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A note on tonal languages | ||
Tags: Tonal languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ihoop Newbie United States Joined 4613 days ago 29 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 7 30 June 2014 at 6:05am | IP Logged |
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Hey all,
I had a small revelation recently about tonal languages that I wanted to share with others. I am sure many people have come to this same realization by their selves, but I just wanted to create a post to put my own thoughts into writing. I have finally realized why tonal languages are so much more challenging than non-tonal languages. It basically comes down to the fact that, if you really want to speak fluently, you must do the majority of your learning (including learning new vocab) with audio and no text. Many foreigners begin learning Chinese with pinyin and tone marks. When they learn a new word they learn the pinyin spelling and the tone(s) that go with it. When actually having to speak they must think first of the pinyin spelling, then apply the tone(s) to that spelling. After their brain has processed all this information they can then get the word out of their mouth. IMO, this is way too much information for ones brain to process while trying to speak fluently, and is also quite tiring. What I have realized is that native speakers of tonal languages do not think about spelling or tones of words when they speak. They directly associate the "sound" of a word with its meaning, thus giving them the ability to speak fluently. Essentially, I think foreigners studying tonal languages miss this point completely (I know I did for a long time). When learning a new word one must listen to it repeatedly without thinking about it's pinyin spelling or what it's tones actually are. One must focus on the "sound" of the word only, trying to make your brain associate this "sound" with meaning. With romance languages, one can get away with learning a lot through reading or just learning vocab without audio. This is because you don't need to think about a word's "tone" when you speak, giving one the ability to produce a word fluently from it's spelling without too much effort. This being said, I think we would all be speaking more fluently if we did the majority of our vocab learning with audio. Any thoughts on this? I have been grinding away at Chinese for nearly two years and only recently had these revelations. They have certainly helped my own studies and have given me greater insight into how people can speak tonal languages fluently. Thanks for reading! -Ian 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5602 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 2 of 7 30 June 2014 at 10:47am | IP Logged |
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It is better to see tone and phonemes as a unit of pronunciation. This was also the idea behind Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which wrote guo, gwo, guoo and guoh instead of guo with different diacritics.
If a learner of English would write bich, and had then to think, if he meant bich(t) or bich(l), in order so know wheather he has to say a tense or a lax vowel, he would be constantly confused. But a native speaker and most learners treat beach and bitch as totally different entities. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4280 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 3 of 7 30 June 2014 at 11:58am | IP Logged |
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Chinese is not so different, if you think about it.
I am born and study in Hong Kong, a former British colony. I began learning English by reading textbooks and listening to my teachers' speech, which pronunciation was mostly inaccurate. At first, I did not know there was any difference in pronunciation between pitch and peach, and beach and peach, even go and goal. When someone explained the differences the first time, I could not hear them when others spoke, and I had to consciously think about them when I spoke. Too much work, as the OP described it, too unnaturally. At that moment, these features were so foreign to me that my brain did not treat them as native speakers treat them, as elements which represent distinctions in meaning. It was only after I started listening a lot to authentic audio and practicing minimal pairs that they became part of my English knowledge. I still think beach and peach sound similar, which they do, as they are both produced with your lips; but now I can tell there is a difference, that "b" is voiced but "p" is not, and produce them as such, without any thinking. So, I would like to tell you that learning Chinese and English (as well as Romance languages) are not all that different; you overlooked it perhaps because the latter you speak since birth. Speaking English, and any given Western European language, (in a Chinese's point of view) cannot be learnt solely by reading as you described it. More listening is the most effective way, if not the only way, to learn to speak well, to assimilate the distinctions, in any given language. Edited by Paco on 30 June 2014 at 4:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4447 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 7 30 June 2014 at 1:42pm | IP Logged |
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Learning any foreign language one tends to be better at reading than listening and speaking. Some of
