Robicon just try to get used to remembering the tones as a way to distinguish between words with identical phonetics. Really exagerate the tones when you are practicing, do the gestures with your hands and say the tone number. Get people who teach you to do the same thing. Then, when you speak to someone, forget about the tones but try to sound “Chinese”. Anyway these are the tricks I’ve been using lately and they seem to be working pretty well for me at least.
People living in the southern US have a reputation for speaking slower than their northern couternparts. Yet, they are all speaking English. It could also just be the way that people talk in a particular region.
Rubi Wrote:
You are joking aren’t you? Where do you live? I am amazed sometimes at the speed at which some Chinese speak, and even read. I would llike to meet some Chinese who spoke a little slower, then maybe I could understand a little more of what’s going on around me.
Rubi Wrote:
You mean it should be more like English; sheep, sheet, sleep, sleet, slip, slit, ship, etc.
Remember the different syllables of words becomes easier (I believe) as you can remember more characters and can associate the characters to the words. Works for me anyway (when I can remember the characters that is!!!)
[quote=“Rubicon Bojador”]
It’s more than that. Words in English are more easily distinguishable from other English words than Chinese words are from other Chinese words, because of greater phonetic variety. Take a random English word - “beauty” - and imagine how confusing it would be if there were several dozen other English words extremely similar sounding, such as “beaufy” and “beausy” and “beauta” and “beauchy” etc.[/quote]
This really is just because we don’t use tones. Tones are phonemic in Chinese. There is one phoneme difference between the English words ‘dad’ and ‘tad,’ just as there is between the Chinese words ‘ma1’ and ‘ma3.’ Someone who is a native speaker of a language that does not distinguish between ‘d’ and ‘t’ would say, “The two sound exactly the same! How can English people tell them apart?” But they sound completely different to us. Japanese speakers have a hard time with English vowels, because they only have 5. They can’t hear the others used in English, but again, the difference is obvious to us.
To take your example: ‘beauty’ and ‘beaufy’: they seem similar to us; but to a Chinese, the tone would also be different; therefore it becomes more like ‘beauty’ and ‘beefy’ - two phonemic differences.
[quote=“RB”]
Tones are cumbersome. I’ve noticed that Chinese speak more slowly in their native language than most other language speakers, in say Spanish (Speedy Gonzalez!) or English. [/quote]
I’ve noticed this too. A professor I knew in China said that Chinese is spoken at the average rate of 80 words a minute. This is very slow - fast English can be up to 200 words a minute; even slow English is 120.
Look on the bright side here - it makes it easier for foreigners.
I think your professor may have been comparing apples and oranges.
Chinese is typically spoken at speeds between 150 and 200 words per minute. English, on the other hand, is spoken more slowly for the most part (except for New Yorkers in a hurry 
).
There are languages that are syllable-timed and languages that are stress-timed (can’t remember specific examples at the moment). The type of language also affects how “fast” it sounds to you, as does your degree of proficiency in the language.
It’s kind of obvious if you think about it – most English words are multisyllabic, while many Chinese words are monosyllabic or, at most, have two syllables. Of course you have to work in the variables for “organization” too, which means that English speakers (who mostly subscribe to linear logic) sometimes appear to have more of an idea of what they want to say, for which reason there is less verbal filler or pausing going on. Chinese speakers, who generally subscribe to “spiral logic”, sometimes use more repetition or verbal filler, so that even though the actual number of words per minute might be higher, the number of “meaningful units” per minute could be lower. In my experience, the average Taiwanese political speaker is much less dense in terms of speech rate than the average Mainland political speaker, but of course I’m going to be more comfortable with the Taiwanese accent in Mandarin so that would color my perceptions.
Speech rate is only one of the things that affects perception, though; there is also the ease with which the speech can be disambiguated (meaning, basically, how different do words sound from one another). That is a bear for most non-native speakers of Chinese because if you’re not really sensitive to small words that go by fast, you won’t understand. There’s logical structure (or relative lack thereof), background knowledge of the subject being spoken about, etc. etc., even the factor of whether the listener knows ahead of time what the topic will be and has a chance to activate his own schema (anticipate what could be said based on what information has already been presented). All these things affect comprehension.
And, interestingly enough, very slow speech is probably more difficult for an interpreter doing simultaneous work than very fast speech. It’s hard to hold back and fill in to make the output sound natural when the speaker truly isn’t saying anything but is making noise so that the audience assumes the interpreter just must not understand what’s going on. I once had a guy at a conference who showed slides and said nothing more in English than “This is really important”, “This is too”, “This is a good slide”, etc. I felt like an idiot going into Chinese and I’m sure the audience thought so too, but short of re-telling the plots to old Three Stooges movies in the gaps, there was nothing to do about it. (Oops, I shouldn’t be revealing trade secrets. )
[quote=“ironlady”]I think your professor may have been comparing apples and oranges.
