Are tones important? (OT from useful words thread)

[color=#008040]Mod note: this has been split off from the thread on special useful Chinese words. Posts providing useful words were left in place intact there. – DB[/color]

[quote=“Dragonbones”]Sorry to nitpick, but getting the pronunciation right (and for that purpose, the Romanization) is pretty important IMO. So that should be
誇張 kua1zhang1, not kau, and adding tone numerals or marks is helpful.
And 亂 luan4

Also, if you add some examples of how to use these it will be much more helpful to others than just tossing the terms out there.[/quote]

point taken. I’m not gonna add the tones becase
A. I don’t know what they are
B. I don’t study them
C. I don’t think they’re very useful

Now not to nitpick but do you have any words to add or just are you just nitpicking? I’m sure lots of people could benefit from your vast knowledge.

haha thanks.

The tones may or may not be vital, but I’ve never bothered. I just copy what I hear people say and hope for the best.

The learning burden for tones seems immense especially if you learn them Suprasegmentally. I’ve known other learners (who may have much better pron than me) who come up with weird hand signals when they talk, or they do each tone slowly and carefully meaning that their speech is really weird sounding.

I’m not Chinese, I’m never gonna have perfect pron, but I did actually notice I was pronouncing kua zhang right even though I had no idea what the tones are. -Maybe I’m just blessed with a good ear?

Good luck with that. :unamused:

As a foreigner who speaks really bad Chinese. I’m going to go out and say that tones are really important and the go and say that they aren’t. Sort of like arguing like a Chinese person. :wink:

Vital:
Because then you sound correct and people can understand wtf you are saying. You can grunt your way through Taiwanese if you can get the tones right. This is important for people you converse with regularly with, otherwise it sounds like you have a speech impediment to them. I also find that with bad tones and in the presence of a Taiwanese person they will tend not to talk to you and just talk to your friend despite you saying the same thing.

Not vital:
When I have to use my bad Chinese and often do use it to purchase things, I immediately start rattling off in standard Chinese conversational patterns. Click, whirl; they immediately understand what I say and do what I want till it goes beyond my Chinese ability then tones come back into play. I find that if I start out in standard Chinese patterns of communication they tend to de-register my foreignness and become helpful since I am in their shop to buy stuff. Then you get into the ugly part with some Taiwanese that will not understand what you say no matter what because you aren;t Asian. This isn’t all that common but it happens even to really good speakers.

All in all, I’d say tones are important, but I can’t be farked with it. YMMV :wink:

Tones are very important~!

I just think learning then 1 by 1 per word is too large a learning burden and probably not worth it. Maybe someone has a link to a paper showing that’s false? Anyway, when I teach kids English I don’t get them doing hand gestures and what not to remember which syllable is stressed…etc…

but that’s enough thread hijacking, let’s get back on topic, shall we?

[quote=“occhimarroni”]

  1. 很屌 hen3diao3 very cool 這家夜店很屌 zhe4jia1ye4dian4hen3diao3 This club is very cool!
  2. 很瞎 hen3xia1 “fucked up” a bit like kua1zhang1 used to described an unexpected outcome in a negative sense, 很扯 hen3che3 is pretty much the same.
  3. 黏 nian2 “clingy” 那個女生很黏 na4ge nv3sheng1 hen3 nian2. That girl is very clingy.
  4. 屁啦, 放屁 pi4la1 fang4pi4 "bullshit" it also means fart but not in this context. If you don t agree with what someone says you can interject by saying pi4la1 but it’s not too polite.
  5. 正, 辣 Zheng4,la4 “hot” “attractive” 她是正妹/辣妹 ta1shi4zheng4mei4/la4mei4 She’s a hot chick. Also 把妹 ba3mei1 " to pickup chicks" notice the mei changes to 1st tone in this phrase.

I’m not sure if that’s what you’re asking for but there’s plenty more where that came from.[/quote]

Thanks for these they’re great. :notworthy:

I think you misunderstood me as you wrote “To the OP, for god sakes just learn the basics of tones. Foreigners have a bad reputation precisely because many feel they can just speak fast and not worry about tones. That’s like telling people not to worry about the difference between “th” and “tr” in English.”

First, I didn’t say I’m not learning the tones, I said I’m not making any effort to purposefully learn the tones. There is a difference.

Second. I don’t think “giving foreigners a bad name” is any of my concern. Do you judge people back home on the basis of what a couple of folks do? Isn’t that called prejudice?

third, there is quite a large body of lit telling people (mostly jennifer jenkins) not to worry about pronouncing “th” sounds in English.

At kinda inking leads to is kinda sentence.

do you think Irish and west Indians talk like that then?

Ugh…

Reminds me of a book I saw here in Taiwan about “tips” for Taiwanese people on pronouncing English like a native speaker. It was filled with awful advice like “Don’t pronounce final consonants” and other garbage that essentially would make people’s accents more unintelligible. :loco:

[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”][quote=“yamato”]
I’m not Chinese, I’m never gonna have perfect pron, …[/quote]

You’re right, if you seriously think like this you never will. At least 1.2 Billion People have no problems pronouncing Chinese, what makes you so special you’re too dumb to ever learn?

Attitude is half the battle with language learning.[/quote]

Errrr… when a person thinks of tones as “optional”, such an assertion is probably correct! :ponder:

[quote=“nemesis”][quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”][quote=“yamato”]
I’m not Chinese, I’m never gonna have perfect pron, …[/quote]

You’re right, if you seriously think like this you never will. At least 1.2 Billion People have no problems pronouncing Chinese, what makes you so special you’re too dumb to ever learn?

