Audio vs Pinyin

[imron]

Split off from discussion here

 

23 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

But these days it should all be audio and characters only.

I disagree.  I don't rely on audio when I encounter a new word in English and neither do I rely on it for Chinese.  In my mind, I can reproduce with 100% accuracy the correct sound from the pinyin, so audio is not really necessary at all, and in fact slows things down (it takes me less time to read the pinyin than it would to listen to audio).

 

Not to mention that audio can also be a source of confusion especially when accents are in play that mixup certain sounds.  For the longest time I thought the word 窄 was pronounced zǎi because I'd learnt it audibly (from a northerner no less, who didn't have any problem distinguishing z/zh in other words).  It wasn't until I was trying to find the character in the dictionary (and couldn't) and then asked, that I discovered the correct pronounciation was zhǎi.

 

Audio is useful, but not infallible.  Likewise pinyin.

 

Personally, I've found that once you have obtained a decent level, pinyin is faster and more convenient than audio for learning new words.

[XiaoXi]

1 hour ago, imron said:

I disagree.  I don't rely on audio when I encounter a new word in English and neither do I rely on it for Chinese.  In my mind, I can reproduce with 100% accuracy the correct sound from the pinyin, so audio is not really necessary at all, and in fact slows things down (it takes me less time to read the pinyin than it would to listen to audio).

Well that's how Chinese people learn, I don't see why foreigners learning Chinese have to be different. 

 

2 hours ago, imron said:

Not to mention that audio can also be a source of confusion especially when accents are in play that mixup certain sounds.  For the longest time I thought the word 窄 was pronounced zǎi because I'd learnt it audibly (from a northerner no less, who didn't have any problem distinguishing z/zh in other words).  It wasn't until I was trying to find the character in the dictionary (and couldn't) and then asked, that I discovered the correct pronounciation was zhǎi.

That doesn't really make much sense. If you listened all your life to a Southerner saying 'damn' in English you'd think it was 'dayum!'. Obviously you have to listen to standard pronunciation audio, no matter what language you learn...?

 

Also English is COMPLETELY different to Chinese, you can't compare them at all. English is written phonetically and there is only that and the spoken language. Whereas Chinese has a written language and a spoken language and also pinyin which is something that didn't even exist for 5000 years. You can't compare with with English or most other languages for that matter.

 

2 hours ago, imron said:

Audio is useful, but not infallible.  Likewise pinyin.

Well 1.3 billion Chinese kids found audio enabled them to speak fluent Chinese with out any written language at all. Audio is infallible as long as it's pronounced correctly. You may as well say pinyin is not infallible because it might be spelt wrong?? Very odd argument you have.

 

2 hours ago, imron said:

Personally, I've found that once you have obtained a decent level, pinyin is faster and more convenient than audio for learning new words.

You just have to drop pinyin and use audio. Once you get used to the sounds of Chinese it's super fast. I never use pinyin anymore (unless there's no other way) and I can instantly recognise a word on sound only. There aren't really that many sounds that are used to produce all the words anyway so it's not a huge undertaking.

 

[mungouk]

11 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

English is written phonetically

 

Although it's rough knowing of climbing drought in Loughborough and Leicester, the psychology of gnomes and gnus shone throughout the bombing while the obscene scenario of plumbers' diarrhoea was a sign of incandescent pneumonia.

 

Couldn't resist

[XiaoXi]

2 hours ago, mungouk said:

Although it's rough knowing of climbing drought in Loughborough and Leicester, the psychology of gnomes and gnus shone throughout the bombing while the obscene scenario of plumbers' diarrhoea was a sign of incandescent pneumonia.

 

Couldn't resist

It's still a phonetic language compared with Chinese. So what you're saying is if you don't know how to pronounce a word like 'Loughborough' you'd rely on a phonetic written explanation like 'luff burrah' or whatever rather than listening to audio (whether from a youtube video which seems to be top result searching how to pronounce this word - ironically) or asking someone?

 

If you search for the pronunciation of most words in google the top result is an audio pronunciation so I guess most people are like me. If you search for 'loughborough' in an online dictionary you get the audio...and also ˈlʌfb(ə)rə/ ......I know which one I'd rather rely on!

