Do you listen to the tones or do you understand by context?

[Andrew78]

Hi guys,

 

I've been studying for four months, mostly reading graded readers up to A2 level, just started to listen and speak 3 weeks ago. I got a native chinese teacher on Skype twice a week. I'd like to ask to intermidiate/advanced speaker of Chinese: when you listen, do you really hear/recognize the tones or you just understand by context? What I mean is if, in your opinion, when chinese people speak at a normal pace or even quite fast, you can really make out the tones, or people just follow the context?. I think it's obvious that if I say:

 

Wǒ xǐhuān xiě shì (last tone wrong) I guess everybody would be able to understand, but not all sencentes are that easy, this joke is very famous: Lǎoshī, wǒ xiǎng wěn nǐ (but anyway I guess in 99% of the cases a teacher would realize the mistake, of course, unless student and teacher are dining alone in a restaurant...).

 

 To my untrained hear, I just cannot make out the majority of the tones unless native speak very very slowly. Have you experienced the same problem at the beginning of your learning process?

[somethingfunny]

17 minutes ago, Andrew78 said:

Wǒ xǐhuān xiě shì

 

I did a double take on this before I knew what you meant - but that might just be a pinyin issue.  Honestly though, I don't think it would necessarily be that straightforward to know what you actually meant.

 

When I listen I don't hear the tones, as in, I don't hear "我喜欢写诗" and think 3-3-1-3-1.  I have a really terrible time trying to pick out individual tones and identify what they are, but I know people who find this quite straightforward.  If a Chinese person teaches me a new word I'll usually check the tones with them just to make sure.

 

I guess you could do tone listening drills where you try and identify the tone, although I never did this.  One great piece of advice I got when I started learning was just really try and nail the tones when you're speaking - you might sound ridiculous emphasising the tones but it's better than getting them wrong completely.

 

Edit: I just listened to your clip in the other thread you made and emphasising the tones is not advice that you need.

[TonganRambo]

34 minutes ago, Andrew78 said:

when you listen, do you really hear/recognize the tones or you just understand by context? What I mean is if, in your opinion, when chinese people speak at a normal pace or even quite fast, you can really make out the tones, or people just follow the context?

 

When Chinese people are speaking at a normal rate you have to be able to recognize whether chengren is referring to 成人 or 承认。Context certainly helps, but knowing the difference between a 2-4 tone pair and a 2-2 tone pair will speed up your ability to listen and understand. If you can't immediately recognize tones, then when you hear chengren you'll have to think, "Okay, what was the context that word was said in so I know which one he was referring to". By the time you figure that out, the speaker will be 6 sentences further and then you'll really be lost. 

 

I didn't keep a detailed account of my beginner/intermediate stage so I can't say how the progression works. I do remember getting hit with a blast of chinese when chinese people spoke and being able to pick out 3-4 words. As I learned new words (how to write them, say them correctly) then I would slowly pick out more and more. 

[Shelley]

My advice is do not separate tone and pronunciation. The sound you make when say shì 是 with the fourth tone, is the sound of the word that is a verb meaning to be. Any other tone used with shi is another word.

 

Also there may shi with same tone, but it has a different character, so most chinese words are made up of 2, 3 and sometimes 4 to help pin down exactly which shi and what meaning.

 

It is much clearer when you start using characters and stop using pinyin, it is easier to pin a different sound to a different character rather than similar looking pinyin.

 

I think you should also start using a textbook, something that guides you at an appropriate rate through grammar, characters, and vocabulary and more. I use and really like the New Practical Chinese Reader.

You have only been learning to listen and speak for 3 weeks, welcome, you have put your foot on the first step, it is something that will take a lot of work and practice to tune your ear and be able to understand what you hear. Listen to as much as you can even if you don't understand it , it will attune your ear to the sounds and rhythm of the language, and gradually you will find yourself understanding more and more.

 

Don't learn to rely on context, you could find yourself in a real mess.

 

Keep at it, keep listening, speaking and learn characters.

 

 

[Publius]

3 hours ago, Andrew78 said:

Wǒ xǐhuān xiě shì (last tone wrong) I guess everybody would be able to understand

I'm not so sure. 血誓 could well be the title of a TV drama or a song. 写实 is also possible if you're already talking about art. And your tones would probably end up like xie2 shi3 anyway, which may open up all sorts of possibilities.

[LiMo]

I think it really is a mix of both. The more common the utterance the more attuned you will be to how it should sound, and the more that variations or mistakes will stand out. For me I still have trouble recognising the tones on unfamiliar words, especially differentiating between 2nd and 3rd tones.

 

My Taiwanese friend sometimes uses tone variations I'm unfamiliar with, unfortunately this usually comes in the form of a correction which I reluctantly accept only to find out upon consulting a dictionary that I was "right" all along (at least by PRC standards). It can get confusing.

[Yadang]

I recognize most of the tones, yes. And they definitely affect how I understand what someone is saying. Context helps, but sometimes context can't make the call. It's hasn't happened all that often to me that a sentence would make sense with the tone being changed on one word, but it definitely has happened. And even when tones aren't necessarily needed to differentiate between two words someone could be saying which would both make sense, context can only do so much: for example, I find it hard to speak to fellow students learning Chinese if they don't have good tones - my brain just doesn't associate 时 with shi4 no matter how much sense it makes in the sentence.

