How deeply do you "feel" tones?

[MariaMaria]

I want to ask foreigners who learn Chinese, how deeply do you "know" or "feel" the tones of Chinese?

My level has improved very much in last year living in the country. I use only Chinese almost all day every day. My pronunciation seems pretty good, everyone understands what I say (at least they seem to understand!), and it never happens now that I don't know the tone for a word which I use. Even with new words, I learn the tone very easily as part of the word, it's very natural process. I've heard recordings of myself, and I'm quite proud of how niceI sound now

But I have to admit that I still make mistakes on tones, even on easy words, when I speak a lot. In my brain I know the word and what the tone should be, but with my mouth I still say it wrong. Sometimes I realize my mistake and immediately correct, but often I don't even notice until that someone tells me

An accent is unavoidable. But a wrong tone is not an accent, it's just wrong.

On a deep level, I don't think the tones have the same important to me as consonants and vowels. For example, "r" in my native language is different than English "r", but I never substitute my native "r" when I speak English. And I definitely never substitute for "r" a different letter like "l" or "t" or "d" or another sound. But that is the equivalent effect of changing a tone in Chinese.

 

I notice that I understand wrong tones much more easily than native speakers. Listening to a foreigner speaking Chinese with many bad or wrong tones, I can usually understand the meaning but frankly my native speaker friend is clueless. This has happened several times with native speakers of many languages trying to speak Chinese, so it's not just one foreign accent.

I also notice that when I'm speaking, if I'm occupied with other things, stressed, or rushing, I make more mistakes, even on easy words. I've thought that perhaps on a deep level, I associate tones with different emotions, so that makes it particularly hard to get Chinese tones right when my emotions are higher.

Chinese speakers tell me that when they watch famous foreigners like DaShan, Julien Gaudfroy, and others, even those foreigners occasionally have tone mistakes. I've had teachers tell me that Western PhD students in their universities, who speak incredible Chinese at very educated levels, still also have tone mistakes.

I guess that the tones when I speak are maybe 97% right or 98% right or more, I don't know. With the case of famous or very advanced foreigners, maybe they have 99,99% right.

But every Chinese native speaker is always 100% right. They never would make a mistake, unless it's just changing their thought while they are speaking and then self-correcting. As I understand, it's as inconceivable for them to make a mistake in tone as it would be, if English is your native language, to say "bar" when you mean "car". It's basically impossible under normal circumstances.

So I want to ask people who know Chinese pretty well but did not grow up speaking a tonal language, how do you feel about this? How deeply do you feel the tones? How often do mistakes occur with words that you know and normally always say correctly? How often do you make mistakes and not notice until that someone tells you?
 

[tooironic]

I guess I'm in a similar situation to you. I've learnt Chinese most my life as a second language, and 口语 has always been my strong point. I would say my tones are pretty good, with only an occasional mistake, usually relating to 2nd and 3rd tone mix up, e.g. saying 棉签 miánqiān as 免签 miǎnqiān, 劳工 láogōng as 老公 lǎogōng, etc. But even though I'm a perfectionist by nature, I have to resign myself to the fact that my tones will never be 100% correct over a period of, say, half an hour of continuous speaking. Because the effort that is required to maintain that level of fluency... well, it's exhausting. I'd say getting it right 98% of the time is already good enough.

 

But every Chinese native speaker is always 100% right.

 

Not quite. When I teach interpreting I sometimes have to correct my students on their pronunciation of tones, since in the NAATI interpreting examination you are marked down for not speaking standard Mandarin. Some examples:

 

因为 yīnwèi - many say yīnwéi
提供 tígōng - many say tígòng
说服 shuōfú - many say shuìfú
复杂 fùzá - many say fǔzá
符合 fúhé - many say fǔhé
尽管 jǐnguǎn - many say jìnguǎn
勉强 miǎnqiǎng - many say miǎnqiáng
创伤 chuāngshāng - many say chuàngshāng
兴奋 xīngfèn - many say xìngfèn
着急 zháojí - many say zhāojí
阻塞 zǔsè - many say zǔsāi
惩罚 chéngfá - many say chěngfá
暂时 zànshí - many say zǎnshí or zhànshí
绯闻 fēiwén - many say fěiwén
档案 dàng’àn - many say dǎng’àn
痉挛 jìngluán - many say jīngluán

 

Many of these are very common words. So as you can see even native speakers can't get tones "100 per cent right". I'd say just do your best - you can always aim to improve on your mistakes, but don't stress too much about it.