 

You certainly learnt English differently to how I did lol...or French for that matter. Whilst learning either French or English growing up, I learnt the pronunciation of any words all from audio recordings or human voice for both French and English.

[mungouk]

 

1 hour ago, XiaoXi said:

So what you're saying is

 

What I said was what I wrote, simply pointing out that English spelling is nowhere near phonetic.  Agreed that IPA isn't accessible to most people. 

 

I don't really see the argument here... some prefer audio pronunciation, some don't.   I don't think either is intrinsically superior, and both have their time and place.

 

[Apollys]

Let's try to keep this thread on track, I think the original question was a good one and people will be interested to see what answers there are.

 

If you'd like to engage in an extended debate a different topic, perhaps start a new thread. The discussion is wandering quite far from the original intent of the topic.

[XiaoXi]

1 hour ago, mungouk said:

I don't really see the argument here... some prefer audio pronunciation, some don't.

Well we all used audio to learn our native languages. In fact even second languages e.g. other European languages it's the same deal. Chinese seems to be one of the few, maybe the only one where strangely, we don't.

 

1 hour ago, mungouk said:

I don't think either is intrinsically superior, and both have their time and place.

Trying to write a 'sound' out in a way that anyone can understand is pretty much impossible. Too many preconceptions. All you can do is approximate. This is why kids will always have better pronunciation because they just listen and repeat with zero BS.

 

At the end of the day language is just sounds represented by symbols, whether it's 'kapow', 'gesundheit', 'Привет' or 'grzznt!'. They're all the same so kids approach them the same way, they learn sound fx and language by listening and repeating.

 

1 hour ago, Apollys said:

If you'd like to engage in an extended debate a different topic, perhaps start a new thread. The discussion is wandering quite far from the original intent of the topic.

Yes the minute you disagree with someone's comment that does tend to happen. All you can do is take it from the disagreement to a new thread. Other than my original response, there was only one other post that was responding to the OP.

 

We should do though 'cos its' an interesting discussion. I'm interested particularly to hear how Imron learns new words in English without audio. He must be one of the ones who prefers to learn the ˈlʌfb(ə)rə/ way. 

[imron]

5 hours ago, Apollys said:

If you'd like to engage in an extended debate a different topic, perhaps start a new thread.

Sorry, this was my fault.  The discussion has now been split.

 

3 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

I'm interested particularly to hear how Imron learns new words in English without audio.

As a native English speaker with a broad vocabulary, I can typically infer the correct pronunciation of new words I encounter.  For cases where I'm not 100% sure, dictionary.com has phonetic spelling.  E.g, from this thread, I see the last word I posted there was 'panchreston', which I correctly inferred the pronunciation of when I first saw it, but if I had been in any doubt, dictionary.com tells me its pronunciation is [pan-kres-tuh n] which would remove any ambiguity.  Dictionary.com also has audio, but in the time it takes to move the mouse, click the sound icon, wait for the sample to download and the player to start up, including any small pauses at the beginning and then speaking at normal speaking speed, I could have read the phonetic spelling a dozen or more times.

 

Which is what I meant when I said audio is slower.

 

20 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

Once you get used to the sounds of Chinese it's super fast.

But it's still slow as a snail compared to my reading speed, especially when you factor in all the things required to play the audio.  Even if the audio is somehow instant, my reading speed is still probably double the speaking speed of typical audio, if not faster.  It's not about being used to the sounds of Chinese.  I'm very used to the sounds, but people speak at a slower rate than I can read so it always comes 2nd to reading.

 

20 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

Well 1.3 billion Chinese kids found audio enabled them to speak fluent Chinese with out any written language at all.

This is far from correct when the context is standard Mandarin.   Firstly, only about half of the Chinese population can 'effectively communicate' in Mandarin.  Of those that can 'effectively communicate' a large number can only do so thanks to pinyin because they grew up speaking their local dialect and only reached effective communication levels in Mandarin after starting school and being exposed to Putonghua.  Pinyin is not primarily a tool for foreigners to learn Chinese, its primary function is to teach standard pronunciation to native mainland Chinese.

