Tone gestures

Language Learning Chinese
1

I’m trying to advise peggy on how to indicate tones. Here is what I said…

[quote]You need to be very purposeful about it until the tones come absolutely naturally.

One should be high and very level. As you move to indicate the tone stop for a moment, your hand should be up around your eyebrows. Then as you say the word move your hand exactly parallel to the floor.

Two should start low, around your hips and move diagonally up till you get about shoulder height,

Three should start quite low, dip and come up higher than it started.

Four should start high and drop forcefully.

In each case pause for a moment before you start indicating the tone and be sure that the gesture actually matches the voice.

The gesture you use to indicate each of the tones should look exactly the same each time. Your students should be able to say what tones you are indicating with the volume “off”. If they can’t do that you are not being clear and consistent enough.

It is surprising really how difficult this seems to be for native speakers of Chinese. I’d bet that most students of Chinese could read aloud and indicate the tones (if they could pronounce them) much more accurately than most native speakers. [/quote]

While that might be correct in spirit I’m not sure that it is exactly correct to the letter. Tones should be indicated clearly and consistently whenever anything is being “taught.” I’m sure of that. What I’m not precisely sure of is exactly “how” they should be indicated.

Definitely the very worst thing a teacher can do is make gestures that are indistinguishable from each other. That happens when the person trying to teach you isn’t focusing on the tone and kind of throws it in as an afterthought, or just isn’t clear that they need to be done distinctly.

Anyway it would be nice to get started on training the locals how to teach us properly and the place to start would be with a definitive answer on this from the “one” person who definitely knows…

:bow:

Oh, and a poem…

SHENGDiao SHENGDiao, FEIchanG ZhongYao
DUO DUO Lianxi2 Jiu nenG xuE hao

2

[quote=“bob”]SHENGDiao SHENGDiao, FEIchanG ZhongYao
DUO DUO Lianxi2 Jiu nenG xuE hao[/quote]
Speaking of indicating tones in a consistent manner…

3

xI

Sorry, I thought there was some spell check thing going on that wouldn’t let me type xI.

4

bob, I know you’re really enthusiastic. I know you really love to teach. I know you mean well.

But third tone does not dip and go back up except on very rare occasions (third tones pronounced in total isolation and usually with emphasis).

I like you, really I do. I like many of your posts. But it’s kind of like listening to a teacher of English explaining how you should pronounce the “th” sound by placing your tongue on the bump behind your teeth.

Why not stick to teaching English and consulting about that? Deal from a position of strength. Just sayin’. Many of the problems involved with current (s/low) success rates with Mandarin teaching comes from having the same incorrect, partially-correct or non-Westerner-friendly information repeated time and time again. And I don’t really want to participate in the lengthy process of getting a Chinese non-teacher with some experience tutoring people and no background in language or linguistics to be a video diva, via a message board yet.

Maybe I’m grumpy today. I dunno. But I must admit that the whole Peggy thread makes me roll my eyes a lot.

5

Damn, I just had this written too…

[quote]Based in part on the graph presented low on the page here…

viewtopic.php?f=40&t=65405&hilit=tones&start=10

which I know to be wrong in some ways I came up with…

1st - Shoulder to shoulder.

2nd - Elbow to shoulder.

3rd - (Elbow to) Belly button to breast.

4th - Shoulder to belly button.

5th - Like somebody is giving you a quick, light poke in the throat with their finger.

The gestures should actually be a visual representation of the sounds. The shoulders provide a good high reference for the entirety of the first tone and the end point of the second. Belly button to breast (man’s) locate the third tone deep in the body, and shoulder to belly button shortens the fourth on the time axis while giving it a starting point at the same point as the start of the first tone.

That’s what it should look like if a person is standing facing another person at some distance or into a camera. A good teacher would try to do it exactly the same way every time until it became second nature.[/quote]

I know this must drive you nuts but that is at least partly because you have thousands of oppurtunities to live this stuff. I don’t. Consider too that peggy is actually following my advice. She quit wearing the low cut shirts and all that. If she hadn’t I wouldn’t be trying to teach her. She is trying to incorporate the tones into what she is doing and I know she is because I saw that she edited it after I bugged her about it. Frankly, I don’t think it is all that easy for Chinese people to indicate tones. If we want to teach them how we should actually teach them how and we can’t really do that if we don’t give them some set of references, can we? Shoulders, elbows, belly button seem “natural” and pretty much correct with the exception of three which, of course, you know is more complicated…

I searched the hell out of the forums looking for information about how to actually do the tone gestures and found almost nothing. You have to admit “How do you actually do the tone gestures?” is a good question. Imagine what it would be like if more people knew the answer. I’m not absolutely certain my answer is correct, that’s why I’m asking you specifically, but they are pretty damn close, no?

(Three is inherently difficult because without at least a weeny bit of a dip it looks absolutely nothing like any visual representation anybody is ever going to see, and in isolation it does dip and rise. What I was describing was the way it is pronounced in isolation. Yes, I think you are grumpy today.)

