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

[Jan Finster]

3 minutes ago, suMMit said:

Litao should consider marketing himself to insomnia sufferers.

Yeah, people comment that he is like a human robot ? 

 

Anyway, in my experience watching different videos on pronunciation can be quite good as no one teacher has consistently the best videos on every bit of pronunciation out there. I remember, when I was learning the  zhi chi shi, I watched probably 10 different videos or so until I felt comfortable that I was doing them correctly.

 

Aside from Mandarin Blueprint's obnoxious marketing, learning a foreign language from a foreigner is also a non-starter for me. Show me one foreign Youtuber, who learned English as an adult  (this is what the MB guys did) and who has a native pronunciation and native English sentence stress and who you would recommend as English teacher. English is much, much easier than Chinese and you will probably have a hard time finding such a person. I know quite a few people, who speak fluent German, but every German native would instantly notice something is slightly off, while you as a foreigner would not notice it.

[Demonic_Duck]

1 hour ago, Jan Finster said:

English is much, much easier than Chinese

 

Gonna have to slap a massive [citation needed] on this. The consensus I've found is that learning English as a native Chinese speaker is equally difficult as the other way around in almost all aspects. The massive caveat to this that learning characters is orders of magnitude more difficult than learning English spelling, but that has no bearing on pronunciation. Chinese has tones, sure, but it doesn't have consonant clusters.

 

1 hour ago, Jan Finster said:

learning a foreign language from a foreigner is also a non-starter for me

 

Learning pronunciation from a non-native has at least one advantage, namely that they've gone through the L2 learning process themselves and so have first-hand knowledge of that process and what parts of it can be difficult. The challenge is then in making sure your non-native teacher of choice does indeed have exceptional pronunciation, which you as a learner aren't qualified to judge.

 

With that said, native teachers probably have a slight advantage in the aggregate, especially at advanced levels, but IMO the ability to teach a language effectively is only weakly correlated with whether or not it's your L1.

[Jan Finster]

4 minutes ago, Demonic_Duck said:

Gonna have to slap a massive [citation needed] on this. The consensus I've found is that learning English as a native Chinese speaker is equally difficult as the other way around in almost all aspects.

I was not even talking about Chinese learning English. Show me one foreign Youtuber (of whatever nationality), who learned English as an adult  (this is what the MB guys did) and who has a native pronunciation and native English sentence stress and who you would recommend as English teacher....

 

Basically, all English teachers that teach in German high schools and colleges are German natives and L2 learners. There is a world of difference between having them as an English teacher versus a English native professional English teacher. Same applies to any language. 

 

11 minutes ago, Demonic_Duck said:

I'd also say that learning pronunciation from a non-native has at least one advantage over learning from a native, namely that a non-native has gone through the L2 learning process themselves and so has expert knowledge of that process and what parts of it can be difficult.

Yes, this is an advantage, but professional Chinese teachers with a degree in teaching foreigners will have learnt this and will get constant input from their students. What I have struggled with as a foreigner, may not apply to you. So, my personal struggle may not entitle me to tell you what is difficult or not. 

 

15 minutes ago, Demonic_Duck said:

The difficulty is then in making sure your non-native teacher of choice does indeed have exceptional pronunciation, which you as a learner aren't qualified to judge.

 

Amen! This is a problem with any field. So, the safest thing is to stick to natives, which (at least in terms of pronunciation) are professionals by definition.

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Just looked them up to refresh my memory, IIRC Mandarin Blueprint were the ones promoting the so-called "kiss and smile" method of pronouncing the "-ün" final, which is uhh... not how it's pronounced. So I agree with you that they're probably not a great source for pronunciation ?

 

Here's a possible counterexample to the idea that learning pronunciation from non-natives is always a bad idea:

 

Mandarin Pronunciation Masterclass Demo: Rhythm & Intonation

 

That's from Outlier Linguistics, who also make the excellent character etymology dictionary on Pleco. This isn't an endorsement of the course, and it's not cheap at $99, but judging by their other output I'd say there's a high chance it's very good.

[alantin]

I haven't done Mandarin Blueprint pronunciation course but I have done their other courses up to their intermediate level. They use two native speakers in all their teaching material so I would expect that to be the case in the pronunciation course too. So yeah.. Learning pronunciation from non-natives, but with with native examples.