 

Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge fan of listening to audio and shadowing as a means of improving pronunciation, cadence and tone (语气 not 声调), but if I come across a new Chinese word/character, it's usually far simpler and faster for me to learn the pronunciation from pinyin than from audio, and my Chinese is at a level where I can hear the correct sound in my head with 100% accuracy just from the pinyin.  This is important because when I remember the pronunciation I don't remember the pinyin I remember the sound - it's just that I use pinyin to generate the sound in my head which I can then 'listen' to many times in the space it would take to manually play any audio.

 

[Apollys]

And one more thing.  Even if something works and is widely used, you definitely can't infer there isn't a better way.

[mungouk]

51 minutes ago, imron said:

when I remember the pronunciation I don't remember the pinyin I remember the sound - it's just that I use pinyin to generate the sound in my head which I can then 'listen' to many times in the space it would take to manually play any audio.

 

In situations where I'm hearing the sound of a new word (e.g. in memrise decks or HSK audio files listing vocab) I find it unhelpful when the pinyin isn't also present. 

 

Recordings of the same word by multiple speakers can sound quite different, especially if the quality isn't high, or I'm listening in a noisy environment, and the addition of pinyin helps to clarify the ambiguity. 

 

On the other hand, for me hearing audio over and over again really helps me to remember the tones.  Possibly once you reach a certain level that gets internalised as well?

 

 

[roddy]

Once you’ve heard 1467 pinyin syllables, you’ve heard them all. 

[imron]

2 minutes ago, mungouk said:

Possibly once you reach a certain level that gets internalised as well?

 

You can work on internalising the tones at any level - my personal belief is the earlier the better.  Note that when I'm talking about remembering the sound of a word, I mean the entire sound, including the tone, which is an indivisible part of the pronunciation (I don't remember ma + 1st tone, I remember the sound of mā which is as distinct from má mǎ and mà as mi mo mu are).

 

7 minutes ago, mungouk said:

really helps me to remember the tones

Right, because you can have a clear audio hook in your brain that you can refer to.  The trick now is to figure out how to generate an imaginary version of the audio hook from just the pinyin and then remember that imagined audio hook, instead of needing to rely on listening to the audio each time.

 

This skill can be trained.

 

Before anyone reading this thinks they aren't 'aural' learners and don't have the ability to accurately remember sounds, I bet if I told you to think of the tune to 'twinkle twinkle little star' or 'happy birthday', you could recall and hear the sound of those tunes in your mind without much effort just from me mentioning them.  Likewise, you can probably imagine and hear the voice of your favourite TV or movie characters without much effort.

 

You've heard those sounds so many times, or you were interested and invested enough in the character that recall of the sounds is instant and effortless.  Your brain has the capability to do this, you just need to figure out what part of your brain allowed you to do that with those tunes/tv characters and then turn that process towards pinyin.

 

So listen to the audio of a given sound over and over again, and take an interest in it. Feel how it sounds, note how it differs compared to other syllables with a similar sound but different tone.  Practice recalling the sound in you mind and 'hearing' an imaginary version of it that sounds exactly like the audio you listened to.  Play with the sound and try imagining it being spoken by a different person - with a higher voice or lower voice, or at a different speed - both faster and slower, in the same way you can conjure up an imaginary 'twinkle twinkle little star' with different styles/speeds/instruments).  Make sure to keep refering back to the actual audio again and again to verify that the version in your mind is the same as the real-life version.

When you can accurately recall the audio, write down the pinyin and practice looking at the pinyin and then recalling the audio.  This builds up your ability to recall accurate audio from the pinyin.

 

Make sure to practice with a variety of different sounds and tones to make sure you've got a broad base of audio hooks you can call up when needed.

 

After regular practice over a sustained period of time (e.g. daily practice for a few months) you should be able to do this mental recall of audio from pinyin without too much trouble, and then you've got your own automatic audio player in your mind that you can call on to generate the correct sounds from the pinyin and then you can imaginarily listen to those sounds over and over again to remember the sound of any word you come across.  You can also imaginarily compare and contrast it to similar sounds/different tones and note in your mind how it is different from those sounds (which aids in differentiating similar sounds).

