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Phonetic confusion - Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 17 of 38 02 January 2011 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
What do you mean? All consonants in Serbian are unaspirated, both voiced and unvoiced. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 18 of 38 02 January 2011 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
With a little bit more air expulsion at the end :). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| FamusBluRaincot Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 5562 days ago 50 posts - 114 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 19 of 38 02 January 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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(In regards to the original post):
It’s nice to see a question like this rather than the usual “How can I learn Mandarin in six weeks” type post. Neither one of the sound clips from Wikipedia sound exactly like the Mandarin sounds to me. Perhaps this is because the pinyin “j” and “q” sounds are never directly followed by an “a” sound. Here is my recipe for producing the “j” and “q” sounds: Touch your lower teeth with the tip of your tongue. Your teeth should be fairly close together. Now press the part of the tongue just behind the tip to just behind the upper teeth for the point of contact. The “q” sound should be heavily aspirated. The “i” sound which typically follows, should be very “thin” and closed. If some trained phonetician wants to tell me that the above description is technically incorrect or incomplete, I won’t argue. It’s simply my subjective opinion of what’s going on. You should check out lots of sources. The critically important thing is that you test these and other sounds out on native speakers (as I have done many times), and don’t quit until they tell you they are perfect. I have often seen these sounds equated with the initials in the English words “jeep” and “cheap”. This is incorrect, and will steer you in the wrong direction. Press the tongue further forwards and up, make the vowels slightly thinner, and make sure to aspirate heavily the “q” sound. The Assimil Chinese CDs are great for pronunciation and other things as well. At first I thought that the people who put those CDs together were a bit wacko. I ended up thinking that they were brilliant. You might check out Cslpod.com level 1 for easy sound clips. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 20 of 38 02 January 2011 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
well, maybe it works for English natives, but when your native language has more approximate sounds, it becomes confusing when you are 'told' to pronounce one sound, but you hear a different one. I'm glad that this topic confirmed that voiced-unvoiced is not so important in Mandarin initials. Regrading pinyin 'zh', maybe students could go on with pronouncing it as English "j" in 'major', but for me it is a different sound (tip of the tongue is further back). To me it sounds like Serbian џ (which, no matter what IPA says, is not same like English 'j'), but with the tip of the tongue moved just a little bit further back. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 21 of 38 02 January 2011 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
no, they are not exactly the same: pinyin 'q' is way more aspirated than totally unaspirated Serbian sound ћ, while pinyin 'j' is maybe just a little bit more 'tight' than Serbian ђ (don't know how to explain,for the pinyin one you press the tip of your tongue a bit more against the top of the mouth). But it was the clearly heard distinction between voiced and unvoiced that confused me.
oh, I'm afraid I'm not patient enough to go for perfection :). I'll be happy if natives are never confused by my pronunciation of these sounds. Maybe I should record myself and see what natives think. Edited by Aineko on 02 January 2011 at 9:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 22 of 38 02 January 2011 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Like someone else mentioned there's an enormous amount of variation across native
speakers, especially for the retroflex and alveo-palatal sounds. Unless you have a particular accent you are trying to shoot for I wouldn't sweat it too much. As a side note, I grew up speaking Mandarin and it was only after I learned some phonetics that I was able to convince myself very begrudgingly that the pinyin b/d/z/zh/g/j sounds I was making were actually voiceless sounds. It was quite a shock actually. Then when I started learning Min which has a three way distinction (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced unaspirated), it took me a long time to hear the voicing difference between the two unaspirated sounds. This blew my mind yet again. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| michau Tetraglot Groupie Norway lang-8.com/member/49 Joined 6227 days ago 86 posts - 135 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish, Sign Language Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic | Message 23 of 38 02 January 2011 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, are you sure there is no aspiration at all in Serbian? I assumed that Polish ć and Serbian ћ are the same sound (I don't hear any difference), but of course it may be untrue. Polish unvoiced consonants definitely have VOT (voice onset time) longer than VOT of Mandarin unaspirated consonants and shorter than VOT of aspirated ones, so there is some aspiration, though admittedly not much. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 24 of 38 02 January 2011 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
no, I don't have such a good ear to say is there a very little of aspiration or not :). Compared to English, definitely unaspirated. However, I doubt that 'being used to hear' is a problem, since I can easily hear pinyin 'b' and 'd' as unvoiced, when they are unvoiced (like in the first Assimil lesson, the male speaker pronounce 不 unvoiced, or at least it seems to me like that :)). However, whenever I hear natives pronouncing Beijing or 句子, I hear voiced consonants. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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