Disregarded tones until present - HSK 4, advice on learning them?

[Fithen]

Because my speaking has been understood for months by my tutor and language exchange partners, as well as during conversations online, I thought that I only needed to keep up my moderate daily listening exercise (~30-45 mins) in order to pronounce correctly.

 

However, after recently receiving honest feedback of the tones being "all over the place", I've realized that since I'm learning a tonal language, I'll have to buckle down and learn all the tones for the words I missed. But with over a thousand words learned, this will be a long and boring process which I don't know where to start at.

 

So far, I've tried to up the time spent "shadowing sentences", keep up comprehensible listening, and go through the HSK backlog of flashcards using Pleco's Tone test flashcard system, where you have to input the correct tone. Is this the right way to go? If not, how would you suggest learning these missed pronunciations?

 

Since I read a lot, I was also considering practicing reading aloud and speaking to myself as a form of practice. But would this just build bad habits if I reinforced the wrong tones?

[alantin]

When I began learning Chinese, I put a lot of effort on tones and especially on being able to recognize them consistently. The theory being that you can't remember something, that you can't hear and if you can't hear it, when speaking, you'll come up with an approximation of any given sound without the correct tone. So my I've basically approached each syllable as stand alone sounds instead of treating them as some kinds of sound + tone pairs. My tones are far from perfect while speaking, but I can get them right when I focus on them and when ever I ask my tutors about my pronunciation, they usually tell me that either some initial or final is off and not that often about the tones.

 

I also read a research article written in England (haven't been able to find it after...), where the researchers basically gave two groups of students two weeks of Chinese lessons, but focused on lots of repeating recognition drills with one group and not with the other, and tested their towns by having them read Mandarin words to a group of native judges who then picked the tones they heard and, I think, also rated how pure the tone was. They also gave both groups brain scans. What they found out was that the group that focused on lots of drills with immediate feedback not only learned to recognize the tones, but they also were able to pronounce the tones far better than the other group. The brain scans also showed development in the brains after only two weeks.

 

What this means is that a person can learn to hear the tones in quite a short time with intensive repetition drills with immediate feedback and the skill of hearing the tones actually also largely transfers into an ability to produce them.

 

So my number one tip would be to first test if can actually hear and judge tones correctly in isolated sounds and if you can't at least 9 out of 10 tries right, then drill listening and guessing them until you can consistently get them right. Once you can do that with isolated syllables, move on to tone pairs and repeat. Once that's done I would recommend practicing them with a tutor. Read words from a list for the tutor and ask them to grade and correct. Once that's down, I believe the problem should correct itself over time with extensive listening and tutors pointing out recurring systematic errors. Bad habits with words learned without the tones will probably take some additional effort.

 

If you like, you can try this Anki deck, (the link works until the end of may 2021) that I made for myself for this purpose.

The idea is that you first listen to a sound pronounced by two or three native speakers and then type what you heard in pinyin including the tone number. If you got it wrong, Anki will ask you again. If you got it right, the card will be scheduled for later. Thanks to the guys at Mandarin Blueprint for letting me use their recordings and share the deck!

 

I would not do speaking drills before I got the Anki stats over 90% and then in the beginning only with a tutor listening and correcting until they are commenting on less than 10% of your drills.

 

For studying the thousand words again, I would recommend the same procedure. Get recordings from somewhere and make it into an anki deck that first plays the audio for you and then asks you to type the pinyin including the correct tone numbers. Maybe pleco can do the same, I don't know, but main point is not to drill something that you can't check if you got it right or not. That will only enforce bad habits! Instead focus on making sure that you hear/know the right tone by testing yourself on that and invariably marking the card as wrong, if you didn't get the tone right.

 

It'll be a slog in the beginning, but it will get easier as you get more and more familiar with the tones!

 

 

Disclaimer:

I'm a fellow learner at around HSK5. Not a teacher or linguistic professional.

Looking forward to what others have to say!

[Fithen]

Thank you for the extremely detailed reply. I'll work on tone recognition, luckily the Pleco Tone flashcard type has the immediate feedback system you shared. Appreciate the Anki link, will be looking into it. 

[Jan Finster]

 

I am surprised you got away with it for so long. When I started my Chinese journey, on my trips to China I very often received those horribly painful "blank stares" when my tones were off. It shows that investing in strict and professional language teachers in the beginning pays dividends later on.

 

1 hour ago, alantin said:

What this means is that a person can learn to hear the tones in quite a short time with intensive repetition drills with immediate feedback and the skill of hearing the tones actually also largely transfers into an ability to produce them.

I very much agree with what Alantin said. Surprisingly, the more I listen, the more "I just know" which tones to use when speaking . Especially when I try to speak fast, many times, I still say the tones wrong, but when I do, I very often instantly notice something is off (and auto-correct). 

Another way to get better with tones is reading and sub-vocalizing the words (with tones) in your head. Of course this slows your reading down, but to me it is helpful in "practicing the tones" 

[alantin]

28 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

Surprisingly, the more I listen, the more "I just know" which tones to use when speaking . Especially when I try to speak fast, many times, I still say the tones wrong, but when I do, I very often instantly notice something is off (and auto-correct). 

