Teaching styles of mandarin teachers

[Flickserve]

I am still in the early stages of learning mandarin.

From some of the advice given in this forum, I recently decided to try and strengthen my pronunciation which is what I expressed to the instructor. But I feel in some respects, I am still weak in this area and then the instructor will move on to increasing vocabulary. However, when the words come out, I don't feel as if my pronunciation is improving. In fact, it seems to remain static. But at least I know it's not accurate as opposed to three months ago when I thought I was saying a word correctly and the instructor says "hmm" as a sign of affirmation. Looking back, I think perhaps I got 50-70% accuracy in saying the word.

So this gets me thinking. With these language schools, do they have the same philosophy of trying to cram vocab and survival mandarin to non-chinese speakers? The same way as in many of the students gauge a marker of absolute success in how many words they know.

So even if I tell my language teacher that I want to concentrate on getting a good accent, will they still quickly move on to more vocabulary as that is their perception of what I want?

Is that their target? To churn out as many survival Chinese speakers with an understandable accent.

Maybe I am just venting some frustration in that I still make the same errors in speaking - even after having lessons and repetition. For example, my first tone always comes out low pitched - it hardly comes out high pitched naturally when reading the pinyin. Nor can I look at a word and remember the tone. Perhaps the sound, yes, but not the tone. And is that not in part due to the instructor not drilling the detail enough or having a wide margin of acceptance?

[ForrestEJ]

When it comes to language classes - in my experience with Korean, Chinese and Spanish - teachers do not have time to work on your pronunciation in class because there are too many students. You have to take time out of class and find a tutor or a friend who will sit there and work with you on your pronunciation, tones, sentence flow etc.

 

You can also do this by listening and repeating a lot. Listen a lot and then repeat and record yourself. You will be able to hear what is wrong 90% of the time and fix it. I found this helps a great deal, and then a native speaker can help get you to a point where you are pretty much pronouncing things as good as you can for your given level of mandarin.

 

At some point, you can stop being frustrated with your pronunciation too much if people are understanding you. Your pronunciation will continue to get better over time as you progress, but at the beginning, doing what I suggest above seems to help a great great deal and will give you a strong head start.

 

Just use classes for what they are - new words, however many hours of listening, grammar introduction, sentences, etc... things like speaking practice, listening practice, pronunciation - those have to come outside of the class.

 

At least, that is the way I approach it because, for me and for those I see who really do excel, that is the best way to approach it.

[DongLian]

I agree with the above.. my pronunciation started out kinda meh.. but now I think it's where I am strongest (listening not so much lol).

 

All I did was listen, and repeat.. I was using Rosetta stone at the time and it won't "pass you" or move to the next part until you hit a threshold of accuracy.  Over time I could turn up the threshold and now I have to put it at max.  I only refined it when I finally took my first CHI101 class but I pretty much already knew how to pronounce things.

 

I think this kind of software might help you.  It  has more patience than a teacher, but the drawback is it won't tell you what is wrong you just keep trying until  you get the sound you're trying to make.

[stapler]

In my experience this was something I really had to do on my own. Looking at mouth diagrams was good at the start, but I had difficulty getting the "c" and "v (yu)" sounds for a while. My Chinese friends would just keep repeating the correct sound and I'd just keep on saying it incorrectly. They couldn't really tell me how to get it right. Just vague stuff like "do this with your lips". The way I got a grasp on pronunciation was sitting down by myself and listening carefully and practicing on my own.

[Radical Mandarin]

To improve pronunciation, LISTEN! You need a lot of exposure to these sounds for you to be able to say them correctly and easily.

 

 

1. So listen to lots of Chinese by native speakers - watch a subbed TV series on youtube, for example, or a few.

 

2. Try the technique called shadowing. (Listening to a text and repeating everything after the speaker, with a small delay, like half a second)

 

3. Do both active and passive listening. By passive listening I mean hearing Chinese while you're doing something else, for example turn Chinese radio on while you're cleaning the house. It's perfectly fine for you to understand nothing - it's for your brain to get used to all these new sounds, which will later greatly facilitate listening comprehension and speaking.

