Comments on: What Americans Need to Know About Chinese “Tones”

By: getluky

getluky — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:56:28 +0000

Chris, I respect your opinion and thank you for your comment, but I believe you just are basically conceding my point. Fast speech and informal speech is the norm for spoken Chinese, not the slow, measured pace of television newscasters or government speeches. I’m definitely someone who has trouble with pitch distinctions, and I don’t think I’m alone among Americans. It doesn’t mean I’m tone-deaf, it just means that the academic decision to teach ONLY tones has left a lot of people like me without much to go on. My whole point is that there is an extremely helpful way to teach listening comprehension which is either being ignored or just remains unknown by the academic establishment, and I’d have been much better off if someone just mentioned it to me from the beginning.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:46:26 +0000

i feel you're missing something in your new understanding of tones. commenter Tony and Wikipedia are right: Mandarin syllables are distinguished by clear differences in pitch (with pitch variations even more profound in Cantonese!). while it's true that fast speech or informal speech often smooths out hills and valleys somewhat, as a musician & Mandarin student the tones really stand out to me.

respectfully, it sounds like you may be slightly tone-deaf. reading your blog article, your discovery that you should concentrate on emphasis more than pitches makes me think you've discovered a cue you can use to infer the pitch of spoken Mandarin.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:01:28 +0000

Nice article (though I’m English and still benefited despite not being an American as your title part advises I should be)

By: getluky

getluky — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:41:03 +0000

Thanks for the comments, everyone. @Tony, doing an actual tonal analysis is interesting, but I am concerned that you separated and enunciated the tones very strongly as a test, rather than analyzing common colloquial speech, which tends to emphasize tones less and other aspects more. I don’t mean to say that there are no tone variations, but rather, that there is more to the Chinese tones than just pitch. This is in direct opposition to how Chinese is taught to Americans.

@Wendy: yes, Greg is just kidding. He’s a friend that just stops by to leave snarky comments. I think that the academic methods do need to develop students’ instincts better by incorporating repetition of complex phrases without the emphasis being just on pitch.

By: wendy

wendy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:29:25 +0000

I’d also like to add that I completely agree with your hope to abandon the concept of pitches. As someone who considers both English and Chinese (Mandarin and Shanghainese) to be my native tongues, I grew up hearing Chinese, but never took any formal or academic classes. As a result, the Chinese “tones” are very second-nature to me. However, if you were to utter a word and ask me to assign it with a tone, I’d be clueless. I hope there will evolve a Chinese speech-training method that builds cognitive INSTINCT, which is what I’ve always relied on.

By: wendy

wendy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:16:51 +0000

@Greg Knauss I hope you're joking.

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:03:24 +0000

getluky, I think most of us are not quite clear and thus find it hard to differentiate the definitions of tone, ptich, notes, octaves, frequencies in what we hear. So, I used a program called TS-AudioToMIDI to test the four tones by saying the four tones ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4 into the application through a microphone (used monosensor instead of polysensor mode). As I pronounced these four tones of chinese characters, I noticed that these tones as shown on the graphical keyboard have different notes. Different notes mean in the music context different frequencies and thus different pitches; and of course they also have different intensities, stress, or emphases as the way you liked to put it. So, the four tones are different in notes, pitches as well as emphases, intensity, loudness and stress. I certainly do not agree that they all have the same note with only changes in the emphases or stress.

I have put some effort to understand what “tone” (using the four chinese tone as reference) does an english sylable has; and I discover that it has only two tones or notes: the 3rd and 4th tone. Try these two words for yourself: “Begin” and “Enter”. “Begin” has two sylables, the 1st sylable “Be” has a 3rd tone and the 2nd sylable “gin” has the 4th tone. And the word “Enter” also has two sylables but with 4th tone follow by 3rd tone. If you reverse the tones of the two sylables of each word, you will notice that they sound funny!

By: getluky

getluky — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:56:35 +0000

@Chinesetomorrow:

Yes, I know Pinyin, as it's the system that was taught to me. Pinyin is a reasonable Romanization of Chinese pronunciation, but I am saying that the way the pronunciation is taught in the Pinyin-based schools is not enough to teach English speakers how to speak naturally. The article I linked to on Wikipedia is actually the article for Pinyin, and it tries to explain tones as pitch variations, the same way it is taught here. If you read my post carefully, this is what I am objecting against.

By: Chinesetomorrow

Chinesetomorrow — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 07:15:56 +0000

Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using the alphabet. There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted and widely used. Once you learn Chinese Pinyin you will know how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary. Pinyin is also the most common way to input Chinese characters into a computer. Although Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet, many letters are not expressed with the same sounds that English uses.

By: Greg Knauss

Greg Knauss — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 05:19:20 +0000

Wouldn't it just be easier to teach everyone on China English?

And by "easier," I mean "easier for me." As usual.