 

 

[XiaoXi]

13 hours ago, imron said:

For cases where I'm not 100% sure, dictionary.com has phonetic spelling.  E.g, from this thread, I see the last word I posted there was 'panchreston', which I correctly inferred the pronunciation of when I first saw it, but if I had been in any doubt, dictionary.com tells me its pronunciation is [pan-kres-tuh n] which would remove any ambiguity.

Because you've already learnt thousands upon thousands of words in your native language by AUDIO. I'm sure you didn't ask your teacher for the phonetic spelling when reading to her as a kid. How about names, like Chiwetel Ejiofor, same again with the phonetic spelling deal? What about foreign words? I looked up Merci and it has [mer-see] and mercy is [mur-see]....you're aware of this difference because I'm not? The phonetic alphabet is not taught in schools so I doubt many people use this method. How and when did you learn how phonetic spelling works?

 

13 hours ago, imron said:

Dictionary.com also has audio, but in the time it takes to move the mouse, click the sound icon, wait for the sample to download and the player to start up, including any small pauses at the beginning and then speaking at normal speaking speed, I could have read the phonetic spelling a dozen or more times.

 

It plays instantly for me, that's China internet speed for you. I guess you are in fact a ˈlʌfb(ə)rə/ fan although I can't imagine this is the norm since the top results in Google are all youtube video files. Not to mention people so often simply ask someone for the pronunciation of a word.

 

13 hours ago, imron said:

This is far from correct when the context is standard Mandarin.   Firstly, only about half of the Chinese population can 'effectively communicate' in Mandarin.  Of those that can 'effectively communicate' a large number can only do so thanks to pinyin because they grew up speaking their local dialect and only reached effective communication levels in Mandarin after starting school and being exposed to Putonghua.  Pinyin is not primarily a tool for foreigners to learn Chinese, its primary function is to teach standard pronunciation to native mainland Chinese.

All classes are taught, even in the countryside in Mandarin. I think if they got to class and had to worry about learning mandarin from pinyin they'd have to to give from the beginning. The kids learn correct pronunciation from watching and listening to the teacher speak. Pinyin is and always has been to help with reading. You don't know what a character's pronunciation is, so the pinyin tells you. The pinyin is only present the first three years and gets less and less each year. By the time they're 10 pinyin is gone.

 

Also don't forget that pinyin is not phonetic, unlike your dictionary tool. It's romanisation of a character, it only roughly gives the pronunciation as we can see from words like 'chi'. It's especially not phonetic to us foreigners since that's not how we would write it if we were writing phonetically.

 

Considering the amount of time Chinese spend learning and using pinyin you'd think they'd be so much better and familiar with pinyin than we foreigners are, but it's not the case at all. I know because one time I wanted to records my gf's voice for audio since she's from Harbin and has the most standard pronunciation. So I wrote out all the sounds I needed in pinyin all ready and set her to records and she was like 'what is all this?? I can't read this'. I had to replace them all with the appropriate characters before she could read it!

 

Obviously she can understand pinyin and even uses it to type on a daily basis, but reading it is another thing. Sometimes foreigners like to write a sentence in pinyin and she says she hates that the most, it's very awkward to read. I have to admit after so long with just audio and characters I can no longer read a huge block pinyin comfortably.

[XiaoXi]

12 hours ago, mungouk said:

On the other hand, for me hearing audio over and over again really helps me to remember the tones.  Possibly once you reach a certain level that gets internalised as well?

Yes exactly. If you use audio every time you look up a word that's extra listening. At the end of the day we're never gonna get as much listening exposure as Chinese do so why lose out on this opportunity to hear a word every time you look one up. Especially since not all of us have been learning Chinese as long as Imron. When I first started looking up words with audio only, sometimes I didn't know exactly what was being said so I switched back to pinyin to confirm. Now I no longer need to do that. You get used to the sounds in time.