 

4. As you say the words, just say them how you hear them, not how you're "suppposed" to say them. Just say it how you heard it, as closely as possible.

 

 

Whether a group or one-on-one class, most of the time in class is better spent on learning new vocab. As a teacher, I don't focus on pronunciation too much, as my students will sound closer and closer to native speakers as they learn anyway (because of a lot of listening). Unless someone is monstrously mispronouncing everything, I'll never dedicate a class to pronunciation. Ask your teacher if they think you need a class on pronunciation. If they say no, it may well be you're not quite as bad as you think!

 

In short, LISTEN a lot, sometimes imitate what you hear while listening, and your pronunciation will catch up.

[roddy]

Pronunciation is often badly taught. There's a perception that non-native speakers 'just need to be understood', and that it's 'too difficult' to reach a high standard. There's often a lack of pronunciation work built into courses (typically a textbook has a 'pronunciation' section at the start, and then nothing about it at all. And in general the Chinese education system is more about memorising words and making sentences. 

 

I'd disagree with a couple of things above. There's no reason not to work on pronunciation in a group class. Off the top of my head, if you've been practicing some dialogue and the students have it pretty much mastered, tell them this time they're going to do it with focus on pronunciation. See if the students can spot and correct each others mistakes to keep them engaged. Sure, everyone has different problems, but that's true for every aspect of language. Chances of this happening in your average Chinese classroom are close to zero though. 

 

And while listening is essential, it's the talking that makes the difference - repeated practice, monitored by ideally a competent teacher, with steady incremental improvements. 

[geraldc]

I was taught mandarin with pinyin, we would have days and days of pinyin drills. My dad grew up speaking mandarin with his Cantonese accent. As I type in pinyin, I find it really helps remembering the pronunciation. All my Cantonese relatives who don't have pinyin, just bend Cantonese, and that causes problems.

[Yadang]

 

And is that not in part due to the instructor not drilling the detail enough or having a wide margin of acceptance?

Yes, at least I think it is. One problem I think, is that whenever I hear teachers correcting pronunciation, they don't say what to do or how to do it. They usually just repeat the word/phrase, sometimes over-emphasizing tones and such. The other problem is that many have been teaching and have heard bad pronunciation for years, from hundreds/thousands of students, and so they are much better at understanding foreigner-accented pronunciation.

 

The good news is, you can make a lot of progress by yourself, if you have a computer, an free internet guide, and patience (the method I used is laid out below).

 

 

 

I was using Rosetta stone at the time and it won't "pass you" or move to the next part until you hit a threshold of accuracy.  Over time I could turn up the threshold and now I have to put it at max.  I only refined it when I finally took my first CHI101 class but I pretty much already knew how to pronounce things.

I think this kind of software might help you. It  has more patience than a teacher, but the drawback is it won't tell you what is wrong you just keep trying until  you get the sound you're trying to make.

 

I tried out the Rosetta stone speech recognition software and was not impressed. I could say things that I knew were wrong, and it would pass me. Also, apart from not being impressed about judging my pronunciation correctly, I was also unimpressed that it didn't teach how to pronounce the syllables in the first place. I think using audacity to record yourself and listen is much better.

 

You can also do this by listening and repeating a lot. Listen a lot and then repeat and record yourself.

 

This is true - and I especially agree with the recording part. A lot of people just say "listen and repeat", but I've heard so many of my classmates listen and repeat after the teacher, and they are far from the correct pronunciation - but it seems they can't hear it. I think it's really important (however excruciating it is) to record yourself and listen to yourself. Listen to a recording of a native speaker, repeat while recording yourself, listen to the native speaker again, then compare with what you just recorded. Repeat.

 

However, for most people I don't think it's enough to just listen, record, compare and repeat either - not me at least. I think it's helpful to have a more gradual approach, using a pinyin chart and a guide that tells you how to make the sounds.

 

 

 

To improve pronunciation, LISTEN! You need a lot of exposure to these sounds for you to be able to say them correctly and easily.

