An excellent video, Steve (one of many)! I've studied Chinese for a year. Here's my 2 cents for starters: Learn pinyin and the sounds together. Pinyin is the way Chinese people "type" on computers and smartphones, so you will use it forever. It was designed for Chinese children (not foreigners!), so most letter groups don't match English. But it is phonetic, once learned. Don't worry about tones. I find them hard to memorize, but you don't need them to type Chinese, or to look up words alphabetically. For written Chinese you only need to read characters (but not draw them) and type pinyin (without tones). For me the pitch patterns of whole phrases and sentences are much easier to hear and imitate. And they don't match the result of me "putting tones on every word" anyway. I do best with Chinese subtitles: seeing each character as I hear the words. Over the last year I've learned and forgotten (as Steve says in another video) hundreds of written words, spoken words, phrases and idioms. Seeing and hearing gives me two chances to recognize a word.
When 周有光 invented Pinyin, he wanted to use digraph and diacritic sign as less as possible. So he use J Q X to represent the alveolo-palatal consonants. And he use ju qu xu jue que xue juan quan xuan to represent jü qü xü jüe qüe xüe jüan qüan xüan. Because there is no ju qu xu in Beijing Mandarin phonetic system. And he use the same i in both zhi chi shi ri and zi ci si and bi pi mi, though the vowels were totally different. He use iu to represent iou and ui to represent uei and un to represent uen. Though it might be confusing sometimes even for pupils of Chinese. It did helpful when you type. In pinyin 25 of 26 of the Latin alphabet was used. And only zh ch sh 3 digraph consonants. Only ü in nü lü nüe lüe are letters with a digraph. I type Mandarin 7 times faster than English
I think Pinyin was the greatest invention of Chinese language in the 20th century! You may find that J Q X are all alveolo-palatal consonants. And zh ch sh are all retroflex
As long as there is zh, ch or sh inside a pinyin, you need to curl your tongue to pronounce it, don’t curl if there isn’t, that’s the rule. V in pinyin also written as an “u” with two dots on top is pronounced the same as 于 or 鱼 but first tone, because most kids already knew what a 鱼 is and its pronounciation, if they don’t know the character they would be shown a picture of a fish to remind them of the sound, hopefully they will point at it excitedly yelling "yü(2)"; sometimes teachers use sounds of very common characters/pictures showing the objects or actions that grade schoolers would instinctively recognize to represent the sounds of the pinyins, it is easier than just telling them to repeat the sounds over and over till they start to stick, I would go so far to theorize that each pinyin sound's derived from popular chinese sounds, a=doctor telling you to open your mouth,c=刺猬的刺but first Tone, x= 西, q=七, b=波，f=佛but first tone (advanced character, show picture of a buddha instead)etc....pretty much anything that isn’t aeiou(v) is treated as a first tone sound, it is not much different from learning the English alphabet(mostly through natural exposure). Pinyin might be an inferior system for foreigners , but for Chinese kindergarteners and first graders? Not so much; I said "might be" becasue after looking over the yale romanization, I doubt that it can teach you the exactly correct sound of a character from the get-go, where as pinyin gives you the perfect, "un-scrutinizable" version everytime, if you follow its rules to the letter; it is definitely capable of teaching near-perfect sounds to foreigners, but from there they will have to listen a lot to the natives and tweak their pronounciations accordingly.
In my first attempt to learn Mandarin Chinese several years ago in preparation for a stay in Taipei and later in Shanghai and Suzhou I tried learning it via Pinyin alone and got nowhere aside from basic everyday phrases. I just couldn’t keep all the short one- and two-syllable words apart to remember them without being able to ‘attach’ them to something in my brain. Unlike in a Romance language any sound would make sense, or not. Now in my second attempt I focused on the meaning and writing of the Hanzi characters first, then later added learning the readings/pronunciation via Pinyin. That sequence made the sounds stick far better now that I had a visual respectively imaginative imprint in my mind to distinguish the characters and words. I think it makes sense to early in your studies spend some time learning to distinguish the tones when listening, but then to not fret too much over them initially not trying to remember everything at once (words, meaning, tones, ...). The feel for that naturally gets better and better over time, like in any other language. Color-coding the tones also helped me initially as a visual aid. Apps like Pleco can do that automatically, or you can make your own flashcards (later when you read full sentences in regular print the colors can fade away). And also initially maybe go through all the some 400 possible sound combinations in Pinyin, especially the a bit tricky ones mentioned by Steve. There are apps and overview charts for that, but it also really helps to have a tutor or see video of a native speaker explaining the basic tongue positions and which shape your lips should be in without having to learn complex phonetic transcriptions or looking at odd diagrams. Aside from Pinyin I also like Gwoyeu Romatzyh as a Romanization system since that eliminates the tone mark accents or numbers, so if you are unsure about a particular Pinyin pronunciation it can help to look at that in addition (Wiki usually provides it for words), even though there is much less material to study and read texts in that. The Wade-Giles or Yale systems don’t really seem to have a huge difference or advantage compared to learning Pinyin as the most widely used transcription system to me, though I’m sure they were also good and would seem more natural if you began with that back in the day. I haven’t really experimented a lot with Bopomofo/Zhuyin yet which is still popular in Taiwan for transcription and also as a way to type quickly on a keyboard, though they have officially adopted Pinyin as well in recent years.
