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Do tones really matter in Mandarin? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6233 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 9 of 28 25 July 2010 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||
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You just described the huge problem for all non-native speakers learning foreign languages. Native speakers do not always speak clearly and slowly, in fact depending on the region, never. That only gets worse when you add in distinctions that don't exist in your native language (pitch accent instead of stress, tones etc.).
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| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5300 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 28 25 July 2010 at 6:47am | IP Logged | ||
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The tones matter. Please do the tones, or at least try. We'll be patient if you're
putting some modicum of effort into it, I promise. I once tutored someone for free who had the exact same idea you did about not needing to do tones if you spoke fast enough. He had pretty good grammar, pattered away happily, was absolutely incomprehensible. Threw something of a hissy fit when I suggested that he begin to learn tones because he thought I was calling him a bad student. Which he was, seeing as tones are easily one of the most fundamental aspects of Mandarin. After that I began to charge him money because no way was I going through that again without lavish compensation. If you are just trying to learn enough Mandarin to get by on vacation - that is, if you do not intend to ever learn much Mandarin and will constrict yourself only to the kinds of basic phrases we all expect tourists to say - then I suppose you could get away with not attempting tones, in that people would probably manage to guess your intention by means of deduction. But if you want to learn Mandarin to a more advanced level, then I suggest that you rapidly turn your attention to both reproducing the tones and hearing them (as it appears that your ears are not used to hearing the differences in intonation yet). The only situation I have ever been in in which someone did not pronounce his tones was in a conversation with my grandfather near the end of his life. At that point he had been deaf for long enough that he was no longer exact with his tones and chose to bellow out his words in a sort of a distraught wail. Actually, I think he was doing it on purpose now that he could "finally get away with it." This sort of situation will almost definitely be the exception to your experience. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5780 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 11 of 28 25 July 2010 at 7:34am | IP Logged | ||
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There are many subtleties to tones in Mandarin that are not taught in official classroom textbooks and things like that. Native speakers have certain triggering features that are the minimal features of each tone, so that they may not be exactly spoken as they are in the textbook examples. A rising tone may not have to rise as much as long as it has certain specific contrasts with the tones before and after it. It's like what you may have heard about the changes in the third tone too.
The tones are vital though. One situation for me was when my friend (another native English speaker) and I would try to get a taxi back to the university in Hangzhou. If he tried to say the name of our campus (with bad or nonexistant tones), the cabbie almost never understood. He had a rate of maybe 10% success with cabbies. Meanwhile, (since we were beginners at the time) I had spent time every day practicing the proper tones for the name of our campus, and I had a near 100% success rate on the first try when telling the cabbies where to go. My friend said that he couldn't hear the difference between what I was saying and what he was saying, but I could hear it and apparently so could the taxi drivers. One more idea is that when people are listening to you speak, they are actively predicting the next sounds that will come from you...the pitch and rhythm is important even in other languages that don't have specific word tones. If you say something that disobeys the prosody of the language, then you're throwing off their internal language prediction abilities, and they lose track of the entire utterance. Check out Olle Kjellin's paper on "Accent Addition" for some interesting additional information, although not specific to chinese. He's refering generally to swedish-style tones, but the principles of how to gain the skills will apply to anything. http://olle-kjellin.com/SpeechDoctor/ProcLP98.html 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5102 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 12 of 28 25 July 2010 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||
This is not accurate. Because the native speakers do speak clearly - that's why they understand one another in the first place. The problem are not the native speakers but the learners's lack of ability to pick everything up. EDIT. Oh, and a great comment by Doviende. Edited by Derian on 25 July 2010 at 12:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6703 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 28 25 July 2010 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | ||
There is more to communicating/understanding than pure pronunciation - native speakers understand each other even if the other person has a some kind of speech impediment, thick accent, is chewing gum, has a fat lip, is numb from having been to the dentist's etc. They know what to listen for, hear if the prosody is right and then fill in the blanks. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 25 July 2010 at 6:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6233 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 14 of 28 25 July 2010 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
At the same time, it is certainly true that native speakers speaking clearly won't always be perfectly understood by learners, simply because they are learners. But it is perfectly possible to be a C1/C2 standard, and still not understand things (music, things through a badly amplified microphone etc.) that natives would understand. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5780 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 15 of 28 29 July 2010 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
Readers here might also be interested in the concept of HVPT ("High Variability Phonetic Training"), summarized in a Language Log article here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=328
The article goes on to say that if you only hear these things from one speaker (perhaps your classroom teacher if you're taking a class), then you won't learn to distinguish the sounds properly in a general sense. Once you've heard the different possibilities from multiple different speakers however, then you can absorb a sort of "target area" for the sound, so that if you hit anywhere inside that area, it's an acceptable version of the sound. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5242 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 16 of 28 29 July 2010 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Are the tones in Chinese more important than tones in Lithuanian, Serbian, Croatian, Swedish, etc?
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