Starting Chinese again. Focusing on tones in the beginning

[Guest realmayo]

19 minutes ago, Demonic_Duck said:

'd hypothesize that it's because you're not 100% sure of the tone of 辽.

 

Well - if you ask me to say it out loud in conversation, I'd pronounce it second tone immediately, without thinking about it. But if instead you just ask what tone it is, I might need to say it out loud (or maybe just internally) before I can be sure. (The first would be thinking fast, the second thinking slow, if you go along with work on cognition by Kahneman & Tversky.)

 

I presume that's because:

- yes my brain does map 辽 to second tone

- and yes it does map 辽 to being the first character of 辽宁

 

But: my brain finds it much faster to go to a different mapping: "how is the name for that province pronounced".

 

And so my brain picks the quicker route.

 

That quicker route is there for words that I've "picked up", especially ones that I learned in the year or two before properly trying to study Chinese, and before ever learning characters.

 

But for words I've learned the normal studenty-way, i.e. "what's are the characters in this word, how are these characters pronounced, OK I've learned a new word today", (which is, sadly, the majority of my vocab) then my brain would work more like Demonic-Duck''s appears to. I think.

 

8 minutes ago, 889 said:

Can't help but think their Chinese would improve immeasurably if they weren't so focused on those numbers

 

As long as they transition to more natural pronunciation over time, overdoing it is probably better than underdoing it, as a beginner? Though maybe an ideal approach would be to teach the tones using non-Chinese sounds (e.g.brīck bríck brǐck brìck brick) until the tones are perfect. And only then move on to nǐ hǎo and all the rest.

[889]

I think that's worse!

 

Concentrate on the most common pairs, like 北京 and 知道. Then when they've got a few dozen down pat, reveal they've been using tones all along.

 

Don't ignore how the concept of tones scares off so many. Make it palatable by hiding it a bit. Like mixing liver with something palatable.

[Dawei3]

14 hours ago, Krobador said:

My native language is Finnish and Finnish is actually pretty flat language. 

It's cool to hear a Finn's perspective on learning Chinese.  In a language meetup group I attend, the organizer is learning Hungarian for fun.  He's a native English speaker that also speaks German & Spanish.  He said that it is so hard to go from the 22 cases in Hungarian into English that sometimes he has his instructor teach him Hungarian in German (because it is more inflected than English).

 

I realize Finnish is only a distant relative of Hungarian.  However, I wonder if the many cases in Finnish also make it harder to learn an uninflected language like Chinese.  I'm surprised at how easy it is at times to go from English into Mandarin, despite that the languages have no linguistic relationship.  

11 hours ago, 889 said:

were more focused on simply saying words exactly like Chinese people do.

 

I agree with 889.  To me a big advantage of actually learning to say things the way Chinese do, as opposed to memorizing tones and grammar rules, is motivation.  While some people can keep themselves motivated by memorizing tones/words/grammar rules, while not actually being able to have a conversation, I can't. 

 

Speaking to people motivates me.  I liked that Pimsleur gave me conversation skills from the start.  My skills were quite limited when I first went to China after just 6 months of learning, but people understood me and I could understand them (to a very limited extent).  It motivated me greatly.  

 

In contrast, many years of learning German in high school & college gave me close to zero conversation skills.  I could conjugate many verbs and say lots of nouns with correct grammatical gender, but I couldn't have a conversation (despite getting good grades).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i__forget]

When I started learning Chinese, for at least the fist two years I would pronounce all third tones as neutral. This was what I would hear when I heard natives speak fast, so I just replicated. Fixing this was not difficult. My forth tone was also a neutral pronounced louder.... I'm currently working on pronouncing the (16?) tone pairs correctly in a way that I don't pause between characters of the same word. It's very challenging!