 

Very good to get confirmation for my my own experience! This is an interesting phenomenon though I'm not that far with it yet. While speaking, I usually know when I'm off, but many times I don't remember exactly how to correct if the word isn't that familiar to me. ? I guess while speaking it's fine as long as I don't get the blank stare.

 

However, sometimes you'll get the stare even if your pronunciation isn't off!

 

Just the other day I was saying to one of my teachers that many of our customers are 造船厂 and got the stare. I expected that my initials or finals were all over the place as I was quite confident I got the tones right, but after a little explanation, she told me that my pronunciation was actually spot on, but the word is just so uncommon that out of the blue without context she had no idea what it was. This was a surprise to me because I expected that if the pronunciation is right, a native would understand it right away, and if she didn't then problem must be in my pronunciation (which is the case usually). It is sometimes difficult for me to remember that with spoken Chinese you need to create a little bit context around less common words because there are so many homonyms.

[Demonic_Duck]

6 hours ago, alantin said:

Just the other day I was saying to one of my teachers that many of our customers are 造船厂 and got the stare. I expected that my initials or finals were all over the place as I was quite confident I got the tones right, but after a little explanation, she told me that my pronunciation was actually spot on, but the word is just so uncommon that out of the blue without context she had no idea what it was. This was a surprise to me because I expected that if the pronunciation is right, a native would understand it right away, and if she didn't then problem must be in my pronunciation (which is the case usually). It is sometimes difficult for me to remember that with spoken Chinese you need to create a little bit context around less common words because there are so many homonyms.

 

The thing you have to remember is that there are so many different components to communicating successfully. In Chinese, these include initials, finals, tones, intonation, context, body language, wording, grammar, collocation, background noise, subject matter knowledge of the listener, whether the listener is distracted (or tired, drunk, annoyed, hungry, needs the toilet...), how well you know them, how often you you've interacted with them before, luck, the phase of the moon, whether Mercury is in retrograde, the feng shui of the building you're in, how recently you went to 拜佛 at the local temple...

 

If one or two of these components are slightly degraded, you might still be able to communicate what you intend to, but if one component is completely wrong, or if many components are each somewhat degraded, there's a very high chance of misunderstanding. You can often get away with pronunciation mistakes if your grammar is on point, or grammar mistakes if your pronunciation is on point, or using some unusual vocabulary if both of them are on point, but you won't get away with all three. And sometimes a single unusual word can throw a listener off, especially if they're already struggling to parse some of the surrounding context.

 

There is also the well-known phenomenon of people simply not expecting someone who doesn't look Chinese to speak Mandarin, but I think this effect is overstated by people trying to convince themselves that their Chinese is better than it actually is. I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen, but I don't think it has any significant effect over the course of a protracted conversation, once the initial surprise has worn off.

[suMMit]

8 hours ago, Fithen said:

Because my speaking has been understood for months by my tutor and language exchange partners, as well as during conversations online, I thought that I only needed to keep up my moderate daily listening exercise (~30-45 mins) in order to pronounce correctly.

 

You are at Hsk 4 after "months"? I'm not clear on how long you've disregarded tones.

[Flickserve]

4 hours ago, alantin said:

It is sometimes difficult for me to remember that with spoken Chinese you need to create a little bit context around less common words because there are so many homonyms.

A very good point. Sometimes it isn’t the tone or pronunciation we get wrong - either there’s little context, the listener is not expecting such an answer or the listener cannot connect the logic. Even a native speaker to another native speaker would have to give context and explanation. 

[Fithen]

6 hours ago, suMMit said:

You are at Hsk 4 after "months"? I'm not clear on how long you've disregarded tones.

I've disregarded them since the beginning, which was roughly a year ago. Six months ago I got a tutor.

[Fithen]

12 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Another way to get better with tones is reading and sub-vocalizing the words (with tones) in your head. Of course this slows your reading down, but to me it is helpful in "practicing the tones"

Thank you for the suggestion, I do try to "read aloud" in my head when reading content in Chinese. However, the big worry here is that this will once again reinforce bad pronunciation. I only know the correct pronunciation for a fraction of my known words, so I'm concerned that unless I click for the pinyin of most of those words on whose tones I'm not sure on (slowing down reading to the point of being moot), incorrect tones will be subvocalized.

[alantin]

On pronouncing the tones, one of my teachers gave me an interesting tip some time ago. If you have trouble saying the third tone, nod your head. You voice naturally becomes lower when you nod your head and it gets higher when you raise your head. You can test this just by trying to "sing" a first tone aaaa and press your chin down without trying to change the pitch of you voice. Then "singing" it and raise your head to look at the ceiling.

 

You should notice your voice becoming lower to the point of creaking at the low point and very clear and high pitched at the top point.

For a perfect standalone third tone, say a syllable and nod your head while saying it.

 

That was a really interesting observation and works for me.

 

When speaking, the important thing for the third tone is to get the voice low, not to make the perfect falling rising pitch contour. There nodding at the third tone syllable, if I have trouble getting it low with some tone combination, has helped me too.