I just started learning, but as a native English speaker, although pinyin doesn’t make sense to me, I just accepted it and I’m getting used to it. So there’s no questioning of the why, but just do and repeat.
7:30 Actually pin yin is a very unfortunate system of writing Chinese. 7:37 However, all you have to do is get used to it. So it really isn't a problem. 7:45 The other thing that's not good about pin yin is... Haha, found that hilarious. But it hits close to home because you immediately gave an example of a word that I now know I've been saying incorrectly (chi). Serves me right for relying on too much pin yin. Thanks! You're great, Steve.
Hi Steve! Thanks so much for making this video. I'm a native English speaker who just started learning Mandarin this month. I actually just made a video a couple of weeks ago talking about how I was struggling to hear the difference between x/sh, zh/j, and q/ch in pinyin. Your explanation is very helpful!
The best explanation that made "x" click for me immediately was this: Make an "s" sound. Now make a "sh." Now make a sound somewhere between those. That is your Chinese "x." For an example, listen to the City Wok character in South Park.
Before I even begin to watch the video. I've been learning Japanese for three years now, and I can already have something somewhat resembling a conversation with a person on italki. And this learning of Japanese and interest in history and the kanji I think naturally arose an interest in Chinese too. I'm just listening to Chinese songs and looking up or requesting their translations, and the pronunciation is definitely something I want to understand, I can barely hear the difference between the tones. And I don't quite understand the difference between ch - q, j - zh. I know Russian and I heard that it should make it easier for me to produce the correct sounds. (x is very much, if not identical to the Russian щ if I'm not mistaken) Well, on to the video! Update: Indeed I can't imagine the tongue diagrams helping me.
As a Taiwanese/native chinese speaker, I always felt like the “x” alphabet in pinyin sounds exactly like the “sh” sound in English. There’s no need to complicate it with something like soft or hard “s” in English 😂 As for the “sh” alphabet in pinyin, it sounds more like the “shr” from the word shreck. 😉
Steve, thanks for another great video. Believe it or not, I found your explanation helpful re: Irish, which I didn't expect! Because there are only 18 letters in the Irish alphabet, and quite a few sounds that don't exist in English, the orthography gets *very* odd sometimes (to an English-speaker's eyes), somewhat like the problems you describe with pinyin. It's not insurmountable by any means - there is a phonetic system involved that's relatively regular - but even though I can sound words out fairly well now, looking up new words I've heard but never seen in print is still quite difficult at times - "which of the four orthographic options to make the "ooh" sound does *this* word use - wait, which "ooh" did I hear?" etc. I'm not quite sure exactly what you said that made Irish make a little more sense to me - maybe it was just the general reminder that there are many other languages out there that require you to trust your ears more than what you see on the page. As a writer, I have an abiding love for the written word, and I tend to get easily frustrated when the two don't match up how I'm expecting them to, which is a habit I'm working on! Anyway, thanks again. Your words are always encouraging.
Thanks Steve. I am not too bad at pronouncing Chinese, I always learned with pinyin, so I am already used to it. But I always had issues with CHI, to eat. We have to remember that that that I is not pronounced, it's just a CH with a high tone. Your tips are useful, thank you. If you can answer, Id be really grateful: How many hours per week do you find most beneficial for mentoring sessions? I am working on an English Teaching certificate and exchanging lessons with a Mandarin qualified teacher. I am enjoying the process immensely, and it's technically free. I'd love to hear your thoughts about what you find most useful
There are so many factors. It depends on your stage in the language. It depends on what other pressures there are on your time. I tend to start with once a week so that I can continue to focus on my input activities. At some point I step it up to two and then three a week.