1. So listen to lots of Chinese by native speakers - watch a subbed TV series on youtube, for example, or a few.

2. Try the technique called shadowing. (Listening to a text and repeating everything after the speaker, with a small delay, like half a second)

 

I have to say I somewhat disagree with this. I think listening a lot will help you get more used to the rhythm, but not necessarily good at pronunciation - not until you have a firm foundation upon which to work. Then listening really kicks in. But I think you have to build that foundation first. Shadowing is definitely a great idea, but again, only after a firm foundation has been developed. 

 

 

It's perfectly fine for you to understand nothing - it's for your brain to get used to all these new sounds, which will later greatly facilitate listening comprehension and speaking.

 

I also disagree that it's fine to understand nothing when shadowing. Pronunciation is not only about combining consonants and vowels and throwing on a tone - it is changed a lot by the context. The words that are come before and after, as well as the intonation/feeling being portrayed of the overall sentence, etc. all can affect pronunciation. 

 

 

As you say the words, just say them how you hear them, not how you're "suppposed" to say them. Just say it how you heard it, as closely as possible.

 

Yeah, but knowing how they're "supposed" to be said - and how they differ from the sounds in your mother language helps. It's much easier to correct pronunciation if you know what you're doing wrong, than if you only know that you're doing something wrong (and that's assuming that you hear that you're doing something wrong in the first place, and without recording yourself a lot at least in the beginning, I'm skeptical that the average learner can do this).

 

 

Ask your teacher if they think you need a class on pronunciation. If they say no, it may well be you're not quite as bad as you think!

 

I wish I could believe this. But I've seen too many people say things with bad pronunciation in front of their teacher, and the teacher understands, says 很好！ and carries on. To be honest, I think it's more likely that the teacher is used to foreigner pronunciation and thinks it's "good enough", and in my experience, the bar for "good enough" is usually pretty low.

 

Not sure who down-voted roddy... Especially his first paragraph is dead on with every point.

[Yadang]

Anyways, here's what I'd recommend to improve your pronunciation, starting from 0:

It seems like your native language is English. That means you can use this guide from Chinese Pod. It's free, and it's good. Supplement it with this other guide written by John Pasden (who was actually the guy who did the stuff for Chinese Pod also, but on his own site, he says some things differently, making them easier to understand. Actually, Chinese Pod seems to have an app for Android and iOS. That wasn't around when I was working on the basics of pronunciation, but as it's made by Chinese Pod, it's probably good.

(Note: all of the above resources are free. There are also some you can buy: John Pasden's new updated stuff from allset learning and Glossika had a pronunciation manual. Here's a review by OneEye. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it on the website... All of the links in the review are broken too... However the Amazon one seems to still be working. But you'll only get the book and not the mp3 files I think...)

If I were you, I'd read the guide and the supplement blog (as well as anything you buy, if you chose to do so). Read each part and then use the pinyin chart (you can download it from the Chinese Pod link) to listen to the syllables in the group of syllables that you just read about. Listen very carefully, a few times, to each syllable. Record yourself. Listen to the native recording, then listen to your own recording, and compare the two. Do this a few times, until you you can't get closer to the native speaker's sound. Do all of this by only listening to the recording of the syllable said in the first tone. Repeat for each syllable in the group of similar syllables.

Then go to the next group of similar syllables in the guide, and repeat.

After you've gotten some pretty good pronunciation by doing this, it's time to work on tones. (Please note, although in the initial learning of pronunciation I think it's a good idea to separate the consonant-vowel combinations from tones, I don't think this should be carried on forever. I agree with imron that this is a bad idea... I'll try to find out where he mentioned that and link it here...)

In the pinyin chart that was downloaded, there should be a folder of mp3's that the chart is referenced to. There are around 1,500 files or so. Copy them all on to your ipod and listen to them in order, so you should hear something like "a1, a2 a3, a4, an1, an2, an3 an4," etc. It will take like 40 minutes to an hour to listen to all the way though, if I remember correctly. It's not fun, but if your brain has no concept of what tones even are, this will at least drill the concept in pretty hard. You'll have the tones stuck in your head on repeat. I have them stuck in my head now, just from thinking about this. It's great.