 

EDIT: I must say I have also found it really helpful to make a list of my pronunciation errors in my notebook. It really helps me visualise where my mistakes are and remember to avoid them when speaking.

[carlo]

After ~15 years of learning/ using the language (mainly Mandarin, and now Cantonese), I can also relate to this.

 

I found that where these mistakes occur however is largely predictable. Language mistakes are the result of bad habits. If you study them carefully, you'll start seeing patterns (eg. when I try to say X, my second tones do Y).

 

"Bar vs car" is probably not a good analogy though, a better one would be a contrastive pair that does not exist in your native language. Eg. sheep vs ship for Italian or French speakers. You can certainly master it, but the fact is that a majority of learners never do.

 

Another Chinese-related example is the contrast between aspirated and unaspirated vs voiced and unvoiced. In spontaneous speech, I find this harder to correct than tone mistakes.

 

@tooironic -- your list above is interesting. Some of these I'd call variant pronunciations (you won't find them in dictionaries but they are very commonly heard).

[OneEye]

When I teach interpreting I sometimes have to correct my students on their pronunciation of tones, since in the NAATI interpreting examination you are marked down for not speaking standard Mandarin. Some examples:

 

I have to ask: are some of these students Taiwanese? Many of the "wrong" pronunciations you list are standard in Taiwan. Does NAATI's version of "standard" only include the Chinese 普通話 standard?

[tooironic]

@carlo Yes I would call them variant pronunciations as well. I've written extensively about it on my blog.

 

 

@OneEye I've taught hundreds of students interpreting. They all make most of these mistakes, and none of them have been from Taiwan. Not sure about the Taiwan-standard question though.

[Demonic_Duck]

It seems bizarre that the NAATI test penalises students for "mistakes" that even highly educated native speakers of fairly standard dialects often make. Overly prescriptive much?

 

Still, native speakers will also sometimes say a word incorrectly as part of their own "idiolect". I don't think this is abnormal at all, at least amongst languages that have anything other than a perfectly phonetic writing system. In English, sometimes there are words which I'm familiar with in writing, but not in speech, and as such I don't know their correct pronunciation. When I try to say them out loud, I often just guess. As I'm a perfectionist, I tend to look up the pronunciation afterwards, but if I don't do this, the pronunciation error might well become ingrained.

 

In response to the OP's original question: I would say I "feel" tones better than 90% of foreigners at a similar level to me (I'm not saying this out of arrogance, I'm well aware that my level is weaker in other areas). I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but I attribute it to a few things: the fact I have a musical background; the fact I spent a good amount of time drilling the sounds of the language when I first started; the fact I'm a perfectionist; the fact I consider tone as an integral part of pronunciation, rather than a separate aspect; the fact I use tone colours on pleco (ones which I chose myself and which make sense to me, rather than the defaults); and the fact I tend to break off my train of thought to clarify the pronunciation of a word if I'm not sure of it.

 

Even so, I still make mistakes sometimes, and often these are words that I "know" the tone of. Sometimes, however, it's simply that I've learnt the word incorrectly. The OP mentions "it never happens now that I don't know the tone for a word which I use", and I would suggest that if you think this is the case, you are almost certainly mistaken.

[陳德聰]

People also have slips of the tongue. I think that lexically "incorrect" tones are one thing, and are easily explained by regional and dialectical differences. I hear people make mistakes and decide to correct/not correct based on how big of an impact those mistakes make.

[anonymoose]

Not quite. When I teach interpreting I sometimes have to correct my students on their pronunciation of tones, since in the NAATI interpreting examination you are marked down for not speaking standard Mandarin. Some examples:

 

I don't think this is the same as MariaMaria's issue. She specifically said:

 

In my brain I know the word and what the tone should be, but with my mouth I still say it wrong.