the time we have to think about words and phrases before we can say them or translate from another language we are more fluent. Different languages have different challenges. In Western (Romance) languages we have subject-verb conjugation rules that non-native speakers may get it wrong... such as: "He don't know" instead of "He doesn't know". Once I heard a radio host from Beijing made a mistake with her English: "He has teach" instead of "He has taught". Although Chinese doesn't have verb conjugation, there is a list of classifiers used in front of a noun. A language like French we have masculine & feminine articles: "le" & "la" such as "le table", "la voiture". In Chinese a classifier describes a noun such as: "a river" we'd say: "一条河“ and "a pen" we'd say: "一支笔“. The other day I was watching a Chinese show from Beijing that featured the Black singer from Nigeria "好弟". He made the mistake of using a classifier. He said: "一对鞋" which is acceptable but he also said "一对牛仔裤" and the show host corrected him "一条牛仔裤". In English we have "a pair of shoes" and "a pair of pants". In English "a pair of jeans" would be acceptable but in Chinese the same rule doesn't apply. We use the classifier "一条" for long objects like like river, pants instead of "一对" for a pair. When it come to intonation, foreigners who have reached a high level of fluency but are not native- speakers would occasionally make mistakes. I once saw someone in an online video said: "zhōumó" for 週末"(weekend) instead of zhōumò" with the incorrect intonation going up on "mò". There was a video discussion between the polyglots "Steve Kaufmann" & "Luca Lampariello". The word for "Russian language" sounded like: "Èwén" 俄文 instead of "Éwén" with the intonation going down instead of up on "É". When it comes to English, a lot of Chinese (particularly Cantonese-speakers) tend to pronounce their "i" like "e". A would like "twin" would sometimes sound like "tween". The other is "r" often pronounced like "l" so that "rice" becomes "lice". Edited by shk00design on 30 June 2014 at 4:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4671 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 5 of 7 30 June 2014 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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The best way to learn tonal languages is (as in other languages)
is focus on sentences and not on isolated words. The problem with standard (Northern) Mandarin: a) connected speech of words rather than robot-like pronunciation of monosyllables glued together b) normal speech speed (allegro style) rather than slow reading style speech c) sentence intonation d) focus e) change from monosyllabic to disyllabic and polysyllabic words (this is reflected in Pinyin: in mainland China ''the moon'' is yuèliang rather than yuè liàng [the Pinyinization used in Taiwan]) f) neutral tones and weakening of tones of unstressed syllables all of these make Mandarin tones in real life difficult, in both perception and native-like production I guess you could pronounce Mandarin syllables as if they were Lao syllables (a language with no connected speech and neutral tones, which consists of all monosyllables being pronounced as if they were syllables in isolation joined together, and with no sentence intonation), but this would sound as a Mandarin spoken by a robot (or a foreigner) and not a speaker of putonghua from Beijing, Chengde or Harbin. See here for more: http://books.google.im/books?id=gG6fb_rKed4C&pg=PA60&lpg=PA6 0&dq=mandarin+%22tones+in+connected+speech%22&source=bl&ots= HJcQMXO-LS&sig=W_HdVttCqN8p-r-705V9OdDYzJ0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=67- xU4_cLs-v7AbfhIHICg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=mandarin%20% 22tones%20in%20connected%20speech%22&f=false Edited by Medulin on 30 June 2014 at 10:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3889 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 7 01 July 2014 at 12:22am | IP Logged |
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I can't comment as to languages with more than 4 tones like Vietnamese or Cantonese, but my experience with Mandarin is that the tone that really counts the most, especially on the last syllable, is T4. In my opinion T4 is the most definite and most unmistakable tone, because it is pronounced the most harshly.
For example in the case of the word "gongzuo", which means "to work", and "hezuo", which means "to cooperate", the second syllable "zuo" must be toned correctly, but the tone of the first syllable doesn't seem to be as important, because the second syllable, T4, is pronounced so much more emphatically. As a rule I believe the tone of the last syllable is the most important. When I began studying Mandarin, I made sure I had good, clear audio representations of the tones from native speakers, so I could learn first word-by-word and then sentence-by-sentence. I would also position my head in a specific way to correlate with the tones. For example, I wouldn't move my head at all for T1 (level), and I would raise my head slightly for T2 (rising). For me the trickiest tone combination is T3 T2, like "jiejue" (to solve), etc. Listening to Mandarin spoken correctly for me is like listening to a song played on a harp that is sometimes played in reverse, but still flows harmoniously. I am still not at the place where I have found total freedom in this language. I have given a lot to this language and sometimes wish Mandarin would give back a little more, and each word I hear would be like a little floating star I could admire and I would no longer have to fight to understand each one. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4035 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 7 of 7 05 July 2014 at 1:17am | IP Logged |
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There are too many complaints on tones, next time I will open a thread on why nasality, vowel length, or consonant
aspiration and voicing deserve special attention. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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