So, I’ve been studying Mandarin for several months now, and I’ve become decent, but I just can’t get past dealing with the tones. I will talk to a native, and I know I’m pronouncing the sound perfectly, but my tones are off or just not there, and they are completely confused.
I understand the rationale behind it making it easier for them to differentiate between words that sound the same, but is that really necessary? English has several words that sound the same, and we use context to determine which word people are using. I can’t recall ever talking to someone and wondering if they said “write”, or “rite”, or one of the various meanings for “right”. But if I ask a question in Mandarin, and don’t use the tone for “ma” correctly, they are apparently wondering why I randomly decided to say “horse” at the end of some sentence.
I do admit, it sounds great to hear them talk, like listening to music, it just seems to make it needlessly complicated, at least for a foreigner. Maybe they like that part. Anyone here agree that the tones make it harder than it should be?
Context does count for a lot. Vietnamese (which has six tones so consider yourself lucky) is often written on chat boards, SMS, etc. without diacritics. That takes away all the tonal information, and even some pronunciation info, but it’s still mostly understandable. However, it’s a bit like writing English without vowels. Usually you can tell what it means especially if you’re a native speaker, but there will be times when there is real ambiguity.
Tl;dr Tones are part of the language. Keep practicing.
There are too many homophones in Chinese to make doing away with tones practical. The tone is an integral part of the word, not an auxiliary artifact. I agree though that getting over the tonal hurdle is the most difficult thing for non-Chinese speakers to come to grips with. It took me a few months but I eventually got it (and this when I was studying Chinese in China). I still have difficulty hearing tones, and I sometimes have to guess at the tone when I’m speaking. One thing that helped me as I got better was learning tones in a phrase rather than word by word. This helped me develop a more fluent sounding sing-song speech pattern. Good luck.
My experience with seeing Tiếng Việt (Tieeng’ Vieet.) written on chat boards and non-Vietnamese equipped phones is that there’s a workaround. The tones are added at the end of the syllable, diacritics are indicated by repeating the consonant (đ is typed dd), vowel (â is typed aa), etc. That was quite some time ago, though, and these days, I see people using the actual Vietnamese writing system, complete with diacritics and tones.
As always, others may not have had the same experience I’ve had. I’m just adding a data point to the discussion.
I’ve heard it said that when Mandarin speakers whisper, they completely disregard tone data but are still understood. If so, then I must agree with the OP that they are superfluous.
If, on the other hand, they change the shape of their vowels or change how loud they whisper to change the apparent pitch of a whisper, then it probably still is phonemic and thus important.
And, of course, if they just rarely fully whisper because it would make it hard to understand them, that would count as phonemic, too.
I’ve been here more than four years, and I still can’t get a pijiou in a bar, where it should be fairly obvious what a customer wants. Luckily I usually go to Western restaurants that have nominally English speaking staff, but it still irks me that I usually fail the most important thing to know in any language.
At work I have much better luck. I know my tones are screwed up, but the people – who are younger and well-educated – seem to be able to understand me when I practice.
(There may be something wrong with me. For some reason on airplanes I’m constantly served white wine instead of red wine, and this is on US airlines with native speakers. Happened again to me yesterday.)
I’m almost fluent in Thai but find it very hard to hear or remember tones. The part of the brain that maps sounds to phonemes develops well only at a very young age.
I once thought “Noi” was an extremely common nickname. It was only relatively recently that I finally learned that, instead, “Noi” and “Noi” are two common nicknames with different tones. Worst of all for me are the words that translate “near” and far." :eek: I still have trouble hearing the difference between these antonyms, and sometimes guess the meaning from context! (Both words, “klai” and “klai”, have short-duration vowels. It’s much easier to hear the tone with long-duration vowels.)
ETA: Type “near far” into Google translate; Click Listen to the Thai and tell me what you think.
The words for sell and buy in Mandarin are only a tone apart too. It can be confusing. I agree that there is a window in language acquisition that can make it really difficult to pick out tones if not learned at an early age. I wonder if children who learn one tonal language at birth learn other tonal languages more easily than non-tonal speakers.
If I asked you for a hat dag, you’d probably have to take a few seconds to wonder what the hell I am asking for. You might conclude that I actually want a hot dog, and have horrible pronunciation.
That’s sort of what tones are like. Once you grasp them, you’ll understand why screwing them up makes things weird.
I think the difficulty of tones is overrated. My tones are terrible, and once I realized that my town transposes two of the tones, I just plain gave up. But I rarely had trouble being understood. I think it’s a mix of naturally picking it up, and people being good at understanding context.
I also think it’s not as foreign a concept as we think. Think about the difference between “object” (as in, a thing) and object (as in to disagree.) Or between “present” (here) and “present” (to display). It’s not that different.
When I travel to Thailand with Chinese colleagues, the Chinese can very easily mimic what the Thais are saying in such a manner that, with my eyes closed, I can’t tell which is the native speaker.
With “object” and “object” not only is the tonal difference large, but the vowel changes. Say “ub-ject” stressing the first syllable and it sounds (to me) like it could be the verb. Say “awb-ject” stressing the second syllable and it sounds like it could be the noun.
English does have an antonym pair I often have great trouble distinguishing, though the difficulty has little to do with tone: “can” and “can’t.”
It works the other way too… as someone who learned Mandarin before English, I had to spend some time after moving to the US deliberately de-toning my English so words wouldn’t have strange emphases on seemingly random syllables. Fortunately in English this doesn’t change the meaning of words, but it certainly contributed to an “accent”.
But different languages use different features to differentiate words, and tones is just one of the options. You know how we separate “d” and “t”, or “r” and “l” (like “row” vs “low”). Some languages have many different "t"s depending on which part of the tongue you produce it with, while others have trouble differentiating between “r” and “l” sounds.
The brain is a pattern-filtering machine, and you train it while young to differentiate certain patterns and ignore others as noise. It doesn’t particularly matter what those specific patterns are, and every culture has different ones.
I have the impression for what it’s worth – from my one visit to China, a three-week holiday – that many Chinese are talented mimics. We were travelling in fairly off-the-beaten track areas of northern China, where it certainly seemed that very few people knew any English; however, my companion and I quite often heard neighbours of ours on public transport etc., reproducing snatches of our conversations in English – closely copying, as regards accent / intonation / pronunciation. One might figure that being a native tonal-language speaker, tends to promote mimicking skills vis-a-vis a big range of languages.
Learn to use the tones. My Taiwanese wife tells me that when she hears a foreigner speaking Mandarin not using tones, its sounds awful. She is my wife so I am getting the straight truth unlike most Chinese who will tell you that your Mandarin is “good” (even when your not using tones makes your Mandarin sound awful).
Did you hear Zuckerberg speak Mandarin to the Chinese President? I do give the guy credit for trying, but he really should take the time to learn the tones.
Well, I think basically all of Sichuan sounds awful.
Okay, not really. I like Sichuanhua. But the town that I lived in transposes tones, shifts a whole line of consonants, drops entire letters, and uses a range of local vocabulary. I learned Mandarin for months, and then had to takes months of extra tutoring to learn the language we actually spoke. The next town over adds an extra tone. I have no idea how that even works, but they’ve got five tones. Or, you can just walk an hour north to the next town, where they apparently speak with such a unique accent that people find them incomprehensible.
So my Mandarin isn’t great, but the purists have a pretty long row to hoe.