tones again, some hard evidence

[kudra]

ken: bao1shou1, conservative

jenny: bao3shou3

http://www.chinesepod.com/podcasts/chinesepod133_C27_20060216.mp3

10:30 into the mp3, ken guesses jenny's prefered style of dress as

conservative, and says bao1shou1 when he should have said bao3shou3(pronounced bao2shou3). You can hear that for a moment it seems that jenny just doesn't know what he said. The flow stops. We don't know how long it would have taken her to get it because Ken slips into English, whereupon she corrects his pronounciation.

Ken I am sure has a pretty thick skin, and anyway he is a million times more successful with his Chinese than I am. I'm not worried about his feelings here.

What I want to illustrate with this example is the extent to which accurate tone pronunciation is important for every day communication.

Keep in mind this is a conversation between 2 people who know each other well, jenny is very familiar with ken's accent. "conservative" could easily have been expected from the context, although it sounded like ken was joking around so there may have been some cultural issues that made it hard for jenny to connect bao1shou1(wrong tones) with conservative.

Disclosure: I am not living in China. Undoubtably other forum members have more experience than I do with this.

That said, I've heard both sides expressed here at chinese-forum for the importance of getting tones right. There is a lot of annectdotal evidence.

Here for once is hard evidence in support of working hard on tones from the get-go.

Especially for newbies who frequently ask, "how important are tones?" -- the evidence in the audio clip is telling.

Also, let me add that when I am unsure of or have forgotten the tone for something, I often find myself "guessing" with 1st tones. I wonder if this is common among foreign speakers or specific to native English speakers. Of course I sometimes misremember completely too.

[roddy]

I often find myself "guessing" with 1st tones. I wonder if this is common among foreign speakers or specific to native English speakers. Of course I sometimes misremember completely too.

You're best off guessing fourth tone, it's most common and at least you get to sound decisive. Unfortunately my default tone is second, and I get to sound not just wrong, but also unsure.

[kudra]

@ roddy

and exactly how much effort would you recommend I devote to changing how I should guess on the fly in mid sentence?

wo3 pa4, At this point it's hard wired, mei2 ban4fa.

[HashiriKata]

exactly how much effort would you recommend I devote to changing how I should guess on the fly in mid sentence?

I'd recommend (at least!) double the time devoted to learning the tones themselves!

[HashiriKata]

"how important are tones?"

I think there shouldn't be one correct answer. To me, whether they're important or not is just a matter of what the learner expects of himself, and of his Chinese:

Learner A: a near-native speaker of Chinese who often feels frustrated because he still makes occasional mistakes or sounds foreign in places.

Learner B: a self-taught learner who feels very happy with the fact that he can get by in China with just 2 years of self-teaching.

Learner C: an American businessman who is quite at ease with himself even though he couldn't mutter a proper sentence in Chinese after twenty years of living in China.

With the examples above, I'm sure Learner A has the best Chinese among the three but may also be the one who feels he still has yet a long way to go in Chinese. The rest is up to you!

[doumeizhen]

Find yourself a compulsive Mormon classmate. They had a very good, precise language instruction and always had to be very careful because they communicate concepts that are not entirely understandable to some Chinese.

Then, swallow your pride and tell them they can correct you at will.*

Although, and I don't know if this experience is shared, but I learned to speak by immitating the people around me (I was living in China) and my tones were ok. I tend to really screw up when I am reading slowly and thinking about the tones, so I think you're right. I am going to have to go back and learn them...

[xiaojiang216]

Am I the only one who found Ken to be a bit annoying in this particular podcast? Sorry...

[Quest]

hmm.. 笔记本电脑 interesting.

[roddy]

hmm.. 笔记本电脑 interesting.

Do you want to tell us why, or are you being enigmatic?

[gato]

He's being sarcastic, I think. He probably thinks that Ken is over-emoting in the recording, but I guess that comes with the business.

[jbiesnecker]

I wonder if it matters that (according to Wenlin) there are no words at all that start with bao1 and follow with 'shou' (either in first tone or with a neutral tone). Like hearing a familiar yet totally nonsensical series of sounds in English might throw you if you're listening to someone whose pronunciation is known to be non-standard.

