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Tonal languages for a tin ear | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 30 30 August 2014 at 1:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to add something to 'tone deafness'; as far as I am aware, most people who consider themselves tone deaf don't actually have the condition called amusia. I vaguely remember reading about one researcher who set up an experiment to measure something like implicit pitch, meaning, she let the participants make decisions about pitch without being aware that they were tested on pitch, and even the participants who did badly on explicit relative pitch tests performed reasonably well on those tests, which, I think, led to some speculation about them simply being bad at using their normal pitch perception consciously.
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| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 10 of 30 30 August 2014 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||
You didn't mention it here, but if that was the first time you had sat down to listen to native speakers converse, that's why you got 5%. You can study all you want from books, that is not going to help to train your ear, that is something that simply must be done by listening. You can listen to Chinese from your learning material, but that is highly structured and clear language. Even radio (except "talk radio) and television are very structured speech (news, scripts from shows, etc). I had a hard time at first following conversations in the languages I'm more advanced in today even though I had studied to a fairly high level. Even native speakers do not speak grammatically correct both by accident and on purpose. They slur things, they use slang, the misuse words for satirical effect, and on and on and on. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4034 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 11 of 30 30 August 2014 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
And there are native speakers of tonal languages with amusia. I think people forget that the pitch is not absolute but is relative to the previous words and all and many assimilations occur, a tone may have a few allophones. And people whisper in tonal languages too, it can't be just 100% context. Edited by Stolan on 30 August 2014 at 4:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 12 of 30 31 August 2014 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
Being tone death doesn't appear to be problematic to a person's fluency in language. There is no evidence that people with "congenital amusia" experienced problems with their speech, only that music would sound like noise. Maybe sound pitches in music operate at frequencies that a person with amusia can't pick up. The English surgeon Dr. Oliver Sacks living in the US is an expert in the subject: Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia - Amusia A "tonal" language describe languages that use tones to distinguish between similar sounding words & phrases while in non-tonal languages words can be pronounced slightly different according to the context. For example we'd say: "Oh really..." to indicate an element of surprise. The same word "really" can be pronounced with the last syllable "ly" raised to indicate a question: "Really?" In a language like Chinese when you say bèijǐng it means background. But if you say běijīng you mean the capital of China. The exact same phonetics except for the accents (tones) on top of the vowels. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 13 of 30 31 August 2014 at 11:26am | IP Logged | ||
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20685803 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119887/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393210 001892 .... I did not claim people with amusia have serious problems learning their native language. It's just likely that it's a bit harder for them, because they have to rely more on the redundancy built into natural language and so have a smaller margin of error. In languages like Mandarin or Vietnamese speakers, when asked to give a word with a certain tone without additional context, say that word in almost exactly the same pitch even when there is a long time between tests, while in languages without lexical tone the pitch at which a supposedly neutral word is said often varies a lot over time and between different words. That is why lexical tone has been linked to absolute pitch, even when the speaker does not have absolute pitch in a musical instrument or in singing. It is true prosody can't be reduced to lexical tone. But if as a speaker of a non-tonal language you listen to very good speakers of English with a tonal language as their native language you can often hear that they remember certain words with a certain pitch, and pronounce it with that pitch featuring into the overall prosody, while a native speaker would infer the pitch of the word from the nuance in meaning they want to express with their overall prosody. For speakers of non-tonal languages speaking a tonal language the effect is probably exactly the other way around - I can't hear it myself, of course. (I can hear people seriously messing up tone, but I meant the way good non-native speakers treat tone when they don't natively speak a tonal language.) Yes, in the context of sentence prosody pitch is relative, and pitch in unstressed syllables isn't as precise as in stressed syllables. But there are rules