I’m doing a Taiwan university Coursera.org online Chinese course.
End of week quiz I get the which tone 1-4 is this sound clip. every Q each time I’m incorrect, I really am tone deaf!
Other Questions I do ok and pass.
Is learning the tones that important (i do practice the ma & shi tones to no avail) or better just learning as you listen?
You absolutely, 100% need to learn tones to learn Chinese. You will sound like a total moron if you do not. Find a human to practice with you/drill them into you.
Also, don’t think about Chinese the way you speak English. English intonation makes no sense in Chinese; it’s just part of the language and you will need to accept that.
As for tone deafness, are you sure? Can you pick up on tones in music? If so, you’re not tone deaf, you just need more training.
Try a music lesson. That will help you get the pitch with your tone.
Everyone, nearly, has trouble hearing (and pronouncing) the tones in the beginning and sometimes the middle and sometimes at the end.
Even native Chinese speakers sometimes have to ask others to repeat a word or to use the same word in a different way to make sure which tone they heard. Especially if context is not known.
It will get better as you listen and speak and even more better when you start listening to others in a conversation.
Don’t give up! A lot of people do.
Sometimes they do the character ‘air’ writing to be sure.
If you can hear intonation when people are speaking English you can hear tones in Chinese. There’s no real difference.
Tones, the bane of my existence. The only way to get those sons of a gun is to hear them over and over ad nauseum.
Are(3) you(1) fuck(3)ing(2) cra(3)zy(1)?
You will sound like such a 歪國人 if you don’t learn tones.
I don’t get the need for tones. I get the need to try to speak with them in order to not sound dumb, but I mean at a broader level, they just seem unnecessary.
I only know like 50 words of Chinese, never speak it, and can only hear the tones when they’re obvious, but yet, if anyone ever says one of the words I do know, I know wtf they’re saying, tone or no tone. It’s simple context
In English we also have homonyms where one word might have five different meanings (same or different spellings, but pronounced the same), so why the tones?.. Granted there are also lots of Chinese words with multiple meanings even with the same tone.
I was watching a video once, some Taiwanese native’s YouTube channel, who said if tones went away tomorrow people would deal with it alright.
it’s kinda like asking why does English use stress in words and sentences, and the answer is the same.
record, and record; one is a verb and one is a noun, and the pronunciation difference is syllable stress.
why do some languages use clicking sounds?
human beings have a limited linguistic toolkit when it comes to producing sounds, and like music this includes tone and rhythm in addition to the phonetics. why pronunciation changes over time is a function of sociolinguistics, and laziness, in general.
edit: i was going to add something about vocal fry as an example of sociolinguistics changing pronunciation, and was just reading up on it a bit when i was surprised to see that, like stress and tone, it can change the meaning of words in some languages: Vocal fry register - Wikipedia
I’ve thought about that but I would argue that the difference in pronunciation is much more slight with a tone change vs pronouncing something as
ree koard
Vs
reh kerd
Compared to
má
Vs
Mà
Also when I watch Youtube or something and someone is speaking fast, I would give anyone $100 if they can demonstrate that tones are actually being used, because I call bs. I can slow things down to .5 or slower speed and listen over and over and there’s just no way. Especially with the ǎ tone that takes longer to say with tone than without
depends on what your native tongue is. the tone is slight to you because your chinese isn’t very good. you probably hear mistakes in the english of taiwanese people easily and they can’t hear those mistakes in themselves or each other until their english gets very very good.
well, this is my secret. i just speak quickly and don’t worry about the tones (i have a musical background, which i think helps, and i get lots of compliments on my pronunciation). it’s fair to say that when a native speaker of chinese is speaking quickly they don’t exaggerate the tones, sure. but similarly when we reduce or liquify vowels and consonants in english they are still there and native speakers will notice over sustained speech if there are significant mistakes.
This seems to… well, I won’t say it works, but it gets better results for me anyway. Plus I hope my abstract-brain-knowledge of tone may translate into corresponding pronunciation. God help the Taiwanese person trying to understand one or two words from me in isolation. In a sentence - or my caveman version of one, anyway - they’ve got a chance.
Why is that?
The fact that you can talk fast and skip the tones shows just how superfluous they are haha
No matter how fast you say record/record, they’re very different.
But I think that’s a bad comparison. A better comparison is just that in English – whether we are conscious of it or not – we put emphasis on some part of the word. Record/record are wholly different sounds. Think instead of the word “neighbor” as a better example. We actually say
NEIGHbor
Verus
neighBOR
You can change the emphasis without changing the pronunciation of each syllable
I think you could be understood more if your emphasis is wrong vs if you’re pronouncing syllables wrong
And then of course we use tone of voice eg when asking a question. It’s really hard for me to ask a question in Chinese (嗎) without changing the inflection of my voice. Something you gotta get used to, since I don’t think they’ll be changing the language anytime soon
so are the tones, to a native speaker of a tonal language.
Nah, not the same.
In Chinese songs I don’t think they even use tones. You can’t sing in English completely mispronouncing things and it make sense. Dropping tones in Chinese isn’t completely mispronouncing
i suppose neither is syllable-timed pronunciation of english, but it still isn’t good pronunciation