Pronunciation Woes

[Anderswelt]

Hi,
I'm contemplating restarting my Chinese adventure after a very lengthy hiatus. I don't find grammar or writing to be at all difficult, but the pronunciation has been such an obstacle that I felt like I was gathering treasure behind an impassable mountain; very frustrating! I suppose what I am asking here is for advice on how to develop adequate command of the pronunciation of Chinese. I remember all of the lessons I went through, the mouth shapes etc, though some software I gathered I no longer possess. I also see that a tone website I used to frequent, with double tones, is no long in existence. Another thing that I lacked was someone to listen to me and tell me what I was doing right and wrong. I never ever gained confidence in this area. Any help much appreciated, as I really love the language and the culture attached to it, and would love to finally crack this one once and for all.

Warm regards,

Markus

[alantin]

Seems to me that you don't really need advice or suggestions on resources and you already identified a major problem, lack of a tutor to listen to you and give feedback. How about trying a teacher on iTalki to go over pronunciation with? The pronunciation is difficult but I find that pretty much the only way to improve it, once you know how everything should be, is to actually pronounce. At least for me exercises become tiring fast but actually talking with a person doesn't. Maybe a half an hour of tutoring two or three times a week to begin with focusing on pronunciation in the beginning and then gradually moving to free talk sessions?

[Jan Finster]

I agree with Alantin.  No matter how many Youtube videos on pronunciation you watch and how many tone drills you do, at the end of the day you will need a tutor to give you feedback. I would invest in a skilled tutor (someone, who studied teaching Chinese rather than a community tutor) for that purpose and then move on to free talk sessions with community tutors.

 

Also, I cannot emphasize enough how important tons of listening is "to get an ear" for pronunciation.

[杰.克]

You need to practice what you want to get good at. How much time have you spent actually speaking chinese? legitimately ask yourself that question and it may be lower than you think. Grab yourself a tutor buddy and get talking!

[Anderswelt]

Quote

You need to practice what you want to get good at. How much time have you spent actually speaking chinese? legitimately ask yourself that question and it may be lower than you think. Grab yourself a tutor buddy and get talking!

 

I used to use the Google keyboard's speech recognition to try and match native pronunciation. I created some exercises and word work on tone pairs, this was in conjunction with videos by YangYang on YouTube. I did have a software in 2015 that analysed speech and showed a graph of the native wave pattern and the recorded sample from me, comparing them. I don't have a clue what that was called, regrettably, I lost it. 

 

[alantin]

Do you have any specific reason for looking for software over a living tutor to help you?

I've tried some speech recognition gadgets too in the past but they are usually not meant for this purpose and are basically just toys.

[杰.克]

On 10/1/2021 at 12:17 PM, Anderswelt said:

 

I used to use the Google keyboard's speech recognition to try and match native pronunciation. I created some exercises and word work on tone pairs, this was in conjunction with videos by YangYang on YouTube. I did have a software in 2015 that analysed speech and showed a graph of the native wave pattern and the recorded sample from me, comparing them. I don't have a clue what that was called, regrettably, I lost it. 

 

All of this is not talking. You need to talk to a human. No 2 ways about it. Practice what you want to get good at. SPEAK MORE CHINESE ?

[Flickserve]

Need to listen to native speech and copy. 

 

You can play around with software as a revision aid but there's no substitute for human interaction.