Chinese is typically spoken at speeds between 150 and 200 words per minute. English, on the other hand, is spoken more slowly for the most part (except for New Yorkers in a hurry ). [/quote]
Could this be a difference between mainland and Taiwanese Chinese, then? I am more familiar with Taiwanese-accented Chinese than with the mainland variety, but Chinese on the mainland sounded a lot slower to me. After studying Spanish and French, listening to the news in those languages, and realizing that even if I did understand the gist, there was no way I could pick out every word, I was so surprised when I went to China and could ‘disambiguate’ every word on the news shows.
[quote=“I”]
There are languages that are syllable-timed and languages that are stress-timed (can’t remember specific examples at the moment).[/quote] Stress-timed are supposed to be faster, because they cram all the unstressed syllables together. English, for example. I’m assuming Chinese is syllable-timed. Or am I mistaken here, and it doesn’t make any difference? After all, Spanish is syllable-timed, but it sounds awfully fast.
I am confused again. Do you guys mean that when they count the words they only count the stressed syllables (because this is where the bulk of the meaning is located)? Or are you talking about the way there tends to be a regular amount of time between stresses in some languages? English I heard was .6 sec between stresses on average, while in others (Spanish and Japanese I am sssuming) there is a regular amount of time between syllables. ie, When you talk about stress/syllable timed are you referring to the way the languages are pronounced or the way they are counted? And when they count words in Mandarin are we talking one character = one word or is one word considered to be one unit of meaning regardless of whether it is one, two or three characters?
[quote=“bob”]Or are you talking about the way there tends to be a regular amount of time between stresses in some languages? English I heard was .6 sec between stresses on average, while in others (Spanish and Japanese I am sssuming) there is a regular amount of time between syllables. ie, When you talk about stress/syllable timed are you referring to the way the languages are pronounced or the way they are counted? [/quote]The way they are pronounced. The stresses tend to occur regularly in English, no matter how many unstressed syllables there are between the stresses.
It should not be counted one character = equals one word. Of course, it’s difficult to decide the word boundaries sometimes, but they should count a three-syllable Chinese ‘word’ as one word, not three.
If that is the case then I find it difficult to believe what Ironlady said about Mandarin being pronounced faster than English. A lot of auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions and even pronouns register as barely a sound when spoken by a native speaker of English. There are more three, four, five syllable words in English of course but a good two thirds of those are unstressed so are spoken really fast as well. Normally I take whatever Ironlady says as gospel but I think she did a boo boo on this one.
No, that’s not the reason and tones are not any more cumbersome than any aspect of language. You just happen not to have been natively trained to latch onto them for meaning.
These are all not good answers. “Words” are not the right units to measure speed because Chinese word boundaries are unclear due to subcomponent (character) meanings. “Characters” aren’t either because characters aren’t directly spoken (one to many mapping). “Stress” means little, too. What we really want to talk about is two things: (1) whether Chinese is spoken at a lower semantic rate, and (2) at a lower syllabic rate. My answers are: both. There are good reasons, too.
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tones: For the sake of argument, suppose Chinese and Spanish both have just 4 syllables. However, suppose Chinese has all 4 tones to go with each of the syllables. Then each time a Chinese syllable is used, it is from 16 choices vs. 4 in Spanish. If every of one of these unit sounds express semantic content equally, then to express semantic content at the same rate, Chinese syllables only need to come out at 1/2 the rate of Spanish (two syllables in Spanish gives 4x4=16 choices). So why don’t Chinese just speak at the same syllabic rate as Spanish and speak at twice the semantic rate? It’s not because they have to “think” about the tones. It’s because tonal contours are spread in time. You need a certain length to produce the proper tonal contour or else you can only distinguish the degenerate “high” and “low” tones, which is the case in the Shanghai dialect, spoken quite fast (go listen to it sometime).
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grammar: Chinese grammar favors a slight bit of vagueness adapted for contextual situations like conversation, with no requirement for tense, gender, person, plural, etc. to appear in a sentence. Even subject, object, or other parts can be neglected. There are other differences that shorten sentence. This makes less precise sentences. As long as the imprecision does not cause ambiguity, which is the case in the vast majority of colloquial speech, it saves on sentence length on average. You can’t have short sentences to encode everything – that’s impossible, so the idea is to encode less frequently used things to the longer sentences. For technical discourse or precise discourse, sentences indeed get quite long and can get very cumbersome due to this type of grammar. By the most fortunate accident, those cases are better suited for writing and in writing, you get the excellent help of characters which disambiguate between words that would sound the same in speech.
Another point in contextual encoding is with regard to pithy idioms which is conditioned on known culture to add semantic meaning.
Put all of these together, it’s not suprising Chinese speech “sounds” slower because really fewer things are said and when said, are said using tones as well as syllables. You can always speak faster, of course (up to the limit of distinguishable tonal contours), if your thoughts are highly expressive; and I imagine in verbal fights, you are trying to be very very expressive. 
