Learning mandarin from cantonese

[calibre2001]

Try tone pair combination drills. Very effective for training tone awareness including the relative pitch.

Using the prescribed HSK vocab for this exercise could help increase your vocab at the same time.

The best of both worlds? Anyway the link below has useful tips.

http://www.hackingchinese.com/focusing-on-tone-pairs-to-improve-your-mandarin-pronunciation/

Also consider playing a game with the tutor ( see the article below )

http://www.hackingchinese.com/a-smart-method-to-discover-problems-with-tones/

[Flickserve]

Thanks. I shouldn't feel too bad. Even local HK persons can find Mandarin difficult. I had dinner with an elderly general practitioner in HK the other night. He said Mandarin is hard for HK people. "They (HK) people are contaminated with Cantonese making it hard to learn Mandarin. Westerners who are totally fresh learn Mandarin more easily."

I have heard that a few times over the years.

Generally a native speaker of Cantonese in HK is able to grasp listening skills and grammatical differences very quickly in Mandarin. They all learn formal Chinese from school. However, their spoken skills vary quite a lot.

A slightly different subset is the group who are pretty fluent in spoken Cantonese but are illiterate. For me, Cantonese is a second language. We don't have the benefit of being literate in Chinese. I pick up the logic of mandarin fairly quickly but cannot express accurately and have mediocre listening skills.

Different people, slightly different angle to the problem.

[calibre2001]

Tones is a feature of Chinese languages and no Chinese adult learning a foreign Chinese language is spared from this difficulty.

Northern Mandarin speakers often get Cantonese tones wrong & heritage-Minnan-speaker who didn't grow up speaking it get their Minnan intonations wrong too. It's probably worse for the average westerner who just can't wrap his/her head around the concept of tones.

 

I do think putting effort into tones, however clinical & sterile it seems, pays off handsomely in the long run. Better accuracy in tones simply results in better communication, especially when saying something the native speaker can't guess or infer from the context. Awareness of it actually improves listening since Mandarin contains many homophones compared to Cantonese.

 

[Flickserve]

I spent nearly a few months working on pronunciation and tones and still do.