Very interesting! As a beginner, I did notice that the "i" in pinyin does indeed seem quite inconsistent, e.g. chī (chr) vs yī (ee) vs sì (like sih but cut short). I've also found that different resources use different pronunciations for the same words, e.g. from the library I got "Get Talking Mandarin Chinese in Ten Days" by Song Lianyi, in which zhè in pinyin is pronounced more like "jay" rather than the more common "juh" that I've heard elsewhere (LingQ, Sonia Gil of Fluenz, and the HelloChinese and Lingodeer Android apps). Also, you mentioned a Chinese podcast or webpage that you'd put a link to with diagrams, but I don't see it. I'd be interested in checking it out. Also, are there any xiangsheng dialogues for beginners? I found one on TH-cam from user lilifoti but I don't know enough to say whether it is any good or not. th-cam.com/video/C_0-bVseVYQ/w-d-xo.html
In this live stream from Yoyo Chinese, the guy also says "jay guh" about 3 minutes in. He said he lived in Taiwan for five years (after living in mainland China for five), so is this difference part of the Taiwanese Mandarin accent? th-cam.com/video/xWU41tIdrvU/w-d-xo.html
The Yale romanisation makes sense for an English native speaker, but i assure you it's so counter intuitive for speakers of other languages, i find the pinyin very "neutral" and not so hard to learn. I also love 相声 but understanding them is so so labor intensive at my level
i would like to ask how much of the 相声 peace do you actually can understand before going over them in detail? and from my experience even after going over it couple of times a lot of it remain a blur. I wander what you guys take on it? modern performers like 郭德纲 I find almost impossible to understand...thanks
Today I understand about 80% depending on content. When I used them to improve my tones I understand less than 30%. But the music and rhythm of my favourite, Hou Baolin was just enchanting. Look for 侯宝林
I personally think Zhuyin is better for pronunciation. Although it's harder to learn for people whose native language uses roman letters, it gives a better understanding. That's not to say Pinyin doesn't work, I used Pinyin for a while but after living in Taiwan I wanted to teach myself Zhuyin. After doing so, I realized a couple of pronunciation flaws I had been making and fixed them. Also, Taiwanese books/articles that are meant for younger people tend to have Zhuyin next to the Hanzi, similar to Japanese Furigana, which is great for people learning the language.
You're got to where you are in languages without learning formal phonetics such as the IPA? It should be a matter of hours to learn most of it if not less.
Hi Steve! So when a Chinese character is written with an X in pinyin, it's actually supposed to be pronounced as S (well, not exactly like S, but almost) and not like CH or SH? For example 謝謝 is pronounced more like "Sie Sie" rather than "Che Che" (roughly speaking)? I'm in the process of learning Chinese and have not understood this until now as I'm learning solo and don't have a teacher. Thank you for a great channel with interesting content. Hälsningar, Sofia från Sverige
I don't see a problem with consonants in pinyin. Like, in Portuguese ‹x› is /ʃ/, in Albanian ‹q› is /c/, and in Turkish ‹c› is /ʤ/. So what's wrong with using ‹z, c› for/‹ʦ, ʦʰ/, for example?You just have to expect writing system to not be the same as in English. Suggestion: look up the pronounciation in Wikipedia or something when you just start learning Mandarin. :p
That's why he said pinyin it's not a problem if you get used to it. The thing is, pinyin is an arbitrary tool to help you pronounce the characters. It makes sense, therefore, to use a system that represents sounds using letters you are already used to as having those sounds (like using dzai instead of zai for 在, or dz instead of zi for 子). Turkish, for example, is a language that uses the Latin alphabet, not Chinese characters, so you have to get used to letters representing different sounds, like it or not. I am a native speaker of Portuguese, and, in my opinion, the Yale romanization makes much more sense than pinyin.
How do you pronounce duì对, suì岁, huì会, huì回? (dweh, sweh, kweh, way) and what's the difference between ZH, Q and CH anyway. I find all of this very difficult to grasp!
Based on English pronunciation , or the value of letters in English, dway, sway, hway. Zh is j as in jump. Q is ch as in cheese, Ch is ch as in church. If you stray ever so slightly from pure Chinese pronunciation, it won’t matter. In any case there are lots of variations within Chinese as spoken by natives.
Pinyin can clearly be easier or harder depending of your own language. You can bet many French will not pronunced the 'h' at all (NI'Ao, Ou Jin tao...). Also, How many other languages do we "butcher" even when they're writen in the latin alphabet ? Pinyin, is not so different, I think it isn't that bad, it's easy to learn even if, indeed, it could be made a little more "obvious" to us "latins". The hard part is still memorizing the tones. Although, to be frank, you could speak without really learning them, it's clearly going to sound strange to locals, and sometimes convey the wrong meaning, but if the rest is fine and there's enough context you should be understood most of the time. And you can catch those tones little by little when hearing them in a conversation or elsewhere. Obviously, it's much better with than without. But it should not be a stopper.
Its the lu and qu which i can never get right. My qu and chu sounds the same and i cant even say my girlfriends name which is 绿洲, she gets so frustrated i have to use her English name. Otherwise i think everything else is pretty okay, and tones are easy pronounce individually but hard to do in sentences. My problem is that its too hard for me to remember the tones, because they feel so detached from the word, we're supposed to treat them like a vowel in English, where without it H-LL could be Hell or Hill or Hull which are obviously different words, but because its just a line above the word my English educated brain never remembers it anymore than the dot above an i. The only success ive had in this has been through simply listening to the word and remember its slightly different tonal variation in sound, forgoing the actual written tonal system and just remembering the sound of the word itself. It would be so much easier if the tone changed the pinyin spelling somehow, but it doesn't. So for me the tones are the hardest part of mandarin, not to pronounce but just to remember.