 

The examples you gave, on the other hand, are consistent "mistakes" made by a lot of native speakers. To them, it's not that they know what the tone should be, but have trouble enunciating it, but rather that they are unaware that their tone is "incorrect". And I should also point out that those tones are incorrect as per the dictionary, but are de facto standard in many parts of China.

[MariaMaria]

First, thanks to everyone for such informative responses. Really nice welcome for a first post, thank you I will try to answer as informatively as possible.

My big question underlying my post is about the psychology of tones for non-tonal-language speakers. If you don't grow up speaking a tonal language, how deeply can you ever feel that tones convey lexical meaning and not just emotion?

Foreigners who have very advanced levels make tone mistakes. This includes famous foreigners in China, very advanced speakers on this forum, extremely advanced speakers I've heard in university settings.

In contrast, very advanced foreign speakers of, say, English, don't just randomly make pronunciation errors, even on the type of contrastive pairs that @carlo mentions. I can say from personal experience that sounds which don't exist in my language, as well as voicing and aspiration differences, are much easier to learn than tones. I learned such differences in English. In English, I never make the random mistakes I make with Chinese tones. Or, to look in different way, in Chinese I had to learn different sounds such as "xie" "xia" "chu" "ju" "shu" "xu" "lu" "lv", etc, which either I didn't know or only knew a different variant. But I never make random errors with those sounds. I learned all Chinese consonant and vowels, and with practice over time, say them now always correctly. I have slightly different accent than native speakers, but I still am internally consistent: I say my Chinese consonants and vowels in the same, basically correct way all the time. But with tones, I say it correct most of the time, but then occasionally it just comes out wrong.

I'd be curious if others agree with me, but the fact I can more easily understand a foreigner's bad-tone Chinese makes me also think that on a deep level the tones don't carry lexical meaning for me. You know confusion that the wrong tones cause native speakers. Except for Chinese language teachers who have loads of experience with foreign learners, native Chinese speakers frankly can't guess the meaning of words where the "only" problem is a wrong tone. I've seen it many times, and in every time I can understand the bad-tone Chinese speech fairly easily. It doesn't matter the foreigner's native language, it's for all non-tonal language accents that I understand them better than native speakers can understand them. Tones must carry less lexical significance for me than they do for native speakers, or I would also be just as confused.

Another issue is the effort that @tooironic discusses. At least I feel relieved that even advanced speakers like @tooironic admit that it's exhausting and requires concentration to be close to 100% perfect on tones. But that just makes me ask why tones are for years, or forever?, such a problem of random mistakes, while consonants and vowels eventually stabilize to consistency.

 

Native speakers obviously make no effort and have 100% perfect tones always. I understand the issue @tooironic mentions about native speakers not saying the "proper" tones, and the examples are very interesting. But his point seems to be an issue of prescriptive view of how native speakers "should" speak, which I see as a separate (and very debatable) issue from my post.  

My issue is about foreign learners making tone mistakes. I tend to believe that it's essentially impossible for a native speaker to make this type of tone mistake. His tone might be different from what an authority claims is the "correct" tone, but his tone will always be correct in the linguistic community in which the speaker was raised. And his tones will be internally consistent, in other words, a native speaker will never randomly say the same word sometimes in tone 1, sometimes tone 2, sometimes tone 3, sometimes warbling tone, etc. Or occasionally - and randomly - mixing up 2nd and 3rd tones, as @tooironic mentions (that's one of my disasters also! ).

I personally don't find any real patterns to my mistakes, as @carlo said. 2nd and 3rd tones confuse more easily, 1 and 4 tones usually are more correct, but the timing of when I make mistakes seems very random. The only pattern I noticed is what I wrote that my own emotions affect my ability to make correctly Chinese tones, which also makes me think that on a deep level I still think tones only represent emotion and not meaning.

@carlo, the "bar vs car" analogy I used is about this impossibility for a native speaker to randomly make tone mistakes. It seems to me that the chance of a native Chinese speaker to randomly make the same type of tone mistakes as we foreigners do is as inconceivable as it would be for a native English speaker to randomly say "I drove my bar to the store yesterday".

Would anyone be able to recommend any academic research about this issue?

