In the show, WTO sisters(?), the American woman from Boston speaks wonderful Chinese with good tonal control and very elegant usage sometimes. The British lady is very fluent, probably more fluent than everyone else, but her tones are all over the place. I often have to read the subtitles in order to understand her fully. So, I guess tones do matter.
Yes. There are Taiwan TV shows in LA.
I find that I do worse with being super-grammatical because I over-speak. Mainly, I say the parts that Mandarin-speakers expect to be elliptical, but don’t say the parts that are elliptical in my native language.
Imagine having a conversation with someone who said, “During the time when I was walking around the malls that are in Warner Village, I saw a man who was standing like he were a statue.”
I had this same problem when I learned Spanish so many years ago. I make my students see these ellipses when I teach them syntax trees. It’s pretty important to show people what to ignore for a given language.
If chinese is unstructured, does that mean I can put measure words after the object? ie can I say the following in a conversation and still be understood?
我要買兩筆枝
or
要買我兩筆枝？
[/quote]
老闆！筆兩隻。謝謝。
No!! The tones are still there, but sometimes contracted. There is physical evidence (spectrogram) behind this. Read “The Sounds of Chinese” if you want to understand. It’s a very simple book and a very good starting place. Anyways, there is so much nonsense-pseudo linguistics in this thread that I’m getting nervous (It’s been a long day and for some reason I can’t sleep). I’ll just say that there being different tones in different Mandarin dialects that are still mutually comprehensible has nothing to do with tones not being important and everything to do with systematicity – most the Mandarin dialects share tonal categories, so in one dialect the “first tonal category” (陰平) may be high and falling and in another dialect it is high and level. This correspondence exists for all the words in the first tone category. Native speakers catch on to this correspondence subconsciously. This is proven. There are some Mandarin dialects – for example 晉語 or 杭州 (Not A Wu Dialect) – that preserve a tonal category that correlates with the distribution of stop endings (入聲). 入聲 in most the Mandarin dialects merged into other categories (in a fairly messy way), so one-to-one tonal correspondences don’t exist between these two groups. I don’t know how 晉語 would be perceived by a Taiwanese person. Mistakes made by foreigners are not consistent in a lot of ways, thus the comprehension problem. There was also another comment about Mandarin linguists thinking that Mandarin is becoming SOV. Can you provide a source? And regarding the no morphology thing, that is how I separate general linguists from experts on the Chinese languages – a general linguist will say Mandarin doesn’t have morphology; a Chinese language linguist will write books on Mandarin morphology There is a nice, new one in the NCCU library right now that’s in English! Since I was the only one that would check those books out, I’m sure it’s sitting there waiting for you to educate yourself…Everything Ironlady has said is accurate to my eyes. Everyone should listen to that observant native speaker – he is smart…I need to sleep now…
I’m very aware that the tones survive but are contracted; my tones are almost perfect. IIRC, I was replying to someone else who said s/he had no idea what the tones are and just spoke randomly but was still understood a good chunk of the time (80%?).
I have been in a room of native speakers (we were all evaluating recorded non-native speaker speech samples in Mandarin) who said absolutely no tones at all was no problem for them to understand the speaker. The speaker did have perfect syntax and correct usage, however. (The non-native speaker evaluators wanted to fail the guy.)
What did the speaker say?
Sorry. I was tired when I wrote that and didn’t finish reading that question of yours I quoted…Anyways, if you’re interested in tone contraction I may be able to dig up an interesting paper. In a nutshell, many scholars think the tones are changing for ease of pronunciation (The Sounds of Chinese describes it that way) – like a 2nd tone becoming a first tone when the tone before it is a first tone. But through spectrogram analysis, a Taiwanese graduate student in England (can’t remember her name/school, but it’s that school that has a phonetics department) showed that the underlying tonal target of a contracted tone is trying to be met; there just isn’t enough time for it to be fully articulated. This is a totally different way of thinking about contraction. I’ll do some digging around; I attended her presentation about a year ago and actually never read the paper. I’d like to read it now. I’ll post the source if I can find it.
Native Chinese speakers can definitely put their brains into “toneless Mandarin mode” when they want to. I think if tones in Mandarin were essential to being understood, then nobody would be able to understand songs sung in Mandarin. After all, you can’t change a tone contour without detuning a sung note.
Sorry. I was tired when I wrote that and didn’t finish reading that question of yours I quoted…Anyways, if you’re interested in tone contraction I may be able to dig up an interesting paper. In a nutshell, many scholars think the tones are changing for ease of pronunciation (The Sounds of Chinese describes it that way) – like a 2nd tone becoming a first tone when the tone before it is a first tone. But through spectrogram analysis, a Taiwanese graduate student in England (can’t remember her name/school, but it’s that school that has a phonetics department) and now a professor her in Taiwan showed that the underlying tonal target of a contracted tone is trying to be met; there just isn’t enough time for it to be fully articulated. This is a totally different way of thinking about contraction. I’ll do some digging around; I attended her presentation about a year ago and actually never read the paper. I’d like to read it now. I’ll post the source if I can find it.[/quote]
Found the papers :
ucl.academia.edu/CCheng/Papers/9 … n_Mandarin
ucl.academia.edu/CCheng/Papers/9 … roximation
And regarding Chinese songs, it’s irrelevant; songs are at a slow, syllable-by-syllable pace, so there is a lot of processing time. It would be, frankly, stupid to think there is 100% comprehension of musical language, as well…
Like it or not, tones are an essential part of the language – they are part of the words’s phonetic shape. Ironlady provided some interesting examples earlier.
