How to improve Mandarin Chinese tones?

Languages have very much in common and a strategy that works well for learning one foreign language is likely to be successful for understanding another. Though, every language also has its own challenges that you’re unprepared for unless you’ve already learned the same language.

When it comes to mandarin, the 2 big challenges are tones and characters. No matter contemporary language expect to Japanese will equip you for the challenge of understanding thousand characters, and while a majority of the world’s languages are tonal, it is still doubtful that the average reader of this post has learned a tonal language prior to mandarin.

How to learn tones in Chinese?

This blog post is about tones. As is normal, in this case, we write about Chinese, but much of what we say is also valid for other tonal languages, including other mandarin dialects. This blog post is meant to be an umbrella that connects and gathers that several articles we have already written on the tones, offering a better understating for teachers and students. 

What are tones in language?

Language tones are differences in pitch that change the meaning of the spoken syllable. Unlike accents, tones are not only used to signal the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, they’re used to differentiate among completely different words. If you’ve no prior experience tones, it might be very helpful to consider them as vowels. Native English speakers of course know that “bad” and “bed” mean different things, and if you change the vowels, it is no longer a similar word. 

This is simply to hear for native speakers of English, but such a shift can be hard for speakers of other languages, including Chinese. Similarly, if you alter the tone of the syllable ma from low to high, the word alterations from horse to mother, this mightn’t feel very different for the novice, but the difference is as enough as the difference among “bad” and “bed”.

Below, I’ll only outline the way to teach Chinese tones and will not repeat things that can be found in beginner courses and textbooks. Here’re the basic definitions of the tones:

• The 1st is high, as in mā, “mother”
• The 2nd is raising, as in má, “hemp”
• The 3rd is low, as in mǎ, “horse”
• The 4th is falling, as in mà, “to scold”

This provides a clear vision that is simple to remember and less complicated to put into practice than the traditional method of teaching the 3rd tone as a dipping tone. 

Apart from the 4 basic Chinese tones, there is also a neutral tone that is not the 5th tone, but rather an unstressed syllable that has no intrinsic tone of its own (it borrows it from anywhere, normally the proceeding intonation or syllable). 

Actually, it is not only the neutral tone that shifts based on the environment, this occurs to the basic tones also, particularly the 3rd tone. This usually covered quite well in most standard courses and textbooks, but I’d love to point to this blog post about which of these tone change laws you’ve to apply and which you do not need to care about so much:

As a method to segue into the next section about the value of tones, I will rapidly address a question that at least 1 person in each class of beginners will ask: what about the music tones? If Chinese is a tonal language, and the tones conflict with the tune being played, then what?

The simple and straight answer is that tones in songs are normally ignored. Yes, this means that unknown words are harder to understand and that they're sometimes ambiguities. But if anyone still able to know, how vital are toned really?

Why Chinese tones are not as difficult as they look 

Don’t worry, it probably sounds a bit complicated. But once you get used to it, it is really not that difficult.  Even when the sounds are the same, the meaning of the word can still be clear.

The instance that is often given to teach Chinese pronunciation is that:

• mā means ‘mother'
• má means ‘hemp'
• mǎ means ‘horse' 
• mà means ‘to curse.

And the people usually reply: That sound seems impossible – 4 words with totally different meanings that sound almost the same, how can you possibly understand the mean?

But it is not as hard as that, several a numbers of reasons:

It is a lot easier to figure out what a word means in the broader context f what you’re talking about. For instance, it is unlikely that you’d be talking about a mother and your horse in the simile sentence. And even if you were, the difference would be transparent.

The instance is talking about one sound pronounced in various tones (mā má mǎ and mà). But it is not truly close to real life, because most of the words in mandarin are made up of many sounds. When the one sound comes as a part of a longer word, they’re less easy to confuse.

• ‘Mother’ would be usually being māma (just like in many languages).
• ‘Linen’ would be mábù.
• ‘To curse’ could be màrén.

How important these tones are?

The fact that a sentence in music or a line spoken by a beginner learner can be understood even if the tones are ignored, doesn’t mean that tones not important in Chinese. Sentences in English can normally be understood even if you change all vowels with me, at least if their relatively common context is given and the sentence is otherwise right. Nobody would take this to mean that vowels are not vital in the English language.

What you’ve to realize as a beginner is that tones are not optional in language

They’re an integral Section of the language and the earlier you understand them, the better. We have spent hundreds of hours trying to right tones issues, and it just gets difficult the longer you wait. If you are new to Chinese learning, just take my word for it.

The main reason you sometimes a person saying that tones are not necessary is because of what we said above. If you are a beginner and use Chinese with the wrong tones in a setting where you say is extremely predictable, tones do not really, matter that much. Neither do vowels or grammar.

The best instance of this is going to a cafe with a very limited number of items on the menu list. The waiter does not actually need to know what you say, he just needs to know which meal you want and how many, that is it. This is a lot easier than hearing what you say.

The best counter instance is going by a ride to a somewhat obscure address (i.e. not the airport or railway station). If you get even 1 tone wrong, likely, the driver would not have a clue what you are considering about. There is slight context to rely on when it comes to names so, any single mistake is very serious.

So, tones are very important. Learn them, now!

But the question is how?

How to understand tones in language?

Very often to the combination of mandarin characters and tones causes a lot of learners to give up too soon. Yet More than 1.5 billion Chinese, also a huge number of international students speak impeccable mandarin, showing that mandarin tones are not impossible to learn. We often tend to see teenagers as the best and quickest language learners and attribute their success to brain flexibility and plasticity that we adults no longer possess.

One might object to the definition of brain plasticity, but some factors in the learning procedure are often omitted: the way they get a 2nd language is different from their mother language. Kids hear complete sentences. They do not start with syllables. They just hear chunks of language and then deeply identify the single components by themselves.

As adults, we tend to consider that we can examine the structure of the language by analyzing every single aspect of it, and we lose sight of the general picture. We still can hear, but we’ve partially lost the capacity to listen.

In order to restore the ability one needs patience and a slight of open-mindedness. Just a couple of months after starting mandarin learning the traditional way I realized how vital it was to listen to full sentences. 

Putting Mandarin Tones to Use When You Communicate

It is all very well being capable to get the tones right in one word. But, you’ve to take those patterns that you are becoming known with and reproduce them when you pronounce them. When you are speaking mandarin, you will probably be speaking in short phrases and sentences at the starting.

Be stable about the mandarin tones at this stage. And try to utilize them as perfectly as you can when you speak. It might feel like it is a much harder task to focus on the tones also putting the words together. And it’s at the starting. But starting carefully and slowly and speeding up gradually will pay off in the last, as you find that you are producing more accurate mandarin.

How to understand the tones of words and characters 

I want to provide you some useful tips about how to remember the tones. Sometimes the reason you get them incorrect is not that you cannot produce that sound pattern. It is just because you cannot remember what tones you’d be using, or you remembered wrongly. You see, you cannot guess the tones or work or character just by seeing it or by the meaning of the phrase.

So, it is a memory game.

Give your memory a helping hand to remember Chinese tones with these crucial tips

• Forever try to learn the tone character whenever you first understand it. For instance, 雨 (rain) is yǔ in the third tone.
• When you understand a word, utilize that as an opportunity to remind yourself of the tones of the Chinese characters in the world. For instance, 下雨 xiàyǔ (to rain – fourth tone, then the rain in the third).
• If you cannot remember the tone of a word as you are speaking or try saying it more in a flat tone.  In that process, the other person can easily guess the meaning of what you are trying to say. Then keep disciplined about looking it up to test as soon as you can.
• When you are listening to mandarin, try to listen for the tones of Chinese words, not only to choose out the meaning.
• When you read mandarin, read out loud to practices the tones of the Chinese characters.

Do natives Chinese speakers use tones?

You might notice that tones do not always behave the way they are supposed to. Sometimes some combinations of tones will sound differently together than individually. Especially in colloquial speech, very little emphasis is placed on the tones, or their use is decreased. They do not disappear altogether, though. Not by a long shot. But do not worry about entire that for now.

 Just as you might hear people claim that tones are very important that people would not understand you without them, you’ll likely also hear that tones are very bullshit and that people do not even use them when they are talking fast. The reality is somewhere in the mid. 

Does this mean you can get away without understanding tones?

No way, it is a bad idea!

Learn them, it is better to emphasize Chinese tones at the starting stages, as your speech will gradually become further sounding and more native as you enhance. So get out there and start practicing.

Takeaway…

The tones of the Chinese are undoubtedly a big challenge, but they can understand with the correct source like CCHATTY and approach. The one we propose is simple, consider the complete sentence and listen to it, try to examine out how it sounds like a whole without focusing on the language tones. You will find that it is an effective approach to naturally getting tones.