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Tonal languages for a tin ear | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| theyweed Senior Member Poland Joined 3602 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English | Message 1 of 30 29 August 2014 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was wondering whether it makes sense to learn a tonal language, for instance, mandarin
if one is so called tin ear. About one year ago I started my journey with mandarin and few weeks ago I had an opportunity to spend some time with two native mandarin speakers. What I found out embarassed me - while they were speaking to each other I was only able to get like 5% of what they were saying (after one year of studies!). It occured to me that I'm not able to recognize the tones (beng said n normal pace). I know that I'm a tin ear, for I tried to learn to play the guitar and always had a problem with repeating the strumming or maintaining the pace. What about you? Do you always recognize the tones and never have a problem with deciphering the meaning of utterance in mandarin? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5389 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes  | Message 2 of 30 29 August 2014 at 3:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Listen to other people speaking with each other is one of the most difficult things in learning languages. If someone is speaking with you, there is interaction, repetition, explanation, when you say "huh", you adapt to each other, you know the context. While eavesdropping, you have no of these advantages.
PS. I think, nobody always regognizes the tones and never has a problem with deciphering the meaning of utterance. The gap between English and Mandarin is big enough, that you can not insist on better results after only one year. Look at what you can do, not at your deficiencies, maybe you can express yourself in a simple way, or you can read some easy stuff, or you can listen, if somebody is speaking to you. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5556 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 30 29 August 2014 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have a bad memory for pitch, and I tend to horribly simplify songs when I try to sing.
What helps me, to some degree, is to listen to the same sentence or passage again and again, and practice repeating/speaking or singing along until I feel I can 'play it in my head' and know what it should sound like, without thinking about whether a certain note or word is a certain pitch. My Mandarin is really basic, but the words and expressions I drilled ad nauseam I can actually understand when I'm inconspicuously eavesdropping to conversations around me. (I mean I understand entire sentences or short exchanges, and not only words that may or may not be my imagination.) Edited by Bao on 30 August 2014 at 1:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3822 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 4 of 30 29 August 2014 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
There are plenty of tone deaf native Chinese speakers, tonality is not music. It's like me saying I want to train my seahorses with a lasso because the name is similar. The idea that the Chinese have been selectively bred to hear tones and are somehow better at music is untrue. Just try to learn the tone as anorther dimension, put intonation on a single word and not an entire sentence, hear the other cues such as vowel length, harshness, nasality, crackling, and other side effects when a person changes the tone a bit. Edited by Stolan on 29 August 2014 at 5:55pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5556 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 30 29 August 2014 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Stolan, have a cookie.
-Thanks. The 'selectively bred' thing is still pulled out if your ... hat, I think. Edited by Bao on 31 August 2014 at 1:07pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4234 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 30 29 August 2014 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Last year I spent 8 months studying Mandarin on my own. I've gone to Taiwan many years ago for a
summer exchange program but haven't have much exposure since. As a Cantonese-speaker (which is another tonal language with similar grammar rules & sentence structure), I do have an advantage. A week ago, I was discussing with a polyglot online about Cantonese-speakers acquiring Mandarin. I know someone who is a Cantonese-speaker tried Mandarin classes for 6 months and gave up completely. According to the polyglot living in China and went to an International school, acquiring Mandarin for him only took 2 months on top of Cantonese which is his mother-tongue, English as his second language, French & Spanish which he acquired in school. He said that his first day in French class was a disaster. The school he went to in Hong Kong were mostly expats from Montreal, Canada who are fluent in French. To prepare for his 5 min. introduction on the first day, he had to lookup & translate every word he wanted to say. Nobody in class could understand a word he said. Based on his experiences, I think pushing yourself to catch up to a class who is already at a high level of fluency made him work harder to become fluent in French. --------------------- What about Chinese? 1. Pinyin: Cantonese-speakers tend to find Pinyin difficult to learn. Personally I started with no knowledge of Pinyin except for a fast typing speed over 60WPM in English. There are common words I would type constantly and after 5 or 6 times I'd learn the Pinyin. 2. Pronunciation: how do you get around the tones? In the beginning I rely on an online dictionary: www.mdbg.net. Every time I come across a word or phrase I don't know very much I'd look up the word in English or if I hear it in a broadcast, I'd look up the Pinyin based on what I thought I hear. Then I would click on the audio button to listen to the correct pronunciation and repeat it a few times. Unlike European languages where you can change the tone of words in a sentence to apply to different contexts, in Chinese every character is always pronounce the exact same. For example: "You are going to the store" is a general statement. But if we raise the last syllable in "store" we can turn the same sentence into a question: "You are going to the store?" The same applies to French: "Vous allez au magasin" is a general statement. "Vous allez au magasin"? with the last syllable of "magasin" raised to form a question. In Chinese you'd add 吗 mǎ at the end to form a question. 