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Tones in Mandarin | ||
Tags: Tonal languages | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| czwelker Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4524 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, French | Message 1 of 5 09 July 2012 at 5:22pm | IP Logged |
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I've just started studying Mandarin Chinese, and I'm starting by trying to recognize the tones, something that I'm having a lot of trouble with. I downloaded an app to help me with the tones and got to the point where I could tell over 90% of the time which tone she was using in single words. Now, I've switched programs to check if I could understand the tones of another speaker, and, as it turns out, no, I cannot. This is obviously extremely aggrevating because I thought I could hear the difference, but now I know that I still can't. Is there anything anyone could recommend to look for in order to hear the differences between the tones? Any thing I could look for in the native person's pronunciation of the words to help me distinguish one from another?
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| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6904 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes  5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 2 of 5 09 July 2012 at 8:47pm | IP Logged |
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My experience with Chinese is as limited as it can be but in my opinion the problem is
that you've learned to recognize the tones as pronounced by just one speaker. Every speaker of every language pronounces certain things in a slightly different way, and as the recognition of tones for a beginner learner of Chinese (well, in my case at least) is partly based on comparing these tones to each other, it may not work well when one's faced with a different speaker. To cut the long story short, before you look for some new methods and strategies you may want just to train your tone recognition with the use of words recorded by a larger number of speakers, both male and female ones. /All corrections of my English are always appreciated - just send me a PM, please./ 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| jsg Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4508 days ago 30 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 3 of 5 27 July 2012 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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I highly recommend the Text and 6 Pronunciation and Romanization resource tapes of the FSI program for learning the sounds and tones of Mandarin.
http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Chinese 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 5 28 July 2012 at 3:33pm | IP Logged |
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Mandarin tones are often accompanied by changes in vowel quality and voice, for example many speakers use creaky voice for short third tones in everyday speech; fourth tone usually is very short when unstressed. But not all of them do so, or do so consistently. Pitch should be consistent.
You probably learnt to recognize her style to realize those additional changes, and not the change in pitch. So, here are some more tips for training. I still haven't found a minimal pair exercise. What I'd also recommend is to memorize short beginner texts spoken by different speakers until you can chorus the text or dialogue, matching the speaker's pitch and pronunciation consistently. That's basically how I taught myself to actually remember pitch, and not only other possible differences like the ones I mentioned. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TBerg Newbie United States Joined 4519 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Danish | Message 5 of 5 28 July 2012 at 4:39pm | IP Logged |
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With Mandarin Chinese, you just have to work the fundamentals into your brain. Here is a downloadable pinyin
chart with the audio of each Mandarin syllable you must just know in order to move on to better things: http://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation/ Then practice with the tricky tone pairs becomes the next challenge: http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/tone-pair-drills After the challenge loses it's challenging excitement, you can try tongue twisters to just turn some of the pronunciation into second nature for you: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chinese+tongue+twisters 1 person has voted this message useful |
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