for how this works, and if you want to learn these rules you should to be able to recognize relative pitch. Some people can't do this well explicitly. I can tell when a note is a full tone higher or lower than another note. I don't know how well I do on half tones, but for quarter tones to a smaller difference I often can only tell that the pitch has changed, not which note was higher. In Mandarin, I partly use syllable length to tell apart second and fourth tone when asked to do so, because while I can tell it's a contour tone, I might not be sure if it went from low to high or from high to low. But when I repeatedly listen to the same word spoken in different sentences and try to repeat the sentences [easy enough to understand them, slow enough to repeat them], I don't have to think about whether a syllable is second or fourth tone [or sandhi], I just recognize the word as a word I know, and of which I know how it works in a sentence. Edited by Bao on 31 August 2014 at 11:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 14 of 30 02 September 2014 at 6:30am | IP Logged | ||
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It's completely normal to not understand full-speed Mandarin after one year. I've been learning Mandarin for five
years and here are my thoughts on difficulties with tone: Don't worry if you're not musical. If you can tell the difference among the four tones when they're spoken slowly and clearly as isolated syllables, you're fine. When you hear a stream of full-speed speech, you do not need to identify the tone of each syllable in each sentence. If you try to do this, you will fail. Most fluent foreigners and I'd guess even native speakers would have difficulty identifying the tones of a passage of completely ungrammatical nonsense spoken at full speed. In fact, you can often understand Mandarin with the tones removed. There will be some ambiguities, but if you know what the speaker is talking about, you can get a decent amount (more than 5%!) Example: "Wo jue de zhong wen fei chang nan xue. Wei shen me ne? Yin wei wo ting bu chu lai sheng diao. Hai you bie de yuan yin, jiu shi, wo de ci hui bu gou le." This should be pretty comprehensible- if the tones were wrong you could parse it differently, but there is really only one plausible way to put tones on that message and make it coherent. If you keep studying, you'll gain more and more familiarity with common words and common expressions. Eventually your brain will expect to hear certain words at certain places in a sentence. You'll subconsciously know when there is only one plausible word in a particular spot, and your brain won't waste energy figuring out the tone and presenting it to your awareness. On the other hand, if you hear "tā hùi shuō hán yŭ," you'll automatically recognize that tone matters for hán because hán is Korean and hàn is Chinese. This is now way easier, because you don't have to worry about the nonwords hănyŭ or hānyŭ. From distinguishing among four tones of five syllables, you've got it down to distinguishing two tones of one syllable. This is how you will use tone for comprehension when you're fluent. Keep at it, and you'll get there. As for speaking with the correct tones, it will require another thread. But first things first. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| theyweed Senior Member Poland Joined 3814 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English | Message 15 of 30 03 September 2014 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your replies.
Some of you claim that the dependence between musical talent and being a tonal language native speaker doesn't exist, but interestingly, according to the research it does exist. I also don't understand why producting the tones correctly (questionable...) by myself would facilitate the ability to discriminate the tones. When I speak I'm aware of fact which tone I utter (I mean I hear it) My chinese friend claims that I'm OK as far as speaking is concerned (maybe it's just chinese politness, but it's not the point as we're discussing listening/speaking correlation). I guess I sometimes make a mistake, notably between second and fourth tone for they require "some ear" to judge whether pitch falls or rises. The idea of memorizing whole utterances appeals to me, however I'm afraid that it may cause a "snow ball effect" - as the number of words, possible responses rises. I also don't want to find myself in the situation where my chinese will limit to:"i dont have to know the tones cuz i can recognize a whole sentence" For instance, I remember coming across a dialogue: 我让他帮助我们。 他最近很忙。会来吗？ 他会来。 Whilst listening to the dialogue I of course misheard it (later I found the transciption) and thought the guy said 回来. At that time it seemed quite normal for me. The another person was busy, probably had been to some business trip and just came back. Edited by theyweed on 04 September 2014 at 8:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 16 of 30 05 September 2014 at 8:25am | IP Logged | ||
That's interesting. Still though, why let that discourage you? You've got some trait that's correlated with difficulty in learning Mandarin phonology, so what? You can still do it. It probably doesn't argue for any serious change in your studying strategy, at least until the research comes out showing that a specific intervention can help nonmusicals overcome their disadvantage. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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