你去商店 vs 你去商店吗? The first part of the sentence: nǐ qù shāngdiàn would sound the same in both cases. 3. Getting around a dialog: people tend to think of a Chinese sentence as a string of characters with no break in between which is true. 我喜欢看电影 is a simple sentence "I like to see movies". Suppose you hear the above sentence on radio with no subtitles you'd hear: wǒxǐhuankāndiànyǐng. This is like a Chinese sentence. The way you'd say it in English would be to break the sentence up into blocks of ideas: subject: wǒ, auxiliary verb: xǐhuan, verb: kān and finally object: diànyǐng. The Chinese version would be written as: 我 喜欢 看 电影 the way you would in English. The Pinyin version: wǒ xǐhuan kān diànyǐng. When you are listening to a broadcast, you basically try to break your sentences into little pieces you can recognize. First you listen for breaks which would indicate the end of 1 sentence. Next ask yourself whether there something that sounds like the subject? A person's name or a pronoun? Next you look for a verb in your head. Finally the object of the sentence which may be preceded by a classifier. 4. Getting around grammar & sentence structure: First there is no subject-verb conjugation or object agreements. For instance: in English you'd say "I go to the store" for today and "I went to the store" for tomorrow. Similarly in French you have "Je vais au magasin" (present) and "Je suis allé au magasin" (past). In Chinese you'd say: 我去商店. To indicate the present you'd add 今天 for "today" in front of the sentence which is usually not necessary such as: 今天我去 商店. Similarly you'd add words like "yesterday" 昨天 or "several days ago" 几天前 for past tense or "tomorrow" 明天 for future tense: 昨天我去商店and 明天我去商店. For the past tense with unspecified timespan you can add 过 after the verb such as: 我去过商店. For the future tense with unspecified timespan, you can add 将会 in front of a verb: 我将会去商店. 5. The classifiers: in Romance languages like French, Spanish & Italian, the article that goes in front of a noun can be masculine or feminine. In Chinese you have a number and a classifier. The classifier isn't M/F but is a description of the object. Noun construct: Pants = Le pantalon = 一条裤 (一 number, 条 classifier & 裤 noun). Examples of classifiers: 一条河 (条 for long objects) 一只狗 (只 for animals, insects, etc.) 一支笔 (支 for long objects such as a stick) When learning words, you'd learn blocks of characters together such as radio: 收音机 shōuyīnjī as 1 idea instead of individual characters: 收 receive, 音 voice & 机 machine. Use the audio feature using an online dictionary and keep repeating the 3 syllables together. 背景 bèijǐng (background) with 2 syllables together. 北京 běijīng (capital of China) again with 2 syllables together. Don't break them up. After a while you'd dissect a conversation by finding blocks of sounds you hear that you think might be the subject, verb, classifier, noun, etc. Edited by shk00design on 29 August 2014 at 6:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4497 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 7 of 30 29 August 2014 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not the world's best singer either and I can deal with Mandarin tones (learning them
right now). All it takes is practice and being able to learn to produce the tones. To be able to hear certain sounds, you need to learn to produce them first. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3676 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 30 29 August 2014 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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[QUOTE=Cabaire] Listen to other people speaking with each other is one of the most difficult things in learning languages.
Yes, and unfortunately if you are a distance learner of Mandarin you don't have a lot of options to master the comprehension of tones, especially if TV and radio are your teachers. To comprehend tones, sometimes barriers have to be broken down, and some of them are imaginary, because tones are not uniquely difficult in and of themselves, and I am not a native speaker. I have found that after 4 years of interrupted studying that the tones have taken care of themselves, now that I have the vocab to usually know the context of the conversation. So now even when a native speaker makes a mistake I am not befuddled because the tones are secondary to the context. Yesterday I was watching a Taiwanese cooking show about a recipe for roast duck and a native speaker made the same tonal mistake twice. She said "shui"(T4) to say "water", which is incorrect. "Shui"(T4) means "to sleep"--"shui"(T3) means "water", but since it was a cooking show everyone knew she meant "water". Tones are just a quirky aspect of what is already a difficult language to begin with. It is just more formalized in Mandarin. In English the words "Hi" and "high", "to" and "too", sound essentially the same, but have subtle tonal differences which go unnoticed because those words have different meanings from each other and are said in different contexts. I am a native English speaker and I have in the last year gone from a comprehension level of A2 to B2 (based on the CEFR Levels posted on another subforum) only thru watching and listening to Mandarin media. It might be even a little better since I can often understand rapid or garbled speech on the radio. My speaking level is probably beyond a B2. I suggest to A2 level students a daily Mandarin talk show or two--not childrens' shows which are too frenetic and often have music in the background, but calm low-key talk shows and try watching them for a month and see if they have made progress. You can sweat the tones if you want to, but you don't have to. Mandarin is hard for IE speakers, not so much because of tones, but because there are a million little loose ends which need to be connected in the brain in order to fully understand it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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