“I wish I’d known that years ago…”

[Guest realmayo]

I wonder if anyone has any suggestions:

Are there any discoveries – from great eurekas to a simple satisfied ah-ha – that people have made learning Chinese? Something which you wished you’d known, say, a year after starting rather than three or four years of never realising?

My example may sound a bit daft. I’d never realised that with the rising second tone you don’t need to start right from the bottom and rise to the top, but start mid-way or higher and rise from there. A really simple thing but made it much easier to speak!

(putting this in speaking and listening forum but don't want to limit it to speaking and listening)

[roddy]

Learn words, not characters.

Learn tones in word / phrase groups, not in single syllable isolation.

(putting this in speaking and listening forum but don't want to limit it to speaking and listening)

Will move it then . . .

[heifeng]

Ok, this isn't really a "eureka" more of ^&*(&( why didn't anyone try to correct me more earlier instead of letting me get away with it for so long...as a native English speaker apparently my

lv vs. lu; &

chu vs. qu;

distinction wasn't great. It wasn't 'till I hunted down a really anal pronunciation tutor who would yell at me enough was I able to fix these... Here are some other things a native English speaker may have difficulties with...prononciation maybe pronounced too much in throat or nasal as opposed to being more outward at mouth like a native Chinese (I just imagine trying to spit out each word and really loudly...wow, more native Chinese-sounding already). Also (maybe it was just my lazy xxxx (insert USA where speakers English standards are very questionable) English carrying over to my Chinese) but my "t" would be a little close to a d or q, without an adequate puff of air at top teeth and tongue. But then again it's really annoying focusing too hard on pronunciating stuff after awhile and you forget what you were originally trying to say.

Also I use to make my 3rd tone way too long and exagerated...

(I say all this only b/c if u refer to some GAO JI HSK KOUSHI books they may only talk about Korean and Japanese student pronunciation issues...Now if only some of my Korean friends can learn to pronounce 'yue' correctly and my Japanese ones can fix the f vs. h problem we'll all just have nearly perfect pronunciation...hehe)

[wai ming]

I only just discovered recently that the 数 in "大多数" is in fact fourth tone, and not third tone as I've been pronouncing it for the past 5+ years... Really wish one of my Chinese teachers had nipped that one in the bud.

On a somewhat related note, it was good when I realised that some words take different tones depending on the function of the word, eg

卷: juan3 (verb) vs juan4 (noun)

中: zhong1 (noun, adjective) vs zhong4 (verb)

种: zhong3 (noun) vs zhong4 (verb)

and of course, 数: shu3 (verb) vs shu4 (noun).

[AlexBrit]

Interesting post Haifeng.

About v versus u. Most native speakers of English have this problem from the beginning as we make a very lazy 'u' sound as in 'food'.

I wrestled with this problem not just a few years ago when studying Chinese, but many years ago when I was studying French, as one needs to distinguish between the sounds as in 'vu' or 'vous' or 'du' or 'doux' etc. In my opinion, (and after several hours in front of a mirror), I decided it was basically a case of forward or backward tongue, with the same basic mouth shape in the two cases - rounded, forward lips.

If you take Mandarin 'road' - 路 (lu) and then 绿 (lv), I think the former requires the tongue pulled back into the throat, whilst the latter needs the tongue pushed forward touching the back of the bottom teeth.

The latter, I think, is the hardest for my students studying either French or Mandarin.

A colleague gave us a nice hint the other week. To produce this sound, push the lips forward in a tight, rounded, o-shape (as if to whistle). Then try to produce in an 'e' sound, as in 'week'.

I think we make something like the v in Mandarin.

And in fitting with the thread, no my Mandarin teachers didn't tell me that!

(Please correct if you have any objections.)

[gougou]

I wish I had started to read real-life Chinese texts earlier. After about 1.5 yrs of study I picked up a copy of 读者 for the first time (bar the 30-hr train ride without English reading materials a year earlier, where I managed to work my way through one paragraph before hurling the magazine through the compartment), only to find out that I was able to understand most of it.I figure that, had I started earlier, it would have saved a lot of time that I spent on memorizing characters.

[Roee]

"A colleague gave us a nice hint the other week. To produce this sound, push the lips forward in a tight, rounded, o-shape (as if to whistle). Then try to produce in an 'e' sound, as in 'week'"

This is what I used while studying in Taiwan and upon arriving to the mainland was taunted that it sounds like a Taiwanese'; and indeed, the mainlanders dont seem to pronounce it this way -- or am I missing something?

[WilsonFong]

I thought the difference between the u in 路 (lu) and the v in 绿 (lv) was simply that the u was the same pronunciation as "oo" in English (e.g. moon) and the v was simply the same as the German "u" with the umlaut, hence why it also has the umlaut in pinyin, but now that I'm reading so many posts about difficulties in distinguishing them I'm starting to have doubts. Does anyone know of any online pronunciation guides with audio files? http://www.chinese-lessons.com/Mandarin/Pinyin/ doesn't seem to be working

[kudra]

@ WilsonFong

for sound, go to the advanced page in adsotrans

http://www.adsotrans.com/new.html

paste in

路

and select sounds.

compare with

绿

My impression is that given what you said, your pronounciation, although perhaps not matching what I heard in the audio from adsotrans, will be within the acceptable variation existing in native speakers. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part.

[HashiriKata]

This is probably what you want:

http://lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/

[AlexBrit]

Sorry to everyone if I took this thread off topic. But just in reponse to the last few posts. I like those two websites - 'adsotrans' and 'lost-theory'. Thanks guys.

As for WilsonsFong's pronunciation guides, I should have pointed out that being English I speak with the type of English pronunciation where the 'oo' of moon doesn't sound like the pinyin 'u' of 路 (but you maybe speak with a Northern American accent where it might well sound like that), and that I am not sure about the umlaut 'u' in German so can't comment.

[gato]

The pinyin ü sound is the roughly the same as the French u, which according to a page below is also the same as the German ü. Thus, at least the French and Germans should have no problem with it.

For English speakers, there's a pretty close approximation of the ü sound in "deuce", at least whenever I hear tennis commentators say it.

http://french.about.com/library/pronunciation/bl-pronunciation-u.htm

http://www.jump-gate.com/languages/french/french1.html

* Pronunciation: the French sound for "u" does not exist in English. While in most languages "u" is pronounced like the u in "bush", in French it differs dramatically. The French "u" is exactly the same sound as the German "ü". As we're going to see later, the sound "u" as the English "bush" exists in French as well, but it is formed by the vowel combination "ou".

* Examples: voiture (car), minute, humain (human).

[heifeng]

Actually, after coming to China it wasn't really just the lv type of v giving me problems. Even the u, as in shu, chu, lu didn't have enough of the 'wu' type sound towards the end so I was told to practice even this u, even if exagerated at first just so the full wu sound is heard...

[Guest realmayo]

Roddy what you suggest is making a lot of sense: have since cut down on the single characters and worked on more "words" instead. And in fact the individual characters stick in my head much more easily that way, than when they're on their own.

Thanks for the other responses guys. I hadn't realised the noun-verb tone change was at all common.

And I hadn't realised how excited people get about "u" and "v"...