 

Their marketing aside, their focus is not on teaching pronunciation or speaking but on teaching how to read and write Chinese characters using a method that is basically an extended version of the Remembering the Kanji or Remembering the Hanzi method by James Heisig. They took the Heisig method and systematized its stories into including mnemonics for remembering the primary initial, final, and tone in addition to the character components. Then they did some character frequency analysis and ordered the characters by frequency and so that each new character uses previously learned characters and components. The characters are taught in this order with frequent words that use them and also includes first short sentences, then short passages of text, and finally full passages with the words that the student already knows.

 

In my opinion this is a very good method and it has helped me tremendously in learning the Hanzi characters just as the original Heisig method helped me learn the Kanji back in the day. The idea they had to incorporate the pronunciation into each mnemonic is also extremely interesting and it by far the most systematic and comprehensive course for teaching written Chinese that I have seen so far.

 

Their claim to teach you 80% of the Chinese language in such and such a time basically means that after finishing their course, you have covered the material that accounts for 80% of the vocabulary and characters in the material that they analyzed to create the order in which they teach the material.

 

I also had an interesting number drill with Phil at some point. Phil had collected answers from their users on how many hours they usually spent doing various activities in their system like learning new characters, doing reviews, and studying vocabulary. I wrote my masters thesis in using Monte Carlo simulations in analyzing cyber risks and I used the same technique with Phil's data to come up with an expected distribution of how many hours people should require to "fluency" in Mandarin Chinese.

My result was that 16% of the people should be "fluent" after 769 hours of study, 50% after 841 hours and 84% after about 912 hours (that's the average and one standard deviation on both sides). By category that time was spent 26% on studying new material, 44% on reviewing, and 30% on output practice (Note output for them basically means shadowing native audio). They decided to use "841 hours for literacy and fluency" in their marketing.

I think Luke and Phil say that after finishing their material you should be able to pass HSK4, though they don't follow HSK curriculum. On the other hand Benny Lewis calculated that to his "fluency" you would need around 420 hours (or three months) of study. LTL evaluated his level at around HSK3 after he had studied Mandarin for three months.

 

To me that seems to correspond quite well to HSK4 in 841 hours considering the increase in material between HSK3 and HSK4. I haven't kept that detailed records of my studies, but the numbers of hours feel right to me too.


Sources:
https://www.fluentin3months.com/hours-to-learn-a-language/
https://ltl-school.com/fluent-in-3-months/
https://www.mandarinblueprint.com/chinese-fluency-with-mandarin-blueprint/

 

 

[suMMit]

Alright, here's another suggestion: find a good pronunciation book, get a teacher(italki or similar) to work with you one to one going through that book. the teacher speaks, you repeat, the teacher corrects you until its right.

 

I can't recommend a particular book, but the CME (Chinese Made Easier) series has a good pronunciation section with diagrams and explanations. The author was kind enough to send me a link to download that plus the whole set of 5 textbooks on PDF. 

 

*I qualify this advice as coming from a 2.5 year intermediate learner

[alantin]

ChinesePod Say it Right video series. It's not free but they a have a native pronunciation expert explain how to pronounce things and they also focus on the correct mouth form in addition to the tongue position. I watched that series a few times when I began studying Mandarin.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvgBIHhQInQ

[OneEye]

17 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

Here's a possible counterexample to the idea that learning pronunciation from non-natives is always a bad idea:

 

Mandarin Pronunciation Masterclass Demo: Rhythm & Intonation

 

That's from Outlier Linguistics, who also make the excellent character etymology dictionary on Pleco. This isn't an endorsement of the course, and it's not cheap at $99, but judging by their other output I'd say there's a high chance it's very good.

 

I'll endorse it. ?

 

I did want to mention that our course teaches how to learn pronunciation from native speaker recordings (and we supply a bunch of them). So we're not actually modeling the pronunciation for students, but teaching concepts and techniques for how to acquire good pronunciation. There is one video where I demonstrate tongue and mouth position and how to pronounce the initials, but I stress that people should be imitating native speakers and the accompanying audio lesson, not me.

 

Also, germane to the OP's question, we do have an hour-long lesson in the course about fixing fossilized pronunciation issues, especially tones. Ash (my co-founder) learned Chinese for years without learning tones, to the point that he was giving papers at academic conferences in toneless Chinese. A well-known professor told him he needed to fix it for people to take him seriously, so he did, and now his tones are pretty good. So the lesson is basically an interview with him about how he fixed his tones.

 

Also, the course (and everything else in the store) is currently 20% off with the discount code 'kanjilaunch' (we recently launched the Japanese version of our character dictionary).

[mungouk]

What made the biggest difference for me was using flashcard decks with native speaker audio.

 

So every time I saw the word, I also heard the correct tone(s).

 

Now I hear them in my "mind's ear" when I recall them. Simple as that.