Will my native tong has the ü as well as the u and the difference is in the position of your tongue. Just say u like the Spanish u and put your tongue against your lower teeth. You will get the ü just try to move your tongue around record yourself and you'll find out. Gl
Hi Steve I remember watching a video recently, maybe this one where you talked about reading a book that was a compilation of Essays in Chinese during your time at Yale in China. I'm Studying Japanese in Japan right now and I'm struggling to find something similar to that that I can read that I'm interested in. I'm at a language school in a level that is for people with an ability around the N2 on the JLPT. Do you have any book recommendations in Japanese similar to that, something with short essays on History or something interesting that would be readable for someone around the N2 level or advice on how you go about finding reading materials that are both level appropriate and interesting in Japanese or any target language?
Mr Steve, could you please talk about Latin is not the root of "romantic languages". I've watched a lot of documentaries talking about Iberic is the real root.
Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve oh, you must study or investigate more about it. It's amazing that theory. Maybe in a future you could make a video saying your own perspective. Saludos desde Mexico.
The genre is called 相声 ( Xiangsheng). My favourite is 侯宝林 th-cam.com/video/QMHoR-LdNj4/w-d-xo.html. You can google for them and find lots of videos on youtube.
The "Beijing" pronunciation by English speakers is one example of a "hyperforeignism" - where people apply rules they incorrectly perceive to exist in another language. Similarly, English speakers often pronounce "coup de grace" as "coup de gras" because they think every final consonant must be silent in French...
I am Chinese, I am learning English now,I hope I can improve my English ,who wanna help me? And I can teach someone who wanna learning Chinese language , thank you.
as a Chinese teacher , i'm just thinking about this = = i think we should change Chinese into something like Japanese , with characters and letters, and the letters can be invented with the example like Korean alphabet
God the Father: Love Me as I love you. -Wednesday, September 10th, 2014 @ 03:00 My dearest daughter, let it be known that every time a man sins against Me, I will forgive him. Sin may separate him from Me but I still love the sinner. Let it be known that I love those who are oblivious to Me. I desire all those who may feel that I do not Exist to listen now. I Am within your grasp. Please call out to Me. I want you. I love you. I need you, for you are part of My Flesh. And, as part of My Flesh I feel lost when you do not respond to Me. Like a parent who gives life to a child, I await your response. A baby naturally responds to a parent. A parent naturally loves its child for this is part of the Gift that I bestow upon humanity. I Am your Father. I Am your Creator. I Am Who I Am. Don’t you know that I love you all with a longing that is only known to those of you who have become parents? I cry Tears of great sorrow when you do not know Who I Am. My Heart is heavy as I call out to you now. Love Me as I love you. Your Eternal Father, God the Most High
why would I want to change your mind? You are happy with Pinyin. Go for it. I gave you my reasons for preferring the Yale system. Maybe it’s just what I was used to.
An excellent video, Steve (one of many)! I've studied Chinese for a year. Here's my 2 cents for starters:
Learn pinyin and the sounds together. Pinyin is the way Chinese people "type" on computers and smartphones, so you will use it forever. It was designed for Chinese children (not foreigners!), so most letter groups don't match English. But it is phonetic, once learned.
Don't worry about tones. I find them hard to memorize, but you don't need them to type Chinese, or to look up words alphabetically. For written Chinese you only need to read characters (but not draw them) and type pinyin (without tones). For me the pitch patterns of whole phrases and sentences are much easier to hear and imitate. And they don't match the result of me "putting tones on every word" anyway.
I do best with Chinese subtitles: seeing each character as I hear the words. Over the last year I've learned and forgotten (as Steve says in another video) hundreds of written words, spoken words, phrases and idioms. Seeing and hearing gives me two chances to recognize a word.
When 周有光 invented Pinyin, he wanted to use digraph and diacritic sign as less as possible. So he use J Q X to represent the alveolo-palatal consonants. And he use ju qu xu jue que xue juan quan xuan to represent jü qü xü jüe qüe xüe jüan qüan xüan. Because there is no ju qu xu in Beijing Mandarin phonetic system. And he use the same i in both zhi chi shi ri and zi ci si and bi pi mi, though the vowels were totally different. He use iu to represent iou and ui to represent uei and un to represent uen. Though it might be confusing sometimes even for pupils of Chinese. It did helpful when you type. In pinyin 25 of 26 of the Latin alphabet was used. And only zh ch sh 3 digraph consonants. Only ü in nü lü nüe lüe are letters with a digraph. I type Mandarin 7 times faster than English
I think Pinyin was the greatest invention of Chinese language in the 20th century! You may find that J Q X are all alveolo-palatal consonants. And zh ch sh are all retroflex
Sin duda encontrarme con su canal fue lo mejor que me pudo pasar, vídeos de hace años me han ayudado mucho. ¡Gracias!
