Remembering tones while speaking

[i__forget]

I have seen the advice online, quite a few times, that you shouldn't learn tones from the bottom up (I.e for each word), instead from the top down (infer the tones from a whole sentence).

 

The benefit of this approach is that it allows you to proceed faster in your learning as you don't have to waste time on the tone of each word individually, which I think does require a great amount of effort.

 

In my opinion this advice doesn't seem to make any sense. If I don't know the tone for each word I want to say, how will I pronounce the sentence correctly? Any opinions?

[anonymoose]

I've never heard that advice before. Some people do advise, however, that the tone should not be learned as an independent feature, but rather as an intrinsic part of the sound (i.e. try to get the sound, including the tone, into your reflex memory, rather than thinking of it as a separate number).

However, I think that's easier said than done, unless you have a good memory for sound.

I'd just say try different things until you find something that works for you.

[tooironic]

In my experience the best way is to learn tones first individually (i.e. by using a pinyin chart) and then mix and match different tone pairs. This allows you to learn practice both zi and ci (including tone sandhi) in equal measure. Not sure what you mean by tones at the sentence level. Perhaps you mean intonation? That's something very subtle that requires long-term immersion to pick up.

[陳德聰]

I think the idea that you should just extrapolate tone info from sentences without any prior tone groundwork is absurd, and while I’m sure it’s humanly possible (because children definitely do this) it seems like a collosal waste of time when you could just start by understanding tone on an intellectual level before having a go at it.

 

Any new vocabulary you acquire should be acquired with the correct pronunciation and not just some vague idea of the pronunciation.

[i__forget]

2 hours ago, tooironic said:

Not sure what you mean by tones at the sentence level. Perhaps you mean intonation

Thanks for your answers guys! I think I should clarify what I mean. This article http://www.thepolyglotdream.com/tips-on-how-to-learn-chinese-tones/ (very cheese website name let's ignore that) explains the idea, and this one https://blog.thelinguist.com/tips-to-help-you-learn-mandarin :

 

"It is hard to remember the tones for individual characters or words while speaking. It is best to try to learn the tones not so much as individual characteristics of each single character, but rather as part of groups of characters or phrases. This is easier than trying to remember, while speaking, “is this first tone, second tone, third tone or fourth tone?”. If you get used to the combined intonation of certain words in phrases and the intonation of these phrases, you’ll eventually start improving. You don’t want to be so tongue-tied and hung up about the tones that you can’t speak."

[Flickserve]

I use both ways together. Learn it as part of a short phrase but also reinforce it by looking it up. 

[LiMo]

I think you got a bit mixed up but your second post adequately clarifies what I think is sound advice.

 

I don't think anyone is suggesting that you learn tones from whole sentences. Most of this kind of advice is aimed at what you should not do, namely, focusing on learning characters and tones in isolation and then learning words and sentences in isolation. This leads to very unnatural speech in which tones are either over-emphasised or completely neglected. 

 

By practising sentences with your attention on tones, tone sandhi  and intonation, you can achieve a more natural/native sounding speech than you otherwise would.

[歐博思]

Don't worry about tones. Just speak quickly with an accent and people will think you're 新疆人. /jk

 

Building on what 陳德聰 said on children's learning, most of us learners don't have a Chinese mom and dad to provide that language immersion or help us naturally compare and contrast "this sentence means one thing when said this way and maybe something totally unrelated if said that way", i.e. other information in sentence-level prosody can affect individual tones (emphasis, emotions, etc).

If you only learn sentence level tones as an adult you're wasting your analytically superior adult mind on a more children's-type learning style.

[ChTTay]

LiMo is dead on the money for me! 

 

I know and have known a fair few people who speak Chinese one word at a time. It means there are (relatively) massive gaps between words in their sentence. Even some who’ve learned Chinese for a long time, some of them obsess of each word’s tone for fear of being misunderstood. Actually, I’ve found speaking like this often leads to more problems. At least in restaurants, waitresses/waiters usually just loose patience and stop listening or the disjointed nature means they just don’t get it. Lots of “eh?” faces. 

 

As above, the advice seems to link into shadowing/drilling sentences (there are some good threads here on this). The glossika method also uses sentence drilling. 

 

I’ve personally found learning and drilling sentences highly effective. 

 

[amytheorangutan]

2 hours ago, ChTTay said:

I know and have known a fair few people who speak Chinese one word at a time. It means there are (relatively) massive gaps between words in their sentence

 

This is me at the moment I’m having problems trying to speak long sentences in a natural way unless I’m mimicking someone or reproducing common sentences. If it’s my own made up sentences that I haven’t heard before I just sound like a robot because I try to make sure individual word is said in the correct tone. I’m working on it ?

[Flickserve]

5 minutes ago, amytheorangutan said:

This is me at the moment I’m having problems trying to speak long sentences in a natural way unless I’m mimicking someone or reproducing common sentences. If it’s my own made up sentences that I haven’t heard before I just sound like a robot because I try to make sure individual word is said in the correct tone. I’m working on it

 

How long is long? I prefer to build up from short phrases like about 4 words long and go from there...

[ChTTay]

Yeah it was me as a beginner too. Of course get the basics down, do loads of pinyin drills, correct pronunciation etc but there comes  time where you’ve just gotta speak! Stop worrying and go for it. 

[LuDaibola]

7 hours ago, amytheorangutan said:

This is me at the moment I’m having problems trying to speak long sentences in a natural way unless I’m mimicking someone or reproducing common sentences. If it’s my own made up sentences that I haven’t heard before I just sound like a robot because I try to make sure individual word is said in the correct tone. I’m working on it ?

 

What's worked for me in this regard is using Audacity to record myself saying my own sentences with the best tonal quality possible and then listening to these sentences just as I do with sentences spoken by a native speaker (sentences from Glossika, Archchinese, ChinesePod, and other sources).  With Audacity, you can record sections separately - say 4 words at a time - and then combine them into a complete sentence.  You can also speak the entire sentence in one stream with gaps between phrases while you think about how to say the next phrase and then just delete the gaps to make it sound like one fluent sentence.  You can also use the program to speed up the sentence.  The only drawback to this method is that, without help from a native speaker, you can get the tones write but totally screw up the prosody.  For this reason, I primarily restrict myself to substitution sentences; 也就是說，I take a sentence from one of the aforementioned native speaker sources and fill-in different words retaining the rhythm and stress as closely as possible.  If you're not already using it, Audacity is free and easy to use at a basic level (believe me, I'm practically a Luddite).  Hope this is helpful.

[LuDaibola]

On 4/23/2018 at 3:41 AM, amytheorangutan said:

unless I’m mimicking someone or reproducing common sentences

 

I realized this morning that my suggestion didn't really address what you were lamenting amytheorangutan.  I have found, to my surprise, that the more common sentences/phrases I learn, the more often I'm able to insert them in conversation though so I still think it's worth taking the time to practice these.  Hopefully, before too long, I'll be in an immersive setting and then I'll have a chance to see how well this method has worked.  This might be an interesting topic on it's own:  how important is learning/drilling sentences.  It's probably already in the archives.