Reading out loud for training pronunciation and tones

[Flickserve]

Did/do any of you do much of this?

 

It's something I have avoided in the past for Chinese. I noticed in Cantonese where I am pretty fluent in speaking and listening, for words which I already knew well, I couldn't read out loud very well. In particular, my tones became very inaccurate. Taking away the text and trying to speak the word in a sentence resulted in a marked improvement.

 

I tried to improve my tones in Mandarin by various means. I once tried an experienced tutor on italki. She asked me to read some text to improve tones. It was a disaster and instead of feeling any satisfaction of improvement, out came frustration and disillusionment. After two or three lessons, I decided to do that particular exercise.

 

Is reading out loud a staple diet for learning tones?

 

 

 

[imron]

1 hour ago, Flickserve said:

Did/do any of you do much of this?

Yes, but the key to success with this is to record yourself and listen back over what you said, and look for errors.

 

It's easy to think you are saying things correctly, and when you record yourself you'll find things straight away that you need to fix - whether tones, pauses, stumbles, umms and ahhs and 那个s and so on.

 

This works equally well for reading from text as it does for speaking off the cuff.

 

1 hour ago, Flickserve said:

out came frustration and disillusionment. After two or three lessons, I decided to do that particular exercise.

Yes.  This is painful to do, and painful to listen to and therefore it's easier to spend time on other study methods that allow you to gloss over these problems, rather than doing an activity that forces you to confront and fix them.

 

1 hour ago, Flickserve said:

I couldn't read out loud very well. In particular, my tones became very inaccurate.

It then becomes a matter of whether you see this as a problem to fix, or a problem to pretend doesn't exist.

 

[edelweis]

On 4/25/2019 at 3:34 AM, Flickserve said:

for words which I already knew well, I couldn't read out loud very well.

 

I think people who start learning Mandarin Chinese from scratch, learning the sequence of strokes for each hanzi associated with its pronunciation, would have the reverse problem:

better tones when reading, because we have associated the shape of the character with its sound in Mandarin. And 多音字 are not that many.

 

But it sounds like you spoke Cantonese before learning hanzi, and in addition you're throwing Mandarin into the mix, no wonder you have problems when reading aloud, your mind must be constantly hesitating between Cantonese and Mandarin...

 

So I think that in your case the best study method for improving your tones while speaking might not be reading aloud.

Perhaps you should consider recording your lessons with a tutor, and then go back over them and each time the tutor corrected your tones, repeat that word first in isolation, then with the preceding words, then the full sentence, recording yourself and checking whether your tones are slipping or not.

[Guest realmayo]

On 4/25/2019 at 2:34 AM, Flickserve said:

for words which I already knew well, I couldn't read out loud very well

 

I have the same thing. But if I already know the text well, it's much less of a problem. Makes me wonder if it's more a reading issue than a speaking one.

 

You could do an experiment (assuming the problem still manifests itself slightly on single words).

Assemble a list of a dozen nouns like 电话 and read them out one after the other.

Then do the same for another dozen but this time represented by pictures not characters.

See which list you read out most fluently!  

 

Or just compare reading in pinyin and in characters.....