finally again a video about chinese! Missed it!!! Thanks steve
As long as there is zh, ch or sh inside a pinyin, you need to curl your tongue to pronounce it, don’t curl if there isn’t, that’s the rule. V in pinyin also written as an “u” with two dots on top is pronounced the same as 于 or 鱼 but first tone, because most kids already knew what a 鱼 is and its pronounciation, if they don’t know the character they would be shown a picture of a fish to remind them of the sound, hopefully they will point at it excitedly yelling "yü(2)"; sometimes teachers use sounds of very common characters/pictures showing the objects or actions that grade schoolers would instinctively recognize to represent the sounds of the pinyins, it is easier than just telling them to repeat the sounds over and over till they start to stick, I would go so far to theorize that each pinyin sound's derived from popular chinese sounds, a=doctor telling you to open your mouth,c=刺猬的刺but first Tone, x= 西, q=七, b=波，f=佛but first tone (advanced character, show picture of a buddha instead)etc....pretty much anything that isn’t aeiou(v) is treated as a first tone sound, it is not much different from learning the English alphabet(mostly through natural exposure). Pinyin might be an inferior system for foreigners , but for Chinese kindergarteners and first graders? Not so much; I said "might be" becasue after looking over the yale romanization, I doubt that it can teach you the exactly correct sound of a character from the get-go, where as pinyin gives you the perfect, "un-scrutinizable" version everytime, if you follow its rules to the letter; it is definitely capable of teaching near-perfect sounds to foreigners, but from there they will have to listen a lot to the natives and tweak their pronounciations accordingly.
This was really helpful, I've been scrambling my brains lately over zh v. j and q v. ch
In my first attempt to learn Mandarin Chinese several years ago in preparation for a stay in Taipei and later in Shanghai and Suzhou I tried learning it via Pinyin alone and got nowhere aside from basic everyday phrases. I just couldn’t keep all the short one- and two-syllable words apart to remember them without being able to ‘attach’ them to something in my brain. Unlike in a Romance language any sound would make sense, or not. Now in my second attempt I focused on the meaning and writing of the Hanzi characters first, then later added learning the readings/pronunciation via Pinyin. That sequence made the sounds stick far better now that I had a visual respectively imaginative imprint in my mind to distinguish the characters and words.
I think it makes sense to early in your studies spend some time learning to distinguish the tones when listening, but then to not fret too much over them initially not trying to remember everything at once (words, meaning, tones, ...). The feel for that naturally gets better and better over time, like in any other language. Color-coding the tones also helped me initially as a visual aid. Apps like Pleco can do that automatically, or you can make your own flashcards (later when you read full sentences in regular print the colors can fade away). And also initially maybe go through all the some 400 possible sound combinations in Pinyin, especially the a bit tricky ones mentioned by Steve. There are apps and overview charts for that, but it also really helps to have a tutor or see video of a native speaker explaining the basic tongue positions and which shape your lips should be in without having to learn complex phonetic transcriptions or looking at odd diagrams.
Aside from Pinyin I also like Gwoyeu Romatzyh as a Romanization system since that eliminates the tone mark accents or numbers, so if you are unsure about a particular Pinyin pronunciation it can help to look at that in addition (Wiki usually provides it for words), even though there is much less material to study and read texts in that. The Wade-Giles or Yale systems don’t really seem to have a huge difference or advantage compared to learning Pinyin as the most widely used transcription system to me, though I’m sure they were also good and would seem more natural if you began with that back in the day. I haven’t really experimented a lot with Bopomofo/Zhuyin yet which is still popular in Taiwan for transcription and also as a way to type quickly on a keyboard, though they have officially adopted Pinyin as well in recent years.
I just started learning, but as a native English speaker, although pinyin doesn’t make sense to me, I just accepted it and I’m getting used to it. So there’s no questioning of the why, but just do and repeat.
Thanks to you I can finally pronounce "yuan"/"ywen"!
MANY THANKS! GREAT! BRAVO!
7:30 Actually pin yin is a very unfortunate system of writing Chinese.
7:37 However, all you have to do is get used to it. So it really isn't a problem.
7:45 The other thing that's not good about pin yin is...
Haha, found that hilarious. But it hits close to home because you immediately gave an example of a word that I now know I've been saying incorrectly (chi). Serves me right for relying on too much pin yin. Thanks! You're great, Steve.
