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Mandarin Chi vs Qi vs Ji | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4676 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 9 of 22 27 February 2012 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
True. This is why people normally learn initials and finals when learning pinyin. If you do that, this issue isn't a concern. I recommend that all beginners work with one of the many free initial/final pinyin tables with sound for a few hours.
Please don't do this unless it's a last resort. The sounds are different, so you should learn them.
When I think of aspirated vs non-aspirated, I think of pairs like p/b, where I feel a little puff of air for p but not for b. I don't doubt that someone has classified these as aspirated vs non-aspirated, but I don't think this is helpful in figuring out the how to pronounce them. What is helpful is talking about things like tongue position, and doing a transformation on something the learner already knows how to pronounce to get to the new pronunciation. This is why I think Arekkusu's post was more helpful than nway's, but stelingo's was easily the most helpful of all. I'll only add that It's very helpful to work your way through the pronunciation unit in FSI Mandarin. It's free, and adds some information that sinosplice is missing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4954 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 10 of 22 28 February 2012 at 5:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This is why I took two weeks just on initials and finals last year in my intro period to Mandarin, probably more hardcore than most people. After the first couple of days (because it was all new), repeating the same drills got really boring, but by the end I had really gotten the sounds down.
This was a few months ago (because my focus has remained French and German). Now that I'm slowly shifting focus from "intensive grammar and learning" in those two to more "volume reading, vocab building, writing, and speech", I'm moving back to Mandarin (more permanently). I have reviewed the sound system and its come back much faster this time. Plus, I have the advantage of having learned IPA and the lingo in the meantime (alveolar, alveo-palatal, labial, velar, etc, etc), plus the technical stuff like aspiration, glottal, voiced, central pulmonic, side pulmonic, blade of tongue, tongue body, etc, etc, etc... All that allowed me this time around to pinpoint the tongue placement almost to a science. My Chinese affricates (the ones that give us westerners the most problems) are if I may say quite close to native form I believe. Of course it's one thing to say them in isolation words and another in full phrases, but everyone says that the most important thing is to learn pronounciation right the first time (as much as you are dying to dive into the language itself), and it will be 1000 times better than having to undo bad habits. Which in Chinese because it has far fewer sylables is far more important, as each sound has a very small margin of error. Knowledge of the terminology above has also made it far easier to remember things like when the "u" is rounded or unrounded, and when the "i" is only holding the consonant sound (for the retroflexes zh, ch, sh and the alveolars c, s, z). And more. I'm still having serious problems discering "in" vs "ing" finals, but I hope that just comes with time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5701 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 11 of 22 28 February 2012 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How is this at all unhelpful? The aspiration difference is the main distinction between the phoneme pairs. This is completely orthogonal to the issue of the tongue position of said pairs, which you say is more important/helpful. Aren't they both important? edit: Are you saying that you don't feel ch/c/q to be aspirated as you don't feel the puff of air? If not, then what do you consider to be the difference between them and their unaspirated counterparts? Edited by egill on 28 February 2012 at 9:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| BobbyE Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5252 days ago 226 posts - 331 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 12 of 22 29 February 2012 at 5:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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IMO, the absolute, hands-down best pronunciation guide I've found for these consonants is
at chinese">Sinosplice. Ever since I started working on pronouncing things like he describes in that article, I have received nothing but complements on my pronunciation from natives and foreigners alike. I highly recommend it. Edited by BobbyE on 29 February 2012 at 9:44am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4676 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 13 of 22 29 February 2012 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I interpreted the question to be "how do I produce and recognize" rather than "what's the difference between" the sounds, because I sensed that's what the op needed, but maybe I was wrong. Anyway, I am almost 100% ignorant of linguistic terms, as you can see from my very basic description of aspiration. Regardless, even if someone told a well versed person like yourself that the difference in the sounds was aspiration, I doubt if that would help you produce or recognize the sounds. Tongue position is much more helpful for me, provided I have something to listen to. L1 examples plus a transformation, ala sinosplice, is the best of all, imo. If you want to know how I'd describe the differences, just read the descriptions in sinosplice. Imo, it's much more useful than linguistic terms, especially for people who don't know them. For example:
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| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4704 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 14 of 22 29 February 2012 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Serisously, Wulfgar, I don't think you know what aspiration means. It has nothing to do with tongue position, it's more or less the way you breathe.
And using voicing instead of aspiration to describe the difference is not a good idea either, the distinctive feature is aspiration, not voicing. If you say the difference is in voicing, you may confuse people. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6855 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 15 of 22 29 February 2012 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Really, better just to say you're unfamiliar with the terminology and then explain it in your own terms than to use legitimate, established terms in the wrong way.
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| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4676 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 22 29 February 2012 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I said I know very little about aspiration and other linguistic terms, and I didn't say aspiration had anything to do with the tongue.
That's exactly what I did. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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