The irony is that I truly do know the tone of the word. I don't always know the character of some words I use, but if I know a word and can use it, then I know its tone. Perhaps @demonic_duck misunderstood, but I definitely know in my brain what the tone is. On a test, I would receive 100%. But somewhere between my brain and my mouth, in a long speech some disasters occur and some tones change.

I decided to see what my rate of success really is. I recorded myself speaking today with a friend, but I told her just to chat with me and not correct any tone errors while I speak. Then after, she counted my errors in the recording and we counted from how many words was the total. My rate of correct was at about 99,5%. I knew my tones were for evaluation, so even though I tried to speak normally, it was still probably better than my usual rate. But even a rate of 99,5%, which seems high, is still actually quite bad. In our chatter which we analyzed, 0,5% is actually a lot of mistakes, especially because every random mistake is immediately noticed as a glaring error by every native speaker. It's also especially a low rate when you think that my consonants and vowels had no similar events of random errors or substitutions. It's also depressing because I know the correct tone for every word I said wrong. But even in a situation where I knew my tones would be measured, I didn't notice these little mistakes while I was speaking.
 

[陳德聰]

There's a constant feedback loop when you're speaking and if your ears are catching the trajectory of your pitch you should be able to make adjustments mid-word or stop yourself and restart with the correct tones. But that also relies on you being able to produce exactly the sounds you wish to produce at will.

 

I would say I don't feel tones deeply at all. In fact I often don't notice them at all until something forces me to. Like Mark Zuckerberg saying all the wrong ones all the time and having to turn off the tone recognizing part of my brain and just pretend like I'm listening to un-accent-marked pinyin in order to understand. I think that this ability comes with exposure for native speakers since foreign accents become undecipherable when you have never heard them before and don't know what to expect. But often times it is easy to understand someone once you realize they're just going to muck up all the tones.

 

Worst is when you have generally perfect tones and suddenly you have a slip of the tongue or a spoonerism and because this is so out of character, what you said becomes impossible to understand because the listener expects that you said what you meant to say. Almost all of my miscommunication comes from (unintentional) spoonerisms.

[Mouseneb]

Sometimes I struggle with tones, sometimes they seem natural. Depends on whether I'm having a good Chinese day or not  

 

Anyway, years ago I noticed that although 游泳 and 有用 had exactly the same pinyin, they were so totally separate in my mind due to tone differences that I hadn't even realized the pinyin was the same. It was kind of an "aha!" moment where I understood a little bit more why native Chinese speakers sometimes have no clue what I am saying when my pinyin is correct but tones are wrong. That's when I started to feel like I sort of "got" tones.

[imron]

游泳 and 有用 had exactly the same pinyin

Some people would argue they have different pinyin, because pinyin includes tones.

I get your point, but I must say I did a double take when I read that.

[anonymoose]

It seems to me that the chance of a native Chinese speaker to randomly make the same type of tone mistakes as we foreigners do is as inconceivable as it would be for a native English speaker to randomly say "I drove my bar to the store yesterday".

 

Is this really that inconceivable though? I think it probably happens more than we imagine, but in our native language, we just self-correct without dwelling on it, whereas when it happens in a foreign language, we take it more to heart.

 

Personally, I sometimes notice myself mispronouncing English words, even though I know full well what the pronunciation should be. And don't tongue twisters also play on the limitation with getting your mouth to say what your brain tells it to say? Of course, everyone is different, and some people are naturally better enunciators than others. But I don't think being a native speaker puts one beyond making the same kinds of mistake, and shouldn't put one beyond scrutiny either.

 

For what it's worth, I think I've heard native speakers make the kind of tone errors that you've described.

 

However, I do also agree that for native speakers of non-tonal languages, there is a weaker association of the tone with meaning than for native speakers of tonal languages, and probably for non-native speakers of Chinese, this is still the major factor influencing realisation of tones in speech.