After you've started to conceptualize tones, you can start use the various syllables that you should already be able to pronounce toneless, and add on the tone. Go through the same listening, recording, listening again and comparing procedure. Although, I didn't find it necessary to do this will all of the syllables and all of the tones. After a while, you get use to it and can just apply tones to syllables.

It would probably be a good idea to use John Pasden's Tone-Pair Drills at this point, although I can't vouch for them as I never used them.

After you go through this, your pronunciation will be much better, but your tones will be ridiculously exaggerated, especially the third tone (unless John Pasden works on more natural sounding tones in his Tone-Pair drills - I'm not sure). At this point, you need to learn how to take your ridiculously exaggerated tones and... how should I put this - tone them down, if you will. Now THIS is the time when listening to actual speech comes in. In fact, I quite enjoyed the experience - you have these exaggerated tones and then you start listening to native speakers talk (not from textbook recordings, but from stuff that's meant to be heard by native speakers, not students), and you'll start having all these mini-epiphanies about the intricacies of tones, and how the pronunciation of consonant-vowel combinations change according to what words came before and what words follow, what kind of emotions the speaker is feeling/trying to portray, if the speaker is emphasizing on part of the phase, how fast the speaker is speaking, etc.

This is when shadowing longer stuff, like clips extracted from movies using Subs2SRS, or clips of podcasts or whatever is helpful. However, I highly recommend recording yourself when shadowing too.

Please note that all of the above is just according to my experiences. I have no formal education in linguistics or language pedagogy, and there are many on this forum who understand pronunciation much better than I do. However, what I can say is that the above, however much of a layman's approach it is, will definitely help your pronunciation if you put in the time. I'm sure there are still faults with my pronunciation (actually I know there are), but I also know, both from my teachers telling me (although as you've probably guessed by now I don't exactly trust most teachers when it comes to correcting pronunciation) and more importantly from my interactions with people on the street - by having them understand me much better than other foreigners who have not gone through this process - that this process will help your pronunciation immensely, thereby making you more understandable and making it much less of a strain on native speakers to understand you. You will also start to notice that people seem to understand you much easier than your foreign friends, and you will be able to hear with your newly trained ears that the difference between your pronunciation and their's is really quite... ermm... pronounced.

If you want to go more in depth, I recommend checking out this excellent post by Tamu, and perhaps wikipedia.

[Radical Mandarin]

Just like tastes differ when it comes to food, different people like and benefit from different approaches. They don't cancel each other out! 

 

My advice about listening is something that I know works well for the majority of my students. So if somebody is stuck with listening/speaking problems, try it, because it may help. Just test this "don't say it how you "should" say it, imitate what you heard". I've seen people make a huge leap by only doing this bit (some non-native teachers have fantastic pronunciation, but it will generally make a lot of sense to imitate native speakers - if your teacher isn't a native speaker, use audio/video resources)

 

 

 

2. Try the technique called shadowing. (Listening to a text and repeating everything after the speaker, with a small delay, like half a second)

 

3. Do both active and passive listening. By passive listening I mean hearing Chinese while you're doing something else, for example turn Chinese radio on while you're cleaning the house. It's perfectly fine for you to understand nothing - it's for your brain to get used to all these new sounds, which will later greatly facilitate listening comprehension and speaking.

 

I also disagree that it's fine to understand nothing when shadowing.

 

There is nothing to disagree with. I never suggested shadowing what you don't understand was good. As you see, these are two different paragraphs, and it was passive listening where I said it's fine to not understand a lot.

 

I have the same opinion as you, one can greatly benefit from shadowing - but you should know what you're saying! Hm, I never thought about save tried shadowing something I don't understand actually. So I won't comment on that.

 

 

 

Ask your teacher if they think you need a class on pronunciation. If they say no, it may well be you're not quite as bad as you think!