Hi Steve! Thanks so much for making this video. I'm a native English speaker who just started learning Mandarin this month. I actually just made a video a couple of weeks ago talking about how I was struggling to hear the difference between x/sh, zh/j, and q/ch in pinyin. Your explanation is very helpful!
The best explanation that made "x" click for me immediately was this: Make an "s" sound. Now make a "sh." Now make a sound somewhere between those. That is your Chinese "x." For an example, listen to the City Wok character in South Park.
Before I even begin to watch the video.
I've been learning Japanese for three years now, and I can already have something somewhat resembling a conversation with a person on italki. And this learning of Japanese and interest in history and the kanji I think naturally arose an interest in Chinese too. I'm just listening to Chinese songs and looking up or requesting their translations, and the pronunciation is definitely something I want to understand, I can barely hear the difference between the tones. And I don't quite understand the difference between ch - q, j - zh. I know Russian and I heard that it should make it easier for me to produce the correct sounds.
(x is very much, if not identical to the Russian щ if I'm not mistaken)
Well, on to the video!
Update: Indeed I can't imagine the tongue diagrams helping me.
As a Taiwanese/native chinese speaker, I always felt like the “x” alphabet in pinyin sounds exactly like the “sh” sound in English. There’s no need to complicate it with something like soft or hard “s” in English 😂 As for the “sh” alphabet in pinyin, it sounds more like the “shr” from the word shreck. 😉
This is perfectly timed, thanks! I'm planning on starting Mandarin in June once I reach a certain point in spanish and hebrew😊
How'd that go?
Could you please do a video on getting to an advanced level of comprehension in a language (preferably Japanese)?
This is comparing pinyin with English, but I don't think pinyin was based on English but a composite of European languages.
I thought pinyin was created for Portuguese learners. So the sounds make sense to them. It's just a problem for English-speaking learners.
Steve, thanks for another great video. Believe it or not, I found your explanation helpful re: Irish, which I didn't expect! Because there are only 18 letters in the Irish alphabet, and quite a few sounds that don't exist in English, the orthography gets *very* odd sometimes (to an English-speaker's eyes), somewhat like the problems you describe with pinyin. It's not insurmountable by any means - there is a phonetic system involved that's relatively regular - but even though I can sound words out fairly well now, looking up new words I've heard but never seen in print is still quite difficult at times - "which of the four orthographic options to make the "ooh" sound does *this* word use - wait, which "ooh" did I hear?" etc. I'm not quite sure exactly what you said that made Irish make a little more sense to me - maybe it was just the general reminder that there are many other languages out there that require you to trust your ears more than what you see on the page. As a writer, I have an abiding love for the written word, and I tend to get easily frustrated when the two don't match up how I'm expecting them to, which is a habit I'm working on! Anyway, thanks again. Your words are always encouraging.
Interesting video. I had noted the problems with pinyin, but your comments put a lot into perspective.
Thanks Steve. I am not too bad at pronouncing Chinese, I always learned with pinyin, so I am already used to it. But I always had issues with CHI, to eat. We have to remember that that that I is not pronounced, it's just a CH with a high tone. Your tips are useful, thank you.
If you can answer, Id be really grateful: How many hours per week do you find most beneficial for mentoring sessions?
I am working on an English Teaching certificate and exchanging lessons with a Mandarin qualified teacher. I am enjoying the process immensely, and it's technically free. I'd love to hear your thoughts about what you find most useful
There are so many factors. It depends on your stage in the language. It depends on what other pressures there are on your time. I tend to start with once a week so that I can continue to focus on my input activities. At some point I step it up to two and then three a week.
Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve Makes a lot of sense. It's what I am doing, coincidentally. Thanks for taking the time to reply. Take care!
Very interesting! As a beginner, I did notice that the "i" in pinyin does indeed seem quite inconsistent, e.g. chī (chr) vs yī (ee) vs sì (like sih but cut short). I've also found that different resources use different pronunciations for the same words, e.g. from the library I got "Get Talking Mandarin Chinese in Ten Days" by Song Lianyi, in which zhè in pinyin is pronounced more like "jay" rather than the more common "juh" that I've heard elsewhere (LingQ, Sonia Gil of Fluenz, and the HelloChinese and Lingodeer Android apps).
Also, you mentioned a Chinese podcast or webpage that you'd put a link to with diagrams, but I don't see it. I'd be interested in checking it out. Also, are there any xiangsheng dialogues for beginners? I found one on TH-cam from user lilifoti but I don't know enough to say whether it is any good or not. th-cam.com/video/C_0-bVseVYQ/w-d-xo.html
In this live stream from Yoyo Chinese, the guy also says "jay guh" about 3 minutes in. He said he lived in Taiwan for five years (after living in mainland China for five), so is this difference part of the Taiwanese Mandarin accent? th-cam.com/video/xWU41tIdrvU/w-d-xo.html
The Yale romanisation makes sense for an English native speaker, but i assure you it's so counter intuitive for speakers of other languages, i find the pinyin very "neutral" and not so hard to learn.