 

This may also partially explain why native Chinese speakers often find it harder to understand poorly-tone enunciated Chinese than foreign learners. But I think education level and awareness are also a factor. It is true that the average native Chinese may find it hard to understand - but foreigners learning Chinese are likely to be higher than average in this respect. If we take well educated native speakers, who presumably have a greater general awareness also, I think they can also understand shoddy foreigner Chinese. If you watch the recent interview of Mark Zuckerberg at, where was it, Beijing University? You can see that the audience seems to have little problem understanding, even though his tones suck big time.

[tooironic]

Even putting aside the original point I made about native speakers of Chinese stuffing up the so-called "prescriptive" tones, it's simply not true that all Chinese use tones correctly all the time. Many, due to interference from their first language/方言, swap their first with their fourth tones, or second with their third, etc. What I'm trying to say is that mixing up tones is not just the domain of non-native learners - though of course our mistakes are inevitably harder to understand than those of native speakers of Chinese. But maybe one day this won't be the case. After all, nowadays French/Russian/Italian/etc. accents have become so prevalent in popular culture that now native speakers of English can understand them with relative ease.

[li3wei1]

We do use tones to convey meaning in English, but at the sentence level. And I don't think we make 'random' mistakes with this, either. A 'yes' spoken with a drawn-out third tone is very different from a 'yes' with a short 4th tone, and I don't think many native English speakers would use one when they meant the other. This is why so many people outside of Australia/NZ find the 'uplift' at the end of non-questions irritating, because it conveys a question or uncertainty to them, but isn't supposed to. So we are wired to hear tones, and produce them, and interpret them, but not at the lexical level. Those two 'yes's are not different words, the way 游泳 and 有用 are.

[GregO]

MariaMaria, I cannot point to any academic research on this but hoped to share my thoughts. I believe that based on your getting the tones right nearly 100% of the time, that it is an indicator that much of your Chinese ability is due to lots and lots of aural input. It seems to me that the more natural the tones (and other aspects of pronunciation) feel the more time the learner has spend acquiring the language through listening. Struggling to produce the proper tone, conversely, is often an indicator of a learner who has spent time memorizing the tones without enough listening to truly acquire the tones. It sounds like your Chinese is already very good :-) 

[Demonic_Duck]

To say we use tones to convey meaning in English is misleading. What we use is intonation, which is different in both function and form to tones. Chinese has intonation in addition to tones. English only has intonation.

[li3wei1]

I know nothing about linguistics, but I think the difference between tone and intonation is a bit fuzzy here. I might hear a 'yes' in all four mandarin tones in normal conversation, all meaning different things. You can call it intonation, but it is changes in pitch following established patterns. I agree we use other things - dynamics, speed, and non-mandarin-tone-like changes in pitch - that are also called intonation and that wouldn't be confused with tones. I could rephrase my sentence to: 'we are wired to hear, produce, and interpret changes of pitch within words', would that make you happy?

[Demonic_Duck]

"Yes in all four mandarin tones"? Intonation patterns in English don't follow Mandarin tones any more than they follow Cantonese or Vietnamese tones. Also, a change in intonation may give a different connotation, but it doesn't signal a change in denotation. "Yes" may imply different things depending on the intonation with which it's spoken, but it will never mean "horseshoe" or "dream" or "epilepsy".

 

Or, to take another example, you would never have a word in English where pronouncing it with a different intonation could cause it to mean mother, tingly, horse or verbally abuse (mā, má, mǎ, mà).

 

I could rephrase my sentence to: 'we are wired to hear, produce, and interpret changes of pitch within words', would that make you happy?

 

Yes, I'd say that's accurate.

[li3wei1]

"Yes" may imply different things depending on the intonation with which it's spoken, but it will never mean "horseshoe" or "dream" or "epilepsy".

 

Yes, that's what I said back in #15:

Those two 'yes's are not different words, the way 游泳 and 有用 are.

 

But you said it so much better.

 

Intonation patterns in English don't follow Mandarin tones any more than they follow Cantonese or Vietnamese tones.

 

I didn't say it did. But you can hear 'yes' spoken with pitch patterns that are remarkably similar to Mandarin tones. You can probably hear it with other pitch patterns as well. All I'm saying is what you agreed to in #18, that Enlgish speakers have, and regularly use, the ability to differentiate between pitch patterns in words. I believe this is relevant to the OP's hypothesis.