Actually if you talk to Chinese people about Mandarin, you will discover that each tone is actually to them a different sound. They don’t have to think about the tones any more than you and I have to think about saying a long vs short vowel, or voiced stop (d/b/z) vs an unvoiced stop (t/p/s)
[quote=“haeber”]Do those of you who have experience learning Chinese believe this to be true?
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
I recently bought the Rosetta Stone set and am rearing to get started, but this article makes me wonder…[/quote]
I’ve got a BA in Chinese and feel very much like what the people in the article said. I believe that the writing system of Chinese is inherently more difficult than other language writing systems.
I don’t think Chinese itself is more difficult-- some aspects are simpler than English (e.g. no inflectional morphology- tenses, S-V agreement, etc.) while others are more difficult (e.g. tones). What makes Chinese so hard is that it is a Truly Foreign Language to English. And that makes English just as difficult for Chinese.
But then you go and add the written language in again. How much language do you learn by just reading? A LOT. Without as easy medium for reading the entire process of language learning slows down. And it takes a LONG time to get good at reading Chinese. I mean, at least a decade.
So, I think the article, while intentionally biased, is accurate and is supported by fact.
I would still like to know which language, on average, produces the greater number of words, with words defined as units that would be separated by a space when written in PinYin.
And zeugmite it takes different lengths of time to produce the tones fully (which of course is not always done) and this fact helps English speakers to distinguish between them. Fourth is the shortest. Followed by first or second (sorry I forget). And third requires the greatest length of time of course. Fifth takes no time at all. Also if people know that volume increases as the tone rises it becomes a lot easier to distinguish between them.
Bob Wrote:
This could be interesting stuff Bob. I don’t necessarily agree, but I don’t know enough to disagree. Is this a personal observation, or is this based on a study?
A Chinese friend helped me to realise that 3rd tones do not rise up as high when used in combination with other tones. I have listened observed and practiced and this seems to be true. If this is actually true then a third tone used in normal speech would not take as long as a 3rd tone in practice drills, or in isolation.
I would be interested to hear why yous make the claim that you do.
I am being genuine, not tearing at your theory. there may well be something to it.
To be honest I read it somewhere but forget now where that somewhere was. :eh: Anyway, it certainly sounds to me that it is accurate especially when describing the way that words are spoken in isolation. I was going nuts with tones at one point, couldn’t hear them so naturally couldn’t
pronounce them. When I learned to concieve of them as functions of time and volume my listening started to improve slowly and my speaking improved immediately. And I do mean immediately. little bob was putting herself through the torture of trying to teach me and there was just no way I could distinguish 2nd from 3rd or, sometimes 2nd from 4th! Certainly not in speaking. I found that article describing time and volume differences, read it, tried pronouncing the words again and little bob said “That’s it! Finally!” Of course it is still a struggle to make myself understood in a lot of situations but at least I have some kind of schema to work with.
Interesting stuff Bob. If you remeber at all where you got that. (or if any one else knows, has heard of, etc.) I would like to know more.
Thanks Bob.
PS I know how littlle Bob feels. My tones have improved tremendously, but are still a thorn in the flesh. Our conversations go like this;
Me: gong3 chang3 zhang4
Chinese Friend: No, its gong1 chang1 zhang1
Me: yeah, that’s what I said, gong1 chang2 zhang3
Chinese Friend: No, you said, gong3 chang3 zhang4
Me: That’s right. And that’s what you said.
etc. etc. etc.
Here’s a link to a study that has in-depth detail on both Taiwanese (Min-nan hua) and Taiwan Standard Mandarin. It includes data on tone length.
By God you could impress me by wading through that jargon! So anyway was I right? 3 is the longest followed by 1 ('m betting), 2, 4 and finally 5. Dui bu dui. Thanks kids.
Actually, according to the data on that page, Tone 3 was the shortest- just a little behind Tone 4. Tone 1 was the longest and Tone 2 just a little behind that.
But what I think you’re getting is measurement of the “half-third” tone, which is very common when the tone is found in context with other tones. I would expect that the length of Tone 3 would be greater when dealing with a more carefully pronounced third tone.
You’ll also notice that the contours and duration you find in speech analysis programs differs significantly from what a hearer would expect or has in their own mind. One other point is that this study was done from a relatively small text sample.
Thanks puiwaihin. I think the length of the tones when the words are pronounced carefully and in isolation is more important for me because I never think about tones in conversation until I get a “…huh?” from somebody, at which time it is usually pretty easy to guess the offending word. At that point a lot of things are possible: a brief pantomime perhaps, translating to English or actually trying to remember the tone and pronouncing it correctly. I find that to do that it is really helpful to focus on increasing volume with the rise in tone and to giving more time especially to 3 and 1. Of course it doesn’t hurt if your efforts are accompanied by gesticulations involving various body parts, raised eyebrows for 1, flailing arm for two, nod of the head for 3 and a stomp of the foot for 4.
By the way puiwaihin your class sounds great. If I had any money and lived in Taoyuan I’d probably take it.