[eion_padraig]

I've lived in China for over 7 years now, though not continuously. I've studied off and on during that time with tutors mostly both in China and back in the US.

 

After all this time, I still have a hard time discerning tones. It's easier when teachers are pronouncing individual words and I can identify tones 80% of the time. When it comes to sentences I wouldn't be able to parse them out by sound. I know some people who can, but often they are musicians or their native tongue is another tonal language. At times I worked on this issue with teachers, but I had minimal progress and in the end I decided other things were more productive and important for me personally.

 

As a result, I understand people largely through context. When I hear a new word, I look it up so I can see what tones are used and to see the character, so I can incorporate it into my vocabulary. It means that fragmented or non-contextual spoken Chinese is very tough for me, but I think it's rather tough for most people given the number of homophones.

 

My pronunciation of tones in sentences is fairly accurate when I know the tones of the words, so this lack of ability to hear tones doesn't mean I have a problem with production of tones.

 

In the past when I've asked people about the process where people improved in this area, people weren't able to discuss how they got better at this skill. You may just been in the early stages and this will click, or you may be like me and @somethingfunny where this doesn't get much better. My listening skills are pretty good overall though so it's not necessarily a huge probably for normal interaction in Chinese.

 

[stapler]

10 hours ago, Andrew78 said:

Wǒ xǐhuān xiě shì (last tone wrong) I guess everybody would be able to understand, but not all sencentes are that easy,

 

Well to be honest when I read this in my mind I was a bit confused. I'd maybe struggle with it even more if I heard it spoken.

 

Listening to beginning Mandarin speakers I actually find it quite difficult because even though I know roughly what they're going to say and the extent of their vocabulary, sometimes it requires a lot more cognitive effort to piece together what they're saying. The sensation for me is similar to listening to someone speak English with not just a strong accent, but someone who also lays stress in weird places. When the tones are incorrect in Chinese it's kind of like me hearing someone say in English "wall let" and I start thinking "what's a wall let? Do they mean a power socket on the wall or something? Oh, you mean 'wallet'!" You can work out what someone is saying with the wrong tones, but its basically just poor pronunciation that forces you to rely on context to decipher what they're saying.

 

 

10 hours ago, Andrew78 said:

 

10 hours ago, Andrew78 said:

What I mean is if, in your opinion, when chinese people speak at a normal pace or even quite fast, you can really make out the tones, or people just follow the context?

 

Because my level isn't that advanced my listening abilities are often just reduced to picking out key words. What prevents me from understanding is being unfamiliar with all the sounds they're making. This is not a problem about being able unable to pick out the tones on top of the sound, the tone is a part of the total sound; - it's not like I hear "duo dui zhe jing zi lian xi yi xia" then later think "oh if only I knew what tones were on those sounds I'd be able to understand it!" Tones aren't a 'post-processing' effect. To try to display it visually, it's not like I hear "jing zi" or "jing4 zi5". I either just hear sound or 镜子. When I hear 镜子 I am automatically hearing the tone.

 

[happy_hyaena]

It's really a combination of both for me. I'll often use contextual words to figure out what makes sense when talking to Natives, but there are also cases when some beginner/intermediate Chinese learner speaks to me with botched tones and I actually have a difficult time understanding, despite them not using any fancy vocab.

 

There are some words that have a slight tone difference, like, say, 成都 and 程度，or 排队 and 派对 or maybe even sometthing as simple as 买 and 卖; these are words I often use and as such am very careful to pronounce carefully, and I'm also very sensitive to the tones that people use. 老师 and 老实 are, in my mind, as different as any other random two-character word.

[renzhe]

I don't think that most of us can intentionally listen to the tones in fast speech. It is a skill that develops over years.

 

Everyone is correct that you should think about tone as an integral part of the phoneme, and that it carries meaning just like the initials and finals, but as soon as full-speed speech starts, this mostly goes out of the window.

 

For most of us who grew up speaking non-tonal languages, most of the understanding will be from context in the beginning because we have been unconsciously trained for most our lives that tones do not carry much meaning. I found that it gets better with time, but I do get tripped up by similar-sounding words even though I know that I should not because the tones are different.

[Xiao Kui]

Quote

Do you listen to the tones or do you understand by context?

 

Spoken Chinese can get really simple and implicit, and like many Asian cultures the burden of communication is on the listener rather than the speaker, so there is not always a lot of context to go by, and it is often found more in the context of the situation than the context of a sentence.  I find I use both tones and context to determine meaning depending on the circumstances. Context usually suffices, but not necessarily when people are communicating in one word sentences where the situational context is not obvious.  Tones are not always reliable, though, especially when many regional dialects switch or change them. 

[roddy]

That might be quite a fun test of a learner's Chinese - get all his native speaker pals to start using the wrong tones and see if he notices. 

[Shelley]

1 hour ago, roddy said:

get all his native speaker pals to start using the wrong tones

 

I wonder if this would be difficult to do. I think that for native speakers the tones are so entwined with the pronunciation that it might not be so easy to do.

[somethingfunny]

You ever seen a native speaker read pinyin without tone marks?  We used to have student lists in pinyin and it drove the teachers crazy - they'd literally cycle through all four tones before knowing which character it was.