tones and questions

[Pedroski]

I should point out that tones in Chinese are very difficult for me, which explains why people on the street just look puzzled when I attempt to say anything! '听不懂啊！‘

 

Just in the text I have today, there are 2 questions:

 

雀巢咖啡为什么会在中国这样一个有着悠久茶文化传统的国度取得成功？

 

那么，直接向 饮茶这种传统习俗提出挑战有没有胜算呢？

 

When asking questions, we tend to raise the pitch of our voice at the end of a sentence.  That makes it clear that what we are saying is a question, in a lot of languages, I believe. Cf 'Your leaving today. Your leaving today?' The speaker in my examples does this.

 

成功的‘功’ is gong1 and 呢 is ne5, or no tone. So, if I raise the pitch of my voice, am I still saying ne5, or ne2?

 

In Chinese, changing the tone can change the meaning completly. If I raise the tone of my voice to make a question, and say gong1, doesn't that become another word?

[ZhangJiang]

Why not learn to speak Chinese the way it is spoken?

[somethingfunny]

In the first sentence the fact that its a question is indicated by "为什么" and in the second by "有没有".  You wouldn't need to raise your voice at the end of "Are you leaving today?" to make it clear that its question.  I wouldn't go messing round with tones to try and make it 'sound' like a question.  Having a "呢" indicates a question by its presence, not by the tone that you say it with.

[Vildhjerp]

Read aloud the first sentence you provided in English. I'm assuming you've already translated it.

 

I guarantee you that your voice won't rise abruptly at the end of the sentence. And if you force it too, it'll feel extremely uncomfortable.

 

Make it a habit not to carry over these kinds of things into Chinese. Like the two before me said, inflections like these are completely unnecessary. Let questions be identified naturally by the particles and trigger words within them.

 

On the other hand, Chinese does allow echo questions, but as far as I know, tonally, they don't exactly work the same way as they do in English.

 

Edit: Take a look at this paper. It's pretty interesting.

[陳德聰]

Many languages do not use intonation to indicate questions. Namely those languages that already use intonation for a different function.

[Guest realmayo]

Chinese definitely uses sound changes for questions but they're not exactly the same as English. Volume can increase, tone range can increase, and pitch can go higher (in that order I think).

[Demonic_Duck]

Chinese definitely uses sound changes for questions but they're not exactly the same as English. Volume can increase, tone range can increase, and pitch can go higher (in that order I think).

 

This sounds about right to me. The tones themselves remain the same (i.e. first tone is still first tone, second tone is still second tone etc.) but their actual pitch contour may change due to the intonation of the overall sentence.

 

To address a few other points made in this thread:

 

Why not learn to speak Chinese the way it is spoken?

 

This is a good tip as a general study habit, and undoubtedly large amounts of active listening will improve your own speaking skills, but it doesn't help so much when someone wants a quick fix to improve a particular aspect of their spoken Chinese (by analogy, if someone was wondering what the difference in usage betwen “的”, “得” and “地” was, you probably wouldn't tell them to "learn to write Chinese the way it is written").

 

As a native speaker yourself, maybe you'd be able to provide sound clips of the sentences in the OP, first as questions, and then rephrased as statements, that can be used as models of good pronunciation for anyone interested?

 

You wouldn't need to raise your voice at the end of "Are you leaving today?" to make it clear that its question.

 

No, but you'd probably cause listeners to do a double take, or even misunderstand you entirely, if you used exactly the same intonation as for a statement.

 

Let questions be identified naturally...

 

Yes, let questions be identified naturally by the wording and the intonation.

 

Many languages do not use intonation to indicate questions. Namely those languages that already use intonation for a different function.

 

I don't know what those languages are, but either way, Mandarin Chinese is not one of them.

[陳德聰]

I think there is a terminology issue brewing here. I often mistakenly use "intonation" and "tone" interchangeably.

 

Mandarin uses sentence-level pitch variation (intonation) to distinguish declarative and interrogative questions, but the syllable-level pitch variation (tone) is not used in the same way.

[Hofmann]

Tone differentiates between words (or morphemes); intonation changes the meaning of phrases. Mandarin has both (Yuan, 2004). Speakers of non-tonal languages learning Mandarin may experience interference from English intonation that dominates Mandarin tones, which may be what happened to OP.

[michaelS]

 

When asking questions, we tend to raise the pitch of our voice at the end of a sentence.

 

In English, this isn't true for questions that are not open-ended. As in your first example, which is a 'why' question. Would you really go up at the end of this sentence in your own language?

 

In fact, although I can't find it right now, I feel like I have read that in the majority of questions in spoken English, intonation goes down at the end.

[Guest realmayo]

Tone differentiates between words (or morphemes); intonation changes the meaning of phrases.

 

 

So would it be technically correct to say that, if using the 1-5 scale for tones, rather than producing a second tone as 4-5, if it is instead produced as 3-6 (for emphasis or question or whatever), then the change from 4-5 to 3-6 isn't a tonal change but an intonation change?

Or can we say: the tone's intonation changed?

 

And: where you have two third tones and the first one changes, it's wrong to say the tone changes?

[Hofmann]

If that syllable were also a phrase, then the intonation of the phrase affected the pitches of the syllable.

 

And I don't know.

[陳德聰]

Sorry realmayo can you provide an example?

 

Edit: Oh actually now I get what you're saying. But isn't that kind of a facetious question? It is still the same tone, but has a different pitch range... Do you mean "does that constitute a modified second tone"? If so, isn't that a given? To add to Hofmann's #12, what you call "emphasis or question or whatever" are sentence-level parameters, ergo intonation, not tone.

[gaogaozhan]

 

If I raise the tone of my voice to make a question, and say gong1, doesn't that become another word?

 

Yes.

[Pedroski]

Well, that was interesting! Thanks for the contributions, all duly noted! Tones remain a book with seven seals for me, and a great source of amusement for the gf, when I try to speak Chinese!

 

Maybe I should have said, 'if I am raising the tone of my voice to make a question', then I am using a rising tone to say gong1.

 

If I learn Chinese the way it is spoken in Nanjing, I will not be able to distinguish between  四 and 十， they are the same! Always have to resort to fingers held up as a cross, like 'hie thee hence, Satan!'

[陳德聰]

I prefer a plugged ear analogy where once your ears come unplugged, you sort of just "get" tones. It usually helps though if you aren't using your own fingers to plug your ears.

[H. Harroty]

Try not to rise your tone at the end of setence.

Instead, put your emphasis on the interrogative pronouns or particles. Like this:

 

雀巢咖啡为什么会在中国这样一个有着悠久茶文化传统的国度取得成功？

 

那么，直接向 饮茶这种传统习俗提出挑战有没有胜算呢？