Chinese people DON'T learn tones. That just means YOU MUST

[AlexBlackman]

It's great to have a native speakers perspective on the topic.

 

I can now quite clearly see I was wrong about attributing natives good tones to immersion alone.

Do you think it is due to L1 interference? Many people in Taiwan speak 台语 and 客家话 at home and these languages seem to differ more in vowel/consonant pronouncation (1) then in tone.

 

(1) I'm English but I've forgotten the technical term for this (>,<) 

[oceancalligraphy]

Do you think it is due to L1 interference? Many people in Taiwan speak 台语 and 客家话 at home and these languages seem to differ more in vowel/consonant pronouncation (1) then in tone.

 

I don't think so. I know in my generation, we spoke 臺語 (Taiwanese) at home and our standard Mandarin turned out fine. And I have family members with less than ideal standard Mandarin pronunciation. Somehow the weight of listening to standard Mandarin on TV and children's shows and being drilled at school outweighed my daily life of being exposed to 臺語 and Taiwanese-accented Mandarin.

 

Even though a main difference between Taiwanese and standard Mandarin is the pronunciation of a sound, but it could lead to not being able to produce the tone correctly. As in, if a child mixes up consonant and vowel sounds, it isn't far fetched that s/he may not hear the tonal difference. Also, there are some children that just have a tough time hearing the difference in tones and need constant practice in the early years. This teacher describes helping students who cannot tell the difference between second and third tones, such as the difference between 吳 and 五. No matter what, the earlier years are devoted to making sure all aspects of pronunciation are correct.

[Demonic_Duck]

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to mislead anyone, but I was conversational long before I got my tones right, and I couldn't really even hear them correctly at the beginning anyway - I could only approximate them. I never was misunderstood because of a mispronounced tone. I placed into an intermediate class my first semester studying so I didn't get the tones drilled in since that was done in a beginner's class. I learned them later because I wanted my reading and speech to sound more fluent and natural, and learning them seemed to come more naturally when I was further along into the language. I got a tutor to help me specifically with the tones and after 3-4 lessons I learned them. Listening to an audiobook helped me to incorporate them more naturally into my speech.

It sounds like your experience is highly atypical. I'm not sure how you could learn every tone you'd neglected to learn up to intermediate level in 3-4 lessons, nor do I understand how listening to an audiobook would help you to incorporate them into speaking.

In Sichuan native speakers switch their tones when speaking Mandarin and they can communicate fluently with other speakers. (Anyone who has ridden a taxi in Chengdu knows that if you pronounce the destination with standard Mandarin tones the driver will repeat it with other tones. you will think they are correcting you, but no, they are just switching the tones.)

The thing is though, there is a pattern to how their tones differ from the standard. It's like the difference between a colour negative of an image and the finished photograph - all the information is still there, it just looks different. If there's no pattern and it's just haphazard, it's more like the difference between a black and white and a colour photograph - there is a loss of information in the B&W image.

[AlexBlackman]

I don't think that's an outrageous thing to claim; Learning to recognise the four tones and common sandhi changes in four sessions isn't too hard.

 

Relearning every word would take many months, but if he just learns the most frequently used words, his spoken mandarin will appear significantly better with a fraction of the effort.

[Xiao Kui]

It sounds like your experience is highly atypical. I'm not sure how you could learn every tone you'd neglected to learn up to intermediate level in 3-4 lessons, nor do I understand how listening to an audiobook would help you to incorporate them into speaking.

 

I'm sorry, I knew the tones of nearly  every word I'd learned until then, but my pronunciation of them was significantly off, especially with combinations, or when reading.  In 3-4 lessons i learned the correct intonations and just applied them to all the words i already knew. The audiobook helped me develop an ear for the rhythm and overall intonation. my perception is that we as foreigners tend to overemphasized the tones so they don't sound natural and it really impedes transitioning between syllables when reading aloud or speaking, so the audiobook helped with that. 

 

When i started learning Chinese i was eager to communicate and didn't have any patience for tone and pronunciation drills. I tried them but got frustrated with my inability to internalize them and skipped ahead.  If you have the patience and discipline for this at the beginning, sure go for it, but if it frustrates you like it did me, skip ahead, you can always go back to them!  I didn't mean don't learn what the tones are for each word, I just meant don't obsess over being able to hear and pronounce them correctly at the beginning.  I'm sorry if my post implied the former - i kind of take it for granted that learning the tone is part of learning a new word, just as much as learning the pinyin and character is.

 

Relearning every word would take many months, but if he just learns the most frequently used words, his spoken mandarin will appear significantly better with a fraction of the effort.

 

Xiao Kui -> 小葵 female ;) 

[Shelley]

I'm sorry, I knew the tones of nearly  every word I'd learned until then, but my pronunciation of them was significantly off,

 

IMHO this means you didn't know them, you were aware of them but unable to use them correctly.

 

I am aware of the tone of any new word I learn but it takes a bit of practice before I get it right. I am not tone perfect myself and probably never will be because I am tone deaf, can't carry a tune in a bucket but I try.

 

I find it difficult to distinguish the relative pitches of music and tones. My tones are usually ok in isolation but string them all together in a sentence and it goes all over the place.

 

I also don't obsess over tones but I also don't feel I can claim to "know" them.

 

I think this topic is one of the things about learning Chinese that will be open to debate for along time to come.