 

Ultimately it should be video in which case I doubt I would have needed pinyin at all to even confirm. This is the solid gold, ace up their sleeve that all kids have when learning their native language - they see the mouth of the speaker when learning. Whether it's their mother, their teacher or even their friends. With both the mouth positions visible and the sounds audible, they're always gonna win pronunciation wise. That added with the shear amount of time they learn for.

 

Anyway the reason you feel you still need pinyin as well as audio is because 1. you're not familiar enough with the sounds and 2. you don't want to leave your comfort zone. Chinese people can recognise spoken Chinese even when it's really unclear and quiet. The comfort zone thing is like when with most flash cards for example for the word 'apple' we get not only a big picture of a shiny red apple but also the English word apple! It's like not only did we not know the word for apple in Chinese, but we can't recognise an apple on sight whatsoever...

[imron]

19 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

I guess you are in fact a ˈlʌfb(ə)rə/ fan

If you are talking about me liking, preferring or even knowing the IPA then you guess wrong.  The only IPA symbols I know are ʒ and ʃ which I learnt in my English teaching days after being frustrated at Chinese students pronouncing the ʒ in 'usually' with the pinyin 'r', so I did some investigation to figure out why that mispronuncation was so widespread (they are taught ʒ is the same sound as pinyin r) and how to fix it (ʃ is a better approximation of ʒ than 'r').  Somewhat ironically, no amount of listening to native AUDIO of 'usually' was able to override the years of incorrect pronunciation, but getting them to substitute ʃ for ʒ fixed the problem in seconds.

 

20 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

Because you've already learnt thousands upon thousands of words in your native language by AUDIO

Right, and after spending thousands and thousands of hours listening to AUDIO in mandarin I have a good enough mental model of the sounds of the language that I don't need to physically hear a sound in order to accurately reproduce it in my head.  You could write a Chinese sentence (in characters) and I could mentally hear it any one of several different voices/accents if I wanted to.

 

20 hours ago, XiaoXi said:

Sometimes foreigners like to write a sentence in pinyin and she says she hates that the most, it's very awkward to read.

Finally something we agree on!  I dislike reading entire sentences in pinyin too.  That's a completely different thing though from looking up a single word, and using the pinyin in the dictionary entry to reproduce the correct sound in my head.

[XiaoXi]

4 hours ago, imron said:

If you are talking about me liking, preferring or even knowing the IPA then you guess wrong.  The only IPA symbols I know are ʒ and ʃ which I learnt in my English teaching days after being frustrated at Chinese students pronouncing the ʒ in 'usually' with the pinyin 'r', so I did some investigation to figure out why that mispronuncation was so widespread (they are taught ʒ is the same sound as pinyin r) and how to fix it (ʃ is a better approximation of ʒ than 'r').  Somewhat ironically, no amount of listening to native AUDIO of 'usually' was able to override the years of incorrect pronunciation, but getting them to substitute ʃ for ʒ fixed the problem in seconds.

So if you don't know how to read it then I guess you must in fact need to listen to the audio for English quite often. I notice you didn't have any answer to the merci, mercy conundrum either so I guess that confirms that. Having said that, since it's your native language you're unlikely to need to look up many words for pronunciation...apart from names. You also didn't reply about when I asked about names like Chiwetel Ejiofor.

 

I think this is actually a logical fallacy, to only cherry pick some of my points to refute. Not sure what the fallacy is called though but it happens quite often.

 

4 hours ago, imron said:

Right, and after spending thousands and thousands of hours listening to AUDIO in mandarin I have a good enough mental model of the sounds of the language that I don't need to physically hear a sound in order to accurately reproduce it in my head.  You could write a Chinese sentence (in characters) and I could mentally hear it any one of several different voices/accents if I wanted to.

Ok so you're not really the norm then. My original comment was not about any specific person, but about foreigners learning Chinese generally, including absolute beginners. If you start right off the bat with pinyin then you probably think that for example 'ying' begins with a 'y' in its pronunciation, but in fact it doesn't. This is why so many language learners end up with somewhat less than perfect pronunciation and the tones all wrong. This is a place where kids never fail because they start with audio right from birth up until they encounter pinyin for the first time and have to learn how to use it when they start school.