Attitude is half the battle with language learning.[/quote]

Errrr… when a person thinks of tones as “optional”, such an assertion is probably correct! :ponder:[/quote]

all second language research indicates that NNS have about a 5% chance of getting perfect pron. That’s all, no more. It’s no really a question of attitude. Do you think all those people back in your home country who don’t speak English with a perfect accent are jsut “not trying hard enogh” and “have the wrong attitude”. Of course, if you have some research I haveb’t seen yet, I’ll be happy to take a look -however I Rudeness removed by moderator.
secondly, I have said repeatedly on this thread, I don’t think tones are optional. I think learning them purposefully is optional. Rudeness removed by moderator.
My language learning attitude is fine. I learned Japanese without doing silly hand gestures or learning the individual pron of each word one by one (huge waste of time) and have pretty good pron. I’ll try the same thing with Chinese -sorry if it bothers you all so much, why not try getting on with your own lives and not worrying about what other peole do?

The learner needs to hear these phrases in action, then he will imitate. He won’t learn from reading your (added on my great pinyin without my authorisation:)) tones from a computer!

You’re exactly right! He won’t learn these phrases from a computer if he uses your strategy of learning. If you spend your time trying only to imitate others instead of just learning some basic rules that will help you do it on your own, then you won’t be able to read it off a computer. Now you can post a word I have never seen before and give me the tone and the pronunciation, and lo and behold, I can pronounce it correctly! Imagine that!

To the OP:

You shouldn’t be so condescending to people who are trying to help you. In the long run, you will be adding more time and effort to your learning since you will only be able to imitate what you have heard before and be serioulsy limited when it comes to making your own sentences and learning/reading new vocabulary. A little effort in the beginning goes a long way…

It doesn’t bother me if you don’t want to learn tones purposefully. That is your choice. But if someone is going to claim that you can save time by not learning the tones, then I will have to disagree. It will actually save you time.

Yamato,

I was absolutely furious with you when I read your terribly assuming, condescending post, but then I read the following:

[quote=“occhimarroni”]
You shouldn’t be so condescending to people who are trying to help you. In the long run, you will be adding more time and effort to your learning since you will only be able to imitate what you have heard before and be serioulsy limited when it comes to making your own sentences and learning/reading new vocabulary. A little effort in the beginning goes a long way…[/quote]

and decided that if that doesn’t get through to you, nothing will.

At no point did I say learning by imitation is bad. In fact, I’m a huge advocate of it. Mostly because I speak three languages fluently and, over the phone, people generally can’t tell I’m not a native speaker. And I’m ~70% self-taught and the rest I learnt by imitation. We all learnt our native tongues by imitation, too, and I daresay most of us speak those very well, don’t we?

I’m saying that the ‘I’m not a native speaker and therefore I’ll never be able to sound like a native speaker’ attitude is self-defeating and quite annoying to those of us who actually DO learn to sound like a native speaker. It’s right up there with the ‘Oh, you’re not Asian, so you’ll never understand this concept’ attitude.

Occhi’s method of learning tones is what I found most useful too :smiley: I remember learning how to say the 3rd-2th combo from listening to the Beitou MRT announcement…

Still going on about tones…take your party somewhere else :unamused:

Yamato, from the very start you came off as very arrogant when someone was merely trying to show the accepted format for writing Chinese pronunciation on a learning Chinese thread. You are not the only one who may interested in learning useful vocabulary so I would urge that this format still be adhered for those who do want to learn the compete and 100% correct way to pronounce things. I have already posted plenty of phrases on here so in the future I think I can speak for everyone when I say a simple thank you would suffice.

[quote=“occhimarroni”]I think I can speak for everyone.[/quote]Not for me, thanks.

I see you’re trying to help people by posting tones, but there’s no need to go into a big lecture about it or resort to personal attacks. It could make people a bit hesitant about posting anything here in case they get jumped on.

(By the way, I do have some thoughts about learning tones if you want to start a thread for that purpose.)

[quote=“Joesox”](By the way, I do have some thoughts about learning tones if you want to start a thread for that purpose.)[/quote]Thanks, mods.

Well, for myself, I do do everything I can to learn the correct tones of words. I do this because I’m lucky enough to have some ability with tones, and so the effort pays off.

But I wonder whether the effort really is worth it for everyone. The idea of learning tones is to be able to communicate well in natural speech, right? Not just painfully recalling tones and then producing words one at a time. So we’re talking about acquisition; some kind of a gut feeling that you develop for which tone goes with which word. That can, to some extent, be supplemented by “conscious” knowledge, but cannot effectively be replaced by it.

The thing is, as Yamato seems to know too, that most adult learners are really not that capable of learning the meaningful sounds of a foreign language. They have to get by with some kind of half-way thing. That’s not their “fault”, but just the way it works for most people. (Of the other bits of language, grammar’s in the middle with some easier things and some harder things to acquire; vocab is generally the easiest and quickest.)

So is it really worth it for most people to put a great deal of effort into learning the tones of Mandarin? I’m really not sure. Certainly, there are tips and tricks which may help a bit for some people: color-coding and hand gestures among them. I don’t think it’s “one way fits all”. But I still don’t know whether it’s worth it overall.

More opinions please…

Everything goes into one of only four categories. Rocket science it is not.

My problem is that ‘knowing tones’ doesn’t mean I can nicely and accurately produce long sentences, especially if I’m not really focusing. People still seem to understand from context.

yada yada yada.

The problem is the amount of time spent learning tones with a1 a2 a3 a4 and a neutral is counterproductive especially when you are tone deaf. Patterns are where I have had most success but I know I will never be fluent - I can have meaningful conversations, and do and many of my tones are close :blush: