A smart method to discover problems with tones

Studying Chinese (or any other language), it’s sometimes hard to assess the quality one’s own pronunciation. People in your surrounding might understand what you are saying, but how do you verify how good your tones are? In an ideal world, it would be easy, you could just ask a qualified teacher and given enough time it would be possible to figure out most of your pronunciation-related problems.

However, the world in which we live is far from ideal, at least in this regard. Teachers sometimes tend to be complacent (they give up correcting students when it’s apparent that they don’t learn after the fifth time) or have had others students who think it’s embarrassing to be corrected in class. I’m not trying to blame the teachers here, because this situation probably arises because students are different (I probably have loftier goals than most and have my own way of achieving them, for instance).

Therefore, as I have said earlier, it’s really up to you as a student to take responsibility for your own learning.

A brief introduction

What I am going to talk about in this post is an ingenious way of checking if your pronunciation is clear. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it’s perfectly correct, but it will take you a long way in that direction. I first heard of this idea from my class mate, Arnaud Laraie, and even though I have added and expanded his thinking, it was he who gave me the inspiration. Credit where credit is due!

This is what the method can achieve:

1. Identify problems with closely related sounds
2. Prove whether your tones are good or not

The second point needs some further explanation. Can’t you just ask someone if your tones are good or not? Of course you can, but most of the time you will get a misleading or even wrong answer. People don’t like pointing out the mistakes of others, especially if you’re a foreigner and a guest in their country. They might also have wildly different standards than you, so if you strive for a close-to-native-speaker level, they might just think that you are slightly better than the average foreigner, which is far from enough. In other words, don’t trust random people when they say your pronunciation is good!

The method consists of the following steps:

1. Define a number of sounds you find difficult to distinguish
2. Draw a diagram of them or just write them down in a list
3. Read the various sounds and let a native speaker guess the word
4. Repeat until you make sure that no chance is involved
5. Reverse the game and have the native speaker reading if you want to improve basic listening ability

In this article, I will use the tones in Mandarin Chinese as an example, but there is no reason why this method could not be useful for other languages or other aspects of learning Chinese. I will write more about this towards the end of this text, but now over to the tones in Mandarin.

The five tones in Mandarin

In Mandarin, there are five tones, numbered one to four with a fifth tone called neutral. These are different changes in pitch for a given syllable that is essential to determine the meaning of a word. It is hard for us Westerners to understand and feel, but tones are typically more important than most people think.

For instance, if you’re in the lift going up to your apartment and you say the word “四樓“ (sì lóu, 4th floor) correctly, but with the wrong tones (let’s say you say sí lóu), the other person is most likely to hear 十樓 (shí lóu, 10th floor), because in their minds, the tone is more important than the difference between s/sh (which is even more true in southern dialects which don’t have as clear a difference between s and sh.

On the other hand, if you get the pronunciation slightly off (like switching sh and s, you say shì lóu instead of sì lóu), but get the tones right, you’re almost guaranteed to end up where you want to go. In other words, tones are something alien to us, but is of paramount importance when learning Chinese. Tone is also the perfect example to demonstrate this method of verifying clear pronunciation.

Getting started

From here on out, it’s assumed that you know how to pronounce the tones in Chinese independently and in theory, because I will deal with the real problem, which is tones in combination and in context. If you’re not clear about the tones in the first place, you can check this website.

This is a diagram showing all the possible tone combinations in Chinese. I used a table almost identical to this one when I tried this out with native speakers and it works very well.

This is a simple way of representing all the combinations of two syllables in Chinese. First look at the column to the left and select a tone, then combine it with any of the five available tones that can follow it.

Now comes the clever bit. Since native speakers tend to understand what people say even if they are pronouncing the tones incorrectly, you are now to choose a sound that has no specific meaning. There are many ways of doing this, pick one you like:

• Use a single syllable in Mandarin (I used “ma”)
• Use a word in your native language (“häst”)
• Use a sound without meaning (such as “mm”)

Analyse those tones!

Now, start pronouncing the chosen word or sound using the different tones! Let’s say you chose option one above and that you are using the syllable ma to practice. Since we’re dealing with pairs of syllables here, we use the double ma + ma. The goal is to check if the tone combination you pronounce is the same as the one the native speaker thinks you want to pronounce. Follow these instructions:

1. Select any of the twenty combinations at random.
2. Add tones to your word (e.g. ma2ma3, ma4ma4, ma1ma3)
3. Let your friend/teacher point on the combination she hears
4. Repeat at least twice for all combinations
5. Repeat using a different friend/teacher

Of course, if you want to monitor your pronunciation in detail, you need to do this in a systematic manner and make sure you cover all the tones. Write the combinations down before you start! After you’ve practised for a while so your friend/teacher is aware of how this works, you can also use reaction time to determine how good your pronunciation is.

• If she points to the correct tone combination without the slightest hesitation, you can be quite sure your tones are good
• If she points to the right tone, but hesitantly, then you might have a problem
• If she points to the wrong tone, you obviously have a problem

The really clever part here is that there is no way your friend/teacher can cheat or try to make you feel better about your language skills. If you pronounce something incorrectly or unclearly, you will know. Of course, you can still cheat, but that would defy the purpose of this exercise in the first place, so don’t do it.

Wider usage

This is a very powerful way to identify and analyse pronunciation problems with the tones in Chinese. However, the same method can be used to teach and/or learn other sounds as well. Try these:

• b/p
• z/zh
• j/q
• -in/-ing
• -an/-ang

Any sounds that are close to each other in pronunciation can be used, which means you can do this in English as well:

• World
• Word
• Whirl
• Were

A problem you should be aware of

A problem with this method is that it doesn’t actually test correct pronunciation, only clear pronunciation. For instance, the sounds might be wrong, but if the native speaker can tell which one is which anyway, in which case you don’t prove anything at all using this method. Let’s say that someone can’t distinguish “world” from “word” and starts pronouncing the “l” as a separate syllable. That would be extremely easy to recognise, but it doesn’t mean it’s right! If the native speakers becomes used to your way of speaking, this method loses it’s effectiveness.

Conclusion

I wish someone had introduced this method to me when I started studying Chinese, not after trying it out on my own after two years. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time and energy to correct my pronunciation and if would have known about my problems earlier, it would also have been a lot easier to correct them.

I’ve used this method several times and I’ve been able to confirm that my pronunciation and tones are quite good. I’ve also tried it on other students of Chinese to see if they also can find out where they go wrong, and most of the time they can. So, if you haven’t tried something similar, do you dare not to? How good are your tones, really?

---

Please consider supporting Hacking Chinese so that I can keep providing free content.

---