 

4 hours ago, imron said:

Finally something we agree on!  I dislike reading entire sentences in pinyin too.  That's a completely different thing though from looking up a single word, and using the pinyin in the dictionary entry to reproduce the correct sound in my head.

Well I'll assume you also agreed with the things you didn't reply to as well. But anyway, so it's clear Chinese people aren't overly familiar with pinyin, so why are we? In such a short time we become better with it than Chinese that learn for a lifetime. They tend to lose the 'stabilisers' at about the age of 10. Just from looking up characters with audio only I've heard so much more native mandarin audio than someone who just looks at the pinyin.

 

You didn't also reply to my point about how Chinese learn mandarin but I'll elaborate on it anyway. Even for those kids who grow up in an environment with a dialect, they still have to watch tv in mandarin (obviously with no subtitles since they can't read) from a very early age so by the time they start school they understand mandarin already. I noticed even shows designed for teenagers are missing subtitles so understanding from audio alone is pretty essential. I know because in the past I was specifically looking for shows like marvel cartoons with subtitles for learning but annoyingly they were pretty much all without subtitles. I guess most kids still can't read that fast at that age to be worth it and they're listening is fine.

 

From there classes should be all taught in standard mandarin and students should all communicate with each other and the teacher in mandarin...ideally...but it's not always the case unfortunately! I live in Chengdu right now it's quite shocking the shear amount of people that actually can't speak mandarin, well...or even at all sometimes. Even young people seem to often have problems with the tones, never mind the pronunciation of mandarin.

[DavyJonesLocker]

One of the problems I would have  by not using pinyin would be when looking up an unknown word using an electronic dictionary. I often use anki on the subway, read books in coffee shops etc 

 

I'd rather not have the sound played aloud for sake of not disturbing others. 

 

However I do notice that without audio I tend to overlook the tones of characters. By that I mean I know which tone they are mostly but it didn't really translate to  speaking out loud.  Audio would enforce this

 

 

[XiaoXi]

21 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

One of the problems I would have  by not using pinyin would be when looking up an unknown word using an electronic dictionary. I often use anki on the subway, read books in coffee shops etc 

Yes I do the exact same thing. Pinyin certainly still has it's uses, I use it to type Chinese too of course. But wherever possible it's best to use audio only. There are other reasons for this too, like for example if you look at the character and listen to the sound, it's just you and the character. But if you have pinyin as well then the pinyin will 'attract' you more since it uses all your favourite letters. Hence you're less likely to commit the character to memory.

 

That's why I was a fan of the NCPR books because they started with pinyin above the characters but then at a slightly advanced level they opted rather for tone marks above the characters. This was a great idea! I used to use this with pencil in my own textbooks when studying at school in China. It enabled me to overtake my fellow students with regard to reading, who insisted on writing full pinyin above every character.

 

Imron undoubtedly has a huge amount of experience in Chinese and thus he's probably an exception. But for most of us I would advise getting used to the characters and the sounds rather than overly relying on pinyin 'stabilisers'.

[Yadang]

1 hour ago, XiaoXi said:

That's why I was a fan of the NCPR books because they started with pinyin above the characters but then at a slightly advanced level they opted rather for tone marks above the characters. This was a great idea!

 

Doesn't this have the danger of reinforcing learning the tone separately from the (non-tonal part of the) pronunciation?

[Apollys]

7 hours ago, Yadang said:

Doesn't this have the danger of reinforcing learning the tone separately from the (non-tonal part of the) pronunciation?

 

I had a textbook that utilized this method and absolutely hated it for the reason you mentioned.  I was tempted to white out the tone marks from the entire book, but figured it wasn't worth it and just used a bookmark to block them as I was reading.

 

I definitely think it's dangerous to start down any path that teaches your mind tones are somehow less innately connected to the language than the other parts of the sounds.  In fact, tones are the most clearly evident element of the sound.  If you hear someone yelling far away, or your friends are talking in another room, there are times when almost all you hear are the tones.  And yet this can be enough to make out the meaning in some contexts.  If you hear people talking in some weird accent, they're likely changing the position of their tongue or lips, but the tones remain.  In short, tones should be the top priority.