[alantin]

12 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

There is also the well-known phenomenon of people simply not expecting someone who doesn't look Chinese to speak Mandarin, but I think this effect is overstated by people trying to convince themselves that their Chinese is better than it actually is.

 

I believe that you hit the nail in the head with this.

 

I have seen Japanese students complain about this for as long as I remember but I believe this is more a function of people not understanding your accent and less about your grasp of vocabulary or grammar. If you can't understand someones accent, then you might not even register what language they are speaking and you are easily inclined to underestimate their grasp of the other areas of the language too.

 

Japanese pronunciation is close to the pronunciation of my own native language, I have very good Japanese pronunciation, and I find that that makes people sometimes expect my Japanese to be better than it actually is. I've been told that Japanese people don't like to speak Japanese with foreigners, but since I began studying Japanese almost 20 years ago, I remember countless times when people have immediately switched over to Japanese after hearing two Japanese words from me (actually this happens every single time I meet a new Japanese person) and only one case where the hotel desk spoke only English to me but had no problem understanding my Japanese. His English accent was so heavy that I had to repeat everything back to him in Japanese to make sure I had understood correctly...

 

My take on this is that, if you can think of a foreigner with a really weird accent that was extremely hard for you to understand, then that's probably you in your L2 if you think people refuse to understand your speaking.

[Moshen]

Quote

a really weird accent that was extremely hard for you to understand

 

It actually doesn't have to be that far off for the listener to be unable to understand.  As several people pointed out, the less context there is, the harder it may be to understand something that's a little off or a little unusually pronounced.  I can give two examples from English.

 

1)In line at a cafeteria-style restaurant in the US South, the server asked me, "Do you want rahhhs?"  For the life of me, I couldn't get that the word was "rice."

 

2)Taking a credit card order over the phone from someone in Ireland, I was getting the numbers fine until the customer said what sounded to me like "ed."  What number was that?  Was it Irish for zero?  I had him repeat it about five times, and finally I had to resort to saying, "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8" and he stopped me there.  His "eight" was more like "et" to my ear. 

[889]

When speaking, it's hard to hear yourself as others hear you.

 

Try recording your reading of a text that's also available with a native speaker recording. Then play back both recordings at the same time and catch the differences.

 

And putting all that time into remembering whether a particular character is 1 2 3 or 4 is meaningless unless you're first able to hit the tones correctly.

 

Besides, there's a good argument to be made that you should focus on listening to and replicating words as they are spoken, not on mentally associating words with their tone numbers.

[TaxiAsh]

4 hours ago, 889 said:

Try recording your reading of a text that's also available with a native speaker recording.

I think it can be simpler than this, even.

 

When I speak a sentence on wechat, whatsapp or whatever (not live, just using the talk button) - I listen back, and sometimes I know I made mistakes during speaking, and sometimes only notice when I listen back. 

 

I think this is a useful/simple way of self-practice - but obviously only if you are using this way of communicating. 

 

 

[suMMit]

I did this course a couple years ago and found it useful, it used to be free, but now I see they charge 19.99. If you disregard the thing about 6hours to native pronunciation, I think it is very well done:

https://courses.mandarinblueprint.com/pronunciation-mastery

 

A free resource about tone pairs:

https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/pronunciation/Tone_pairs

 

I haven't personally done this, but it might be worth a look:

http://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/mandarintonesmastery/

 

Chinese Pod also has an excellent pronunciation course called "Say it Right" that can be accessed as part of a subscription to their service.

 

In conjunction to doing a course like this, I would have a native speaking tutor give you feedback on your progress.

[Jan Finster]

6 hours ago, suMMit said:

I did this course a couple years ago and found it useful, it used to be free, but now I see they charge 19.99. If you disregard the thing about 6hours to native pronunciation, I think it is very well done:

https://courses.mandarinblueprint.com/pronunciation-mastery

 

It was not bad (I listened to it when it was free) but you can find what they cover in this course on Youtube for free. I would not throw my money at Mandarinblueprint as they have very dodgy marketing. Just search for the pinyin  (e.g. yang) and pronunciation. I think, e.g. Litao Chinese has lots about it.

 

[suMMit]

45 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

Mandarinblueprint as they have very dodgy marketing.

I've never used any of their services, other than that previously free pronunciation course, but I'm curious what is "very dodgy" about their marketing? I recently listened to  an interview on You Can Learn Chinese with the owner of mb, I'd be surprised if those guys would help promote a company that was dodgy.

[Jan Finster]

51 minutes ago, suMMit said:

but I'm curious what is "very dodgy" about their marketing?

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/58073-it-only-took-3-years-the-mandarin-blueprint-method-is-ready/?do=findComment&comment=474864

(just obnoxious...)

[suMMit]

Ah yeah I remember reading through that thread a year or so ago. I'd say annoying or obnoxious rather than dodgy though.

 

 

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Just search for the pinyin  (e.g. yang) and pronunciation. I think, e.g. Litao Chinese has lots about it.

I'd rather follow a well structured course or series than just searching Ying and yang and yang on youtube. Litao should consider marketing himself to insomnia sufferers.