Just a thought...

[in_lab]

In the dialogue, they use 台式電腦 for desktop computer. In Taiwan, 桌上型電腦 is more popular, maybe because 台式電腦 sounds like a "Taiwanese style" computer.

When I make a tone mistake, I don't usually detect it until I have said a few more words, and then I'm not sure if I should (a) repeat the word that I messed up (B) repeat the whole sentence, or © just forget it if the other person understood. None of the choices are very attractive.

[Lu]

I think I'd correct myself, and if necessary repeat the sentence from there. This way, you show that you do know, and you say it right = practice.

[kudra]

@ in_lab

Which make me think of a possible soap opera lampoon, Desktop Style Divorce.

[kudra]

Regarding tones in Mandarin, and their importance.

googled for

chinese tonal information entropy

Here is a paper

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj/research/fltonemandarin.pdf

I didn't read the math, but this section of the conclusion is interesting.

A quantitative information-theoretic measure demonstrates the

important role played by tone in Mandarin Chinese. In particular,

lexical tone contrast has been shown to have a comparable

functional load to that of vowels for Mandarin, and

higher FL than stress in English, Dutch, and German. We have

also demonstrated that the importance of tonal contrasts varies

among the tones of Mandarin.

...

some

language reformers have suggested that tones do not need to be

represented in a revised alphabet. Our result suggests that such

an alphabet would be as hard to use as an alphabet that represented

tones but not vowels.

Re "Functional Load" is apparently a statistical measure. I don't know if this means in practice that students of Mandarin should be as careful of their tones as they are of their vowels, i.e. getting the tone right is as important as getting the vowel right. Presumably you could test this by making native speakers listen to text with either vowels scrambled, or tones scrambled. Presumably realistic scrambling of tones by non-native speakers of Mandarin is not random, so it's not obvious how to make the comparison "fair" -- if that matters.

Also, we have corroboration regarding roddy's advice to use 4th tone when guessing as it's most common, compared to my self reported defaut guess of 1st tone, although it's close.

Table 7: The fraction of syllables with different tones in Mandarin,

based on the TDT3 corpus of VOA Mandarin broadcasts.

Tone High Rising Low Falling Neutral

Fraction 0.27 0.22 0.16 0.28 0.07

skimming, looks like the 1st author is a grad student advised by the 2nd author.

Here's the 2nd authors cv.

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~levow/cv.htm

[charlescpp]

we usually call laptop computers 本儿 in 中关村

中关村 == 村儿

去中关村 == 进村儿

[mandarin-ka]

www.melnyks.com is another useful Website in a podcast form for those who wants to learn beyong Pimsleur or Chinesepod.

[roddy]

Enough of the self-promotion, thankyou!

[bewolff]

I think the problem of tones are a little bit like english pronunciation for Chinese speakers. There is a point where you are more or less understandable. Practice tones...I suppose. When you study your new words your should try to learn the tones well then. However if you think about your tones constantly your will slow your speach making yourself not undertrandable to your Chinese listeners. Context and speaking a little faster will help them understand you, even if your tones are quite bad. You should also be doing hours of listening to tv/radio/recordings to hammer the sounds of the tones into your head. Find out the 5 things that you do very poorly in Chinese pronunciation and try to work on those directly, one-by-one. From there, if you are still wanting to punish yourself, add another and another. But you have to do the listening. Forcing your self to correct your pronunciation is tedious, boring, frustrating...like the hamburger scene in the new Pink Panther.

[Southernjohn]

I haven't listened to that specific podcast, where Ken makes that tonal mistake. However, I have listened to other Chinesepod segements with Ken and Jenny. Ken does not really speak fluent Mandarin. He typically speaks a sentence or two, but quickly switches to English. Don't get me wrong, I am not belittling Ken's Chinese. However, don't read too much into Jenny misunderstanding him. (again I haven't listened to this specific recording). I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jenny did not understand Ken because Ken, in his "short-burst", "short-phrase" Chinese provided very little context. Yes, Ken's tones are not that great some times, but I would assert that Jenny's lack of comprehension has more to do with Ken's lack of overall fluency, i.e.- vocabulary, grammar, and time spent speaking the language.

Does that sound so far off?