 

I wish I could believe this. But I've seen too many people say things with bad pronunciation in front of their teacher, and the teacher understands, says 很好！ and carries on.  To be honest, I think it's more likely that the teacher is used to foreigner pronunciation and thinks it's "good enough", and in my experience, the bar for "good enough" is usually pretty low.

These are not related though. If the teacher doesn't correct someone's pronunciation when the student is talking in a group, it doesn't mean they will lie if asked - is my pronunciation really bad? do I need to work on it?

 

Yeah, all teachers grow a tolerance to mistakes and mispronunciation, and sadly some don't seem to realize, or care, that native speakers may struggle or fail to understand the language learner.

 

I hear it's a common occurrence to experience some degree of not being understood by native speakers of tonal languages, when all one used to do was talking to teachers and other students, hearing other students' accents all the time. Then again, teachers themselves don't always have great pronunciation. This can get ingrained in one's mind, and get stuck there as a model of the language. They then speak classroom English, classroom Chinese, classroom French etc.

 

This is why I stress a lot of listening to authentic material is so important.

[Flickserve]

It's all very well to practice tone pairs but it is good to know their meaning.

One issue about practicing on my own is I can't hear the differences between my own voice and a native speaker. Imperfect practice does not make perfect speech. I am not yet good enough to discern the fine differences and fine tune as required. A source of help is the praat app in PC.

Radical mandarin hit the money on the button. Teachers are more tolerant to the mistakes. I just have been assessed as being intermediate- lower level which I am fairly happy with. But when I ask, how good is my accent and pronunciation, the reply is "I can understand you. You do have a cantonese accent". I want to know how good or bad is my putonghua accent and where to work on it to improve. There are a number of people in this forum who regret not working on their tones better early on when learning chinese and then find native speakers not understanding them on arriving in China.

I am starting to pick up people's conversation. I listen to a Beijing radio station almost every day for half an hour. Mainly passive and a bit actively. I tried watching a Taiwanese made film last night - I could hardly pick up anything, even with the subtitles there. I thought it might have been mainly in Taiwanese except that there were some words definitely in mandarin. Very different to the speech in shows that originate from China.

[Flickserve]

Here is something that happened just now.

I had a conversation in Cantonese. And then 5 minutes later tried to say 教练. I got the 'jiao lian' but the tones came out in Cantonese tones. And this is a word I am quite familiar with.

That's depressing.

[Radical Mandarin]

But it's fine, you were still on that Cantonese wave. Don't give it a second thought!

 

This phenomenon is not even limited to the languages we learn! This happens to me in my mother tongue! Sometimes I use a foreign language intensely, and afterwards have no time or context to "switch" back, and may mispronounce something in my first language ("you're speaking with an accent"), or search for words in vain, to describe something, because my brain keeps giving me equivalents in the language I've just been using.

 

This happens to a lot of people, why be stressed about such a minor thing. We're not robots. For one thing, your post made me feel envious, your ability to speak Cantonese is such a huge advantage when learning Mandarin, to say nothing of the fact it's an awesome language to know. 

[Flickserve]

Why be stressed? Not stressed but depressed! It seems difficult to make the transition to make that final transition of remembering and getting the correct tone out consistently.

I have the same problem with Cantonese - there are some words I can't say consistently correctly but I haven't concentrated in learning Cantonese. Just for your interest, I can understand up to about 80% Cantonese in general colloquial conversation which drops when a conversation starts to use more technical words or more formal Cantonese. I can also switch between Cantonese and English without thinking. Delivering a talk in Cantonese is about the limit of my ability. My accent is definitely of a non-native speaker. This is the level I am aspiring to in mandarin and with a more accurate spoken ability.

I just want to be able to switch to mandarin and minimize the accent and tone imperfections. With this thread confirming instructors accepting a level of "it's an acceptable level of mandarin for a foreigner", that's a source of frustration. My pronunciation is only going to be worse outside of class and probably an unintelligible mess. I am trying to learn from others experience of their biggest regret in learning Chinese. When I used 教练 with a Cantonese spoken tone, that just indicated I am not progressing on naturally changing my tones to mandarin and hence my frustration.

[xiuqu yin]

这里中国人多吗？