I also love 相声 but understanding them is so so labor intensive at my level
Find some transcripts and import them into LingQ.
i would like to ask how much of the 相声 peace do you actually can understand before going over them in detail? and from my experience even after going over it couple of times a lot of it remain a blur. I wander what you guys take on it? modern performers like 郭德纲 I find almost impossible to understand...thanks
Today I understand about 80% depending on content. When I used them to improve my tones I understand less than 30%. But the music and rhythm of my favourite, Hou Baolin was just enchanting. Look for 侯宝林
Great video really enjoyed it 👍
现在大多数人都很少会用yale惹叭。。。大多数应该都是用拼音的，不过这个vid我发现yale也不错，更容易知道读音，现在学校都教拼音了的。学习华语的人们加油！ Those who r learning Chinese gambateh neh
I personally think Zhuyin is better for pronunciation. Although it's harder to learn for people whose native language uses roman letters, it gives a better understanding. That's not to say Pinyin doesn't work, I used Pinyin for a while but after living in Taiwan I wanted to teach myself Zhuyin. After doing so, I realized a couple of pronunciation flaws I had been making and fixed them. Also, Taiwanese books/articles that are meant for younger people tend to have Zhuyin next to the Hanzi, similar to Japanese Furigana, which is great for people learning the language.
You're got to where you are in languages without learning formal phonetics such as the IPA? It should be a matter of hours to learn most of it if not less.
Hi Steve! So when a Chinese character is written with an X in pinyin, it's actually supposed to be pronounced as S (well, not exactly like S, but almost) and not like CH or SH? For example 謝謝 is pronounced more like "Sie Sie" rather than "Che Che" (roughly speaking)? I'm in the process of learning Chinese and have not understood this until now as I'm learning solo and don't have a teacher. Thank you for a great channel with interesting content. Hälsningar, Sofia från Sverige
Hej! Yes it is sh or ch it is sie or sye.
strawberrycake64 X in pinyin ,it sounds like Hush Shush in English ....the SH sound .I am Chinese I can teacher you
I don't see a problem with consonants in pinyin. Like, in Portuguese ‹x› is /ʃ/, in Albanian ‹q› is /c/, and in Turkish ‹c› is /ʤ/. So what's wrong with using ‹z, c› for/‹ʦ, ʦʰ/, for example?You just have to expect writing system to not be the same as in English. Suggestion: look up the pronounciation in Wikipedia or something when you just start learning Mandarin. :p
That's why he said pinyin it's not a problem if you get used to it. The thing is, pinyin is an arbitrary tool to help you pronounce the characters. It makes sense, therefore, to use a system that represents sounds using letters you are already used to as having those sounds (like using dzai instead of zai for 在, or dz instead of zi for 子).
Turkish, for example, is a language that uses the Latin alphabet, not Chinese characters, so you have to get used to letters representing different sounds, like it or not.
I am a native speaker of Portuguese, and, in my opinion, the Yale romanization makes much more sense than pinyin.
I came here to learn mandarín and now I learned that idiosyncrasies is a word in my own language lmfao
How do you pronounce duì对, suì岁, huì会, huì回? (dweh, sweh, kweh, way) and what's the difference between ZH, Q and CH anyway. I find all of this very difficult to grasp!
Based on English pronunciation , or the value of letters in English, dway, sway, hway. Zh is j as in jump. Q is ch as in cheese, Ch is ch as in church. If you stray ever so slightly from pure Chinese pronunciation, it won’t matter. In any case there are lots of variations within Chinese as spoken by natives.
Pinyin can clearly be easier or harder depending of your own language. You can bet many French will not pronunced the 'h' at all (NI'Ao, Ou Jin tao...). Also, How many other languages do we "butcher" even when they're writen in the latin alphabet ? Pinyin, is not so different, I think it isn't that bad, it's easy to learn even if, indeed, it could be made a little more "obvious" to us "latins". The hard part is still memorizing the tones. Although, to be frank, you could speak without really learning them, it's clearly going to sound strange to locals, and sometimes convey the wrong meaning, but if the rest is fine and there's enough context you should be understood most of the time. And you can catch those tones little by little when hearing them in a conversation or elsewhere. Obviously, it's much better with than without. But it should not be a stopper.
Its the lu and qu which i can never get right. My qu and chu sounds the same and i cant even say my girlfriends name which is 绿洲, she gets so frustrated i have to use her English name. Otherwise i think everything else is pretty okay, and tones are easy pronounce individually but hard to do in sentences. My problem is that its too hard for me to remember the tones, because they feel so detached from the word, we're supposed to treat them like a vowel in English, where without it H-LL could be Hell or Hill or Hull which are obviously different words, but because its just a line above the word my English educated brain never remembers it anymore than the dot above an i. The only success ive had in this has been through simply listening to the word and remember its slightly different tonal variation in sound, forgoing the actual written tonal system and just remembering the sound of the word itself. It would be so much easier if the tone changed the pinyin spelling somehow, but it doesn't. So for me the tones are the hardest part of mandarin, not to pronounce but just to remember.
