Tone deaf?

Language Learning Chinese
41

I second that.

My tones are mostly wrong, but I can communicate just fine. However, I do pay attention on grammar and word choice, just like @ironlady mentioned. I can even handle phone or video-conferences discussions in different topics, mostly without issues (I do sometimes have to repeat what I said or look for other ways to explain), no matter if speaking with people here or across the strait.

Names or address, however, are always an issue. There’s no way to work around that so I have to look back at the correct tone if I want to make myself clear.

These are the times I wished I had paid more attention on tones when I started learning Chinese. Correcting them now is very difficult…

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42

It depends on the singer I think. A lot of singers will add weird dynamics on individual syllables when pronouncing words. Especially male singers.

43

What?

44

First of all, English is a tonal language just like Chinese. Unless you speak in a monotone and sound like a robot, you already know tones.

Next, all the tones of Mandarin already exist in English. We use them all the time, you just need to recognise them.

Tone 1: Pretend you’re a classical singer and sing " la la la la laaa", with each “la” getting slightly higher. The final “la” is tone 1.

Tone 2: Your friend tells you an outrageous story and you say “Whaat?”.

Tone 3: No native speaker uses the full thing. Just use tone 2.

Tone 4: Scold a naughty dog by shouting a sharp short “NO!”

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45

Nice one. My point exactly.

There’s hundreds of tonal languages around the world. It’s not a particularly weird approach to communication. In fact more languages are tonal than are not. Anyone who comes up with the comment, Chinese is a stupid language what wiv all them tones and stuff is basically just sour graping. It works perfectly fine for the 1.5 billion Chinese people.

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46

Not in the same sense though.
In Chinese, different tones generally mean different words.

Like “ma” with different tones could mean “mom”, “horse”, “scold”, “numb”, etc. (although in some households maybe it is all related :laughing:)

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47

God that “ma” analogy is so overdone. We need a new one.

There’s 108 shi and 78 yi to choose from.

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48

I definitely hear some third tone

49

I suppose you would be alright if it was in “bear-i-tone”. :drum:

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50

I guess that one’s used because at least it sounds like a word in English, unlike shi or yi.

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51

Yi bah gum is a phrase in Yorkshire.

52

Nah, that would be a totally non-standard spelling of the “ee”, even for people from Yorkshire.

If I didn’t know how “yi” is pronounced in Chinese, I’d read it as “ye”/“yee”, with the “y” pronounced.

53

一八滾

54

That’s definitely a non-standard spelling in Yorkshire.

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55

Careful, you’re laying the groundwork for China to decide that Yorkshire is a Special Administrative Region & domestic matter in 30-40 years.

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56

Blockquote
No native speaker uses the full thing. Just use tone 2

Um, not quite.
It’s true that “full tone 3” is rarely used – that is, you won’t often hear the dip down-go back up version of it that is always drilled in legacy-method Chinese classrooms. But when tone 3 gets less than that sort of treatment, it does not go to tone 2 (rising tone). What is most common with tone 3 is just a very short, very low tone. Not rising or falling, just really low.

The quickest and most effective way to “fix” tones if you’re desperate and have longstanding fossilized problems with them is to narrow your tone space. Most of us are taught to exaggerate the tone space – go way high for 1st tone, go way low for 3rd, and move a lot on the others. If you reduce the “height” of your tone space, native speakers will be more likely to accept your tone efforts, probably because they are not as glaringly wrong? This was a tip given to me in interpreting school by my classmates, and it worked (as evidenced by the fact that the teachers pretty much quit yelling about my tones after that). Of course when interpreting you’re speaking Chinese under pressure so something always has to go if there aren’t enough resources to output things the best way you potentially could, but that was a fairly easy MacGuyver for the tone thing.

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57

I think there’s a way, with a paperclip, a straw, and a stick of gum, to ensure perfect tones every time.

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58

I don’t get the need for tones

I only know like 50 words of Chinese, never speak it

There you go. If you learn more Chinese, you’ll get it.

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59

For me that ended up in being the guy they could learn some English from and he can help out foreign costumers, that was in Yingge in a DIY pottery making/teaching throwing ceramics. Anyways, I got pretty good at the ceramics, less so in Chinese. But it also started up my career in baking and cooking as I started making pastries, cakes, pies for the inhouse coffee shop.

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60

But your whaat or what, whoat is always what. Tone in English doesn’t change a thing on the vocabulary meaning.