Learning Mandarin: HelloChinese and written language

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Japanese is different. It is pretty easy to learn the main syllables. You can do it in under an hour with the app YuSpeak.

It is much easier to recognize Chinese symbols (Hanzi) than to memorize how to write them. Of course with frequent use it may be worth the effort, and simple ones are easy, and the rules for how to copy a character are straightforward. But even words like beautiful (piaoliang) have complicated symbols, and of course the “older” symbols before 1950s government simplification are more complex still.

22

I’ve been using this for stew months and still really like this app. It has a Premium Plus version which allows one to speak and get marked by some sort of AI method. This is really helpful to me now, but would not have been that helpful to me until I had worked through the vocabulary, which took me a few months.

My take on mandarin: easy grammar, very logical, vocabulary somewhat challenging, symbols more challenging, tones very difficult and seemingly little tolerance for imperfect pronunciation. You get the sense of the tones are wrong you are just talking gibberish.

23

I just recently started practising Chinese again, really focussing on tones this time because they were my downfall before. Going over even the most basic vocab to make sure I know what tone it’s supposed to be is frustrating, but at least I feel like I know what I’m aiming for a bit better. It’s helpful (and fun!) to say the same syllable over and over but with different tones, exaggerated even, so you can really get the pattern of sound into your head. I like using ‘bing’, because you sound like a mad robot.

When I talk to Chinese people I get the sense that if you try to use the tones but get the wrong one, they will often be able to work out what you mean. If you don’t use tones at all, it doesn’t even sound like Chinese to them, and they just assume you are speaking English.

24

If you get a few tones wrong or the person is eager to talk to you and has lots of interpolation skill (like one accustomed to teaching), there is leeway, as there has to be due to significant regional variation.

But if you get quite a few tones wrong, it quickly becomes a thing where it takes considerable effort or is impossible to (much more than English in my uninformed opinion) determine the phrase. Of course there are degrees of wrong.

25

(Native Mandarin speaker here)

Anecdotally, I don’t think the tones are that essential to holding everyday conversations, compared to just using the correct characters and grammar. As long as the sentence is long enough, the context usually provides more than enough clues — it’s similar to the way we naturally disambiguate homophones in English.

Many songs, after all, subtly change the character tones to better match the melody, even at the expense of meaning. For example, compare the tones in the Mandarin version of A Whole New World (from Aladdin) to the actual pronunciation of the first phrase, 带你看这世界 (dài nǐ kàn zhè shìjiè, or push the speaker icon to hear it). The musical version tones are quite different & imprecise, and if you stripped away the background melody, it would sound very strange, like a foreigner speaking it. But over the course of an entire phrase, it’s still easy to understand from context.

Context is key here… if you just said one or two random characters with no context and no tones, it would be very difficult to guess what they meant (unless it was something super common like “nǐ hǎo”). But as soon as the sentence gets to like 4-5+ characters, it’s quite easy to figure out what is meant.

I grew up in a school that had a mix of native Mandarin speakers and foreign speakers of various levels of proficiency. Their mastery of tones (or lack thereof) mainly marked them as foreigners (the way an accent would), but did not really hinder communications as much as you’d think.

Just anecdotal experience, but I saw a lot of this in the two decades I lived in a Mandarin-speaking country.

Edit: Here’s some examples

Spoken (with the correct tones)

vs

Sung (with musical melody)

In the original, it’s like dài nǐ kàn zhè shìjiè, whereas in the music it’s like dái ní kān zhe shìjié. The “dai ni” in particular are rising, as is the final character (jié), but still the meaning is clear.

26

Your experience is much more relevant than my impressions. But for a beginner learning Mandarin from an app - never ideal even if the app is very good, the tones are less likely to be corrected than in a designated school.

27

…usually.

28

Oh, for sure… I’d always advocate a real tutor over an app, too :slight_smile:

In fact I’m taking Mandarin lessons with a teacher right now to improve my business Chinese. Even after growing up with it and speaking it for two decades, she’s still finding a few things to correct about my tones. Though, to be fair, some of that is just due to regional variations in how different parts of China and Taiwan use subtly different tones for certain characters in certain phrases. Apparently in some parts of China, a character’s tone can change depending on the context it’s used, usually based on the immediately preceding character(s). The way she tells it, the central government has standardized the tones of a large body of characters, but not all, and still allows small regional variations in certain phrases and excludes those ambiguous phrases from standardized testing.

But… despite all that… all this means is that you shouldn’t let tones alone stop you from trying to speak Mandarin to someone! Sure, they’re meaningful and you should keep learning them, but as with any language, overall meaning is derived from a combination of grammar, context, maybe hand gestures too, etc. It’s OK to learn it gradually, that’s all :slight_smile:

29

Oh, interesting!

As a child, I learned the similar tongue-twister “forty-four dead stone lions”:

Listen to it: https://fightingignorance.org/c52b6cb5-7f6c-4c28-96d0-38fde6f15d42-forty-four-dead-stone-lions.m4a

四十四只死石狮子, or sì-shí-sì zhǐ sǐ shí shīzǐ

That poem must be its original inspiration. I never knew!

30

I have heard of this lion poem; it actually illustrates something about the evolution of Chinese pronunciation, for example in Middle Chinese it starts off something like “dzyek syit syi dzriX sye dzyijH srij…” [X = rising tone, H = departing tone]

There used to be “entering tone”, “departing tone”, “rising tone”, and “level tone” (which all derive from even older pronuncuiation). Which is important to understand classical poetry, but equally crucially it is important to note that the tones in modern Mandarin are somewhat different due to even more loss of final consonants.

31

HelloChinese is a paid app. The trial only includes the basic flavour (the first 200 words or so). There are premium and premium plus versions; the latter is pretty expensive at $C199 per year.

I’ve used it daily for eight months. It’s very good; dramatically better than books or other apps I’ve used. I would guess I know 2000 words. The app is good at gradually introducing useful contemporary words (e-mail, smartphone, practical travelling, business and relationship words) and reinforcing the grammar (easy in Mandarin, but not done in every book or app) and testing weak spots.

It gives one a flavour for the rules of how to write characters but does not (thankfully) emphasize this. I have learned HSK4 vocabulary, but stopped trying to learn symbols after HSK2 to concentrate on speaking.

The app uses AI evaluate speaking, and tones are the hardest part of learning Mandarin. But this is only available in pricy premium plus which I bought after offered a 40% discount. It evaluates you and seems quite harsh, giving you a score out of 5 and marking every spoken syllable. You can throw it off - if you sing a random English song the scores are surprisingly high.

But after using the spoken dialogues, Chinese people who speak Mandarin can now mostly understand what I am saying.. So it does seem to be helping. It includes something like 1000 short videos of daily interactions with specialized vocabulary. And another 1000 stories (Some with jokes) written in English, Chinese or both characters. I think Premium plus is the way to go, but only after using the more basic options for six months or so.