[quote="archylgp"And regarding Chinese songs, it’s irrelevant; songs are at a slow, syllable-by-syllable pace, so there is a lot of processing time. It would be, frankly, stupid to think there is 100% comprehension of musical language, as well…
[/quote]
Yes, how silly of me. All songs are indeed slow. And, as everyone knows, words sung are much easier to understand than words spoken, just like in English.
[quote=“monkey”]
Yes, how silly of me. All songs are indeed slow. And, as everyone knows, words sung are much easier to understand than words spoken, just like in English.[/quote]
Listen to most Mandarin music. It is sung out syllable by syllable. Faster music isn’t of course, but assuming perfect comprehension is silly; use English as an example, I have no idea what is sung in a lot of popular songs these days and I’m sure I’m not the only one…(There isn’t a linguists out there who will make assumptions on phonological systems of a spoken language based on musical language – they are not the same.)
All of the Taiwanese I’ve posed that question to say that they don’t completely understand song lyrics without reading them first. And I’m not talking about only singers like Jay Chou. This despite how repetitive and unoriginal the vast majority of Taiwanese pop music is.
Do I have slow friends? :eh:
[quote=“odysseyandoracle”]All of the Taiwanese I’ve posed that question to say that they don’t completely understand song lyrics without reading them first. And I’m not talking about only singers like Jay Chou. This despite how repetitive and unoriginal the vast majority of Taiwanese pop music is.
Do I have slow friends? :eh:[/quote]
I just asked my wife the same question and she said the same thing.
[quote=“archylgp”][quote=“odysseyandoracle”]All of the Taiwanese I’ve posed that question to say that they don’t completely understand song lyrics without reading them first. And I’m not talking about only singers like Jay Chou. This despite how repetitive and unoriginal the vast majority of Taiwanese pop music is.
Do I have slow friends? :eh:[/quote]
I just asked my wife the same question and she said the same thing.[/quote]
My wife just confirmed it as well.
If chinese is unstructured, does that mean I can put measure words after the object? ie can I say the following in a conversation and still be understood?
我要買兩筆枝
or
要買我兩筆枝？
[/quote]
老闆！筆兩隻。謝謝。[/quote]
Your example is irrelevant in regards to the quoted post – the topic-comment structure is unrelated to the grammaticality of 要買我兩筆枝？. 
Sure you can.
車輛很多。
But that doesn’t mean Chinese is unstructured, merely that whomever thinks this is evidence of non-structuredness doesn’t know that this particular structure is considered grammatical.
[quote=“ironlady”]Sure you can.
車輛很多。
But that doesn’t mean Chinese is unstructured, merely that whomever thinks this is evidence of non-structuredness doesn’t know that this particular structure is considered grammatical.[/quote]
I think you misunderstood me. These T-C sentences are irrelevant in terms of the grammaticality of #-MW-N sentences. I didn’t say that they are ungrammatical.(Would use a topic-comment sentence to teach your students how to say 一輛車?)
There doesn’t necessarily need to be a measure word in a TC sentence, so why would I bother to relate those to “teaching” (though I do not “teach” measure words) measure words?
You only get into these blind corners when you insist on teaching grammar using “patterns”. The majority of students really don’t give a toss about analyzing grammar. The issue is that the majority of people who become language teachers these days are those who were taught analytically and were good at it – which is why they became teachers. They want to share what they find interesting, which is grammar. The problem is that they aren’t tuned into the fact that 99% of students just want to get fluent and learn to read efficiently.
Measure words are very simply acquired. Just use the damn things in meaningful contexts. Everything will be “ge” in another 100 years anyway. 
[quote=“ironlady”]There doesn’t necessarily need to be a measure word in a TC sentence, so why would I bother to relate those to “teaching” (though I do not “teach” measure words) measure words?
You only get into these blind corners when you insist on teaching grammar using “patterns”. The majority of students really don’t give a toss about analyzing grammar. The issue is that the majority of people who become language teachers these days are those who were taught analytically and were good at it – which is why they became teachers. They want to share what they find interesting, which is grammar. The problem is that they aren’t tuned into the fact that 99% of students just want to get fluent and learn to read efficiently.
Measure words are very simply acquired. Just use the damn things in meaningful contexts. Everything will be “ge” in another 100 years anyway. [/quote]
Yes – I agree with everything you said. I think your approach is great as long as students know what’s going on. See my comment above.