regional accents affect the tones where you are.

One striking feature of Kunming accents is that other tones, especially 3rds, are changed into 4th tones in ordinary speech. 

 

My pronunciation teacher/vocal coach is not local (She's from Shanxi) and so she notices the local accents a lot. People from other provinces often say, partly in jest, that if you want to sound like a Kunming native, just change most of your tones to 4ths and put a "ge" or "ga" on the end of most utterances.

 

"Xiexie ge" is the way you say thanks. "Nihao ga" is the way say hello. And so on.

[Meng Lelan]

Meng Lelan, have you ever used a visual aid like this before? I would be interested in how you experience it and in what progress you make. 

 

 Yes and I don't think I make progress with visual aids. My low and high tones (the two tones that can stay somewhat monotone and flat, easy for the deaf to do) are never a problem. But as for rising tones, I end up looking at the screen while tightening my vocal cords (that's the only way I can sense myself going into a higher pitch) and sometimes I almost asphyxiate myself trying to get to the rising stage as I watch the graph show any rise at all. Also when I say a sentence of at least six words in length the visual aid ALWAYS shows two or three tone errors though never ever got an entire sentence tone-wrong. When I say a word or phrase the visual aid rarely shows any errors at all in tones except for rising (I can't go high enough without blacking out).  I wonder if that is a major problem. When I speak Chinese I focus so much on the message to be conveyed that I don't think at all about the tones and I always speak in sentences of at least six words or more (according to peers).

 

Maybe if I became a Chinese teacher this would be a problem. If I work on tones and consonants then I prefer to work with a live teacher, and I wish I could go to Taiwan for a month to work with a live teacher on Chinese speech and tones. The way my career path is going now looks like I will end up working in blind rehab not Chinese teaching which is fine by me, though I worry about my speech situation in Chinese - reading, writing, and listening (when presented with speechreading) are no problem to me but the tones and some consonants are a problem and I am not sure what to think of that. 

[Baron]

@Tamu 

You seem quite interested in pronunciation, that's great! What work have you done on it? How has it been for you?

 

I've made little concerted effort on my accent besides trying to make it comprehensible. My goal has always been to not have a horrendous English accent, and I've probably achieved that. It seems you've set your sights higher. In any case, having an understanding of phonetics/phonology has helped. In my experience, understanding the phonology of my native language (English) has been more useful for reducing an English accent on Chinese than learning about Chinese phonetics and phonology. The thing you discovered about vowel nasalisation is one of many phonological phenomena in English that we simply don't hear and thus carry over to foreign languages, so it often the case that we need to work on eliminating them more than we need to work on emulating native accents.

 

How much time do you spend work on your accent on a daily/weekly basis? 

[manjusri33]

Thanks for the response Tamu, I'll be sure to check SpeakGoodChinese out. Audacity is certainly a godsend for language learning, I don't know where I'd be without it!
@abcdefg

So I you're learning chinese in kunming as well ga? I would give an arm and a leg to have a Shaanxi-based vocal trainer to help with pronounciation, definitely not a connection easy to come across
I'm trying to figure out how to message you through chinese-forums, but so far to no avail. If you could help me contact your teacher by however means (presuming she has time to squeeze in a few classes for me) I would be forever indebted to you!

I'll make another post on GoKunming in regards to my search for someone with this sort of specialization later today. If there's another method in which I can contact you, please let me know... I will pay for a lesson or two of yours if you find this is sufficient for helping me out ^_^