Will my native tong has the ü as well as the u and the difference is in the position of your tongue. Just say u like the Spanish u and put your tongue against your lower teeth. You will get the ü just try to move your tongue around record yourself and you'll find out. Gl
Thanks for the video!!! It’s helpful!
100% agreed
Hi Steve I remember watching a video recently, maybe this one where you talked about reading a book that was a compilation of Essays in Chinese during your time at Yale in China. I'm Studying Japanese in Japan right now and I'm struggling to find something similar to that that I can read that I'm interested in. I'm at a language school in a level that is for people with an ability around the N2 on the JLPT.
Do you have any book recommendations in Japanese similar to that, something with short essays on History or something interesting that would be readable for someone around the N2 level or advice on how you go about finding reading materials that are both level appropriate and interesting in Japanese or any target language?
Nice video !
Mr Steve, could you please talk about Latin is not the root of "romantic languages". I've watched a lot of documentaries talking about Iberic is the real root.
I know nothing about the subject.
Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve oh, you must study or investigate more about it. It's amazing that theory. Maybe in a future you could make a video saying your own perspective.
Saludos desde Mexico.
Steve, can you please write the name of the performers that you suggest to learn tones ?
The genre is called 相声 ( Xiangsheng). My favourite is 侯宝林 th-cam.com/video/QMHoR-LdNj4/w-d-xo.html. You can google for them and find lots of videos on youtube.
He has an vast book collection 😍😍😍💞💞💞💞💞💞 Oh my💞
I was thinking the same thing. Wild
So useful!
Steve Coffin right
Mr. Kaufmann, how should I learn French in 6 months to reach level B2 to pass French exam?
thanks
Lost of listening and reading. Try LingQ. And look for people online to speak to.
Anyone know where I can get the Chinese comic dialogue? Either CD or just audio files? The same ones as Steve.
you will have to Google Xiangsheng or 相声
🍎 📷 👌 " Mandarin Chinese "? can there be Mandarin Hebrew ? הבר 你好
Chinese has many languages
Where can we buy the flash cards?
you will have to Google, as I did, Yale in China China Chinese character flashcards.
so all the books in the background are on foreign languages :)
Not all by any means. All the CDs are though.
The "Beijing" pronunciation by English speakers is one example of a "hyperforeignism" - where people apply rules they incorrectly perceive to exist in another language. Similarly, English speakers often pronounce "coup de grace" as "coup de gras" because they think every final consonant must be silent in French...
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你的中文很好.
Jim Jones omoooooooo.... I'm at the earliest stage of learning mandarin but I was able to understand this..... Thannkkkssss... It motivated me
What do you start first. listening our reading?
Both.
I prefer reading the text along with hearing the audio at the same time. LingQ is perfect for this.
I am Chinese, I am learning English now,I hope I can improve my English ,who wanna help me? And I can teach someone who wanna learning Chinese language , thank you.
I can help you
China should just copy the Korean alphabet 😂
I would actually like to see Korean re-introduce Chinese characters.
as a Chinese teacher , i'm just thinking about this = = i think we should change Chinese into something like Japanese , with characters and letters, and the letters can be invented with the example like Korean alphabet
허허허허허허허허허허허허허 ㅇㅅㅇ
Either wear the glasses or don’t but you gotta pick one
God the Father: Love Me as I love you.
-Wednesday, September 10th, 2014 @ 03:00
My dearest daughter, let it be known that every time a man sins against Me, I will forgive him. Sin may separate him from Me but I still love the sinner. Let it be known that I love those who are oblivious to Me. I desire all those who may feel that I do not Exist to listen now.
I Am within your grasp. Please call out to Me. I want you. I love you. I need you, for you are part of My Flesh. And, as part of My Flesh I feel lost when you do not respond to Me. Like a parent who gives life to a child, I await your response. A baby naturally responds to a parent. A parent naturally loves its child for this is part of the Gift that I bestow upon humanity.
I Am your Father. I Am your Creator. I Am Who I Am. Don’t you know that I love you all with a longing that is only known to those of you who have become parents? I cry Tears of great sorrow when you do not know Who I Am. My Heart is heavy as I call out to you now.
Love Me as I love you.
Your Eternal Father,
God the Most High
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Wtf, bro
pinyin is way better than yale or wade-giles change my mind
why would I want to change your mind? You are happy with Pinyin. Go for it. I gave you my reasons for preferring the Yale system. Maybe it’s just what I was used to.