6

It’s been ages since I saw any of Peggy’s videos. Seems like you’ve really been putting a lot of effort into helping her. Still, after looking at these:

[quote]1st - Shoulder to shoulder.

2nd - Elbow to shoulder.

3rd - (Elbow to) Belly button to breast.

4th - Shoulder to belly button.

5th - Like somebody is giving you a quick, light poke in the throat with their finger[/quote].

I can’t help but think the 3rd tone sounds a little erotic and the 5th tone sounds like a death move… seriously though, a well aimed quick poke to the throat might kill someone .

7

If you have studied Chinese at all you know that tones are really difficult. If you have tried attaching a gesture to the tone you know it is one of the best ways to learn them.

And if you think about it it makes sense that the tone gesture should actually be some sort of actual visual representation of the tone. For example, you don’t hear people advising that the first tone be represented by a finger in the nose, do you?

So, if we agree that tones should be learned with gestures and that those gestures should actually be some sort of accurate visual represention of the tones it naturally follows that we should know what the gestures look like. And if we want to know what they look like and can’t show each other because we are communicating via the written word it makes sense that we try to describe them. And if we want to describe them we need some reference points.

Given that the hands are connected to the arms and the arms to the body it seems natural that those reference points be located somewhere on the body. Somewhere on the front of the body. On the front of the body are located several body parts easily accesible to the hands (don’t go there) but the points that seem most accessible for use in a visual representation of tones and their relationship to each other are the hips, shoulders, breast, elbows and throat.

Now, I apologize for being the genius who thought to ask this question but I won’t very easily admit that it isn’t a good question.

8

I don’t think your third tone is too convincing. And how do you deal with tone sandhi?

9

Third is a major hassle. If you give it a drop and a lift you get in trouble with people like ironlady. If you performed it the way it actually sounds in connected speech it wouldn’t look like much of anything. Elbow to belly button to breast at least keeps it down low and reflects the fact that the rise is greater than the drop.

It makes sense that if you are teaching beginners you should teach words the way that they sound in isolation. If tone sandhi changes the tone it should be performed that way when the word occurs that way.

I’ve never hard anybody describe the tone of five by the way. It sounds high to me.

10

It’s not consistent. Depends on the word.

11

Damn.

12

I once studied on a really good supplimentary course at Chines Culture University, besides their main courses which are 2 hours each day, you have to take supplimentary courses as well.

It was a pronunciation course and they were using their own materials, it was a thin blue book, which contained a lot of tonal exercises and spent a lot of time explaining how to use the 3rd tone, they split it up into 3 different kinds:

first half - 2.1
second half - 1.4
full 3rd tone - 2.1.4

From studying that course, I found out that odd thing about the 3rd tone is that - the full 3rd tone is hardly every used, when it is used it’s mainly for emphasis or if it’s being used for an isolated character, otherwise you need to use the first half 2.1 or second half 1.4, that’s the real challenge.

With the fifth tone, I can’t remember exactly what the formula was, but I do know that it depends on which tone went first.

I would have typed out the explanation in the book I had - but I’ve already shipped it off with the rest of my life.

13

What, as in completely wrong, you mean?

14

Gestures I don’t know. I think soem foreigners speaking Chinese don’t really have the sense of high, low or contour that goes with pitch. If you can’t hear a falling tone when it’s spoken, why can you visualize it better when it’s acted?

It’s useless to try to learn tones in isolation. Learn multi-character words and the tone pattern that goes with them. The tone pattern 3-2 as in “meiguo” is pretty easy to copy. Then extend it to “meiguo ren” 3-2-2. Then put more and more words together so that you can say the whole sentence right.

I think that’s how I learnt how to do it. But mostly just by copying Chinese speakers.

15

Bingo.

Input. Input. Input.

16

What, as in completely wrong, you mean?[/quote]

It wasn’t “completely” wrong. Third tone is sometimes pronounced that way. I worked out a resonably good compromise gesture for the tone. If you’ve got a better one offer it.

17

My experience is that by acting it out, which you could benefit from being shown how to do, you begin to hear them better. Also, by doing the gesture with the tone you “remember” the tone better, probably in part “because” you hear it better and probably because it has become a physical movement. That last statement is as obvious to me now as the rather large nose on my face.

18

[quote=“Dr Jellyfish”] It was a pronunciation course and they were using their own materials, it was a thin blue book, which contained a lot of tonal exercises and spent a lot of time explaining how to use the 3rd tone, they split it up into 3 different kinds:

first half - 2.1
second half - 1.4
full 3rd tone - 2.1.4

From studying that course, I found out that odd thing about the 3rd tone is that - the full 3rd tone is hardly every used, when it is used it’s mainly for emphasis or if it’s being used for an isolated character, otherwise you need to use the first half 2.1 or second half 1.4, that’s the real challenge.
[/quote]

Thanks.

Are the numbers from the graph I provided at the beginning of this thread or…?

19

It’s not consistent. Depends on the word.[/quote]

Thanks.

Is there any system to it?

20

It’s not consistent. Depends on the word.[/quote]

Thanks.

Is there any system to it?[/quote]

Look at the chart under “neutral tone” here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_M … utral_tone