I did this unknowingly by watching Chinese dramas for a year almost everyday then start learning Chinese. I had two teachers until this day and both of them were surprised by my pronunciation, i still have a long way to go but listening too much Chinese before start to learn it helped more than i can imagine😄
I really need to expose myself to more Chinese! Similar to you but with Japanese, I watch a lot of Japanese media so my pronunciation (and more than that, my listening ability) is much better than my Chinese even though I started formally learning Chinese munch longer than Japanese TT. I'm virtually tone deaf to be honest.
Same with korean I've been watching kdramas for years, recently a friend began to learn the language and we noticed that i already know a lot of vocabulary and i can identify the pronunciation of words whose meaning i don't even know
I think speaking helps tune your listening as well. I know plenty of kids who grew up in the U.S. but their parents speak Chinese at home. They understand Chinese very well, but can't speak it well at all becausae they would typically reply to their parents in English.
@@yeroca Speaking helps you to increase your active vocabulary and maybe train your grammar. How could it help to "tune" your listening is beyond my understanding
@@AJ-fo2pl not my experience. In fact active vocabulary is almost always much smaller than active one, so it can't make a big difference in comprehension. There're also lots of people who can understand another language but not speak it. I also find that concentrating solely on input in the beginning, speeds up the learning process. And speaking is honestly stressful in itself, even on the higher level, so I doubt doing it early could reduce your overall stress level. But it may be different for different personalities.
just today i complained to my teacher that I can not retain tones and prononciations from card-method hanzi learning, no matter how hard i try. But I can joyfully use everyday words that I heard in chinese dramas and be understood. Now, I just need to find a chinese drama about botany and organic pigments...
I always said that foreigners focus way to much on the tones exactly how you mentioned in this video. Listen to the way native speakers speak and just try to imitate them. Once you know how the tones sound it's much more efficient than trying to memorise tones.
Thanks for this video... one of my Chinese teachers told me that tones are important but the rhythm inside the sentences is even more important. Every language has its own rhythm. Greetings from Italy!
This method is how my university Chinese speaking course began. I think it’s set me up well with “Chinese ears” and even though I haven’t studied Chinese in over ten years, I can still distinguish the tones pretty well.
Good advice. You can memorize the 5 tones in minutes, but that is not how people speak. The tones are used for isolated words, but sentences use intonation (and pauses) for meaning, and that often over-rides the isolated tones. It's part of the language.
I think the most important thing is that you keep trying to communicate. People are generally very gracious when they know that you are trying and will help you!
@@ShuoshuoChinese Wow, you are tooo beautiful!! whomever see you shall believe that God is real and whenever I see you I am always in a dream and when we wake up we all will realize that all this life was nothing but a dream and that only God is whats true and real. I dont know how can atheists believe that such a very attractive beauty queen like you came from monkeys hahaha 😄 There was a teacher whom didn't believe in the existence of God, He said to his students do you see God?, the students replied no we don't see God, so the teacher said if you don't see God it means there is no God, then a smart student stood up and said to the other students hey guys do you see the teachers brain?, then the students replied no we don't see the teachers brain, the student then said then the teacher is crazy he got no brain :0) God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident. one God for all of us, all the universe shows unity with diversity, there are different things different creatures and different materials but are all made of particles and atoms God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident. This life is temporary, while the next is forever, eternal, either in paradise, or in Hell fire! so lets all try to be good humans in life & not to be bad, and be kind & try to obey God through following his words and commands and following his great final messenger to humanity, and the true rightly successors of his final and last messenger whom are an extension of the messenger of God and of his light. Shine and spread the light sunshine. 😘 I wonder how will this look like in Chinese 😊
@@ShuoshuoChinese Wow, you are tooo beautiful!! whomever see you shall believe that God is real and whenever I see you I am always in a dream and when we wake up we all will realize that all this life was nothing but a dream and that only God is whats true and real. I dont know how can atheists believe that such a very attractive beauty queen like you came from monkeys hahaha 😄 There was a teacher whom didn't believe in the existence of God, He said to his students do you see God?, the students replied no we don't see God, so the teacher said if you don't see God it means there is no God, then a smart student stood up and said to the other students hey guys do you see the teachers brain?, then the students replied no we don't see the teachers brain, the student then said then the teacher is crazy he got no brain :0) God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident. one God for all of us, all the universe shows unity with diversity, there are different things different creatures and different materials but are all made of particles and atoms God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident. This life is temporary, while the next is forever, eternal, either in paradise, or in Hell fire! so lets all try to be good humans in life & not to be bad, and be kind & try to obey God through following his words and commands and following his great final messenger to humanity, and the true rightly successors of his final and last messenger whom are an extension of the messenger of God and of his light. Shine and spread the light sunshine. 😘 I wonder how will this look like in Chinese 😊
When I first started learning Chinese 14 years ago I spent a lot of time with this online pronunciation chart of pinyin syllables and I’ve always gotten component on my pronunciation. Chinese sounds and tones were so foreign to me at first, I couldn’t produce them before I trained my ears to hear them. Great advice!
Going to leave updates here: day 2 of practicing with a chart, before I could make out less than half of the tones I was hearing, and now i can pronounce them better and when using the maorma site i get more than 70% right, let's see how it will be after a month
How did you manage to capture footage of me trying to learn (1:30)?!?! That's my problem exactly - learning individual words' tones, and then failing miserably at the whole sentence!!😂 I'd actually started getting discouraged about pronounciation and so I've been focusing more on reading/writing characters - but this video was a huge encouragement! It showed me what I'm doing wrong and gave me a new technique to practise my pronunciation going forward, and I can't wait to get started! Thank you so much!! New subscriber :)
The method I used was take a sentence and first say the tones one by one, then small phrases, and then the whole sentence. 我，喜欢，吃，苹果。 我喜欢，吃苹果。 我喜欢吃苹果。 Because if you go from the first step straight to the third step you'll surely go wrong.
Wo Xihuan Chi Pingguo....Is this sentence used as an universal example. Like every apps, books, videos I've used, read and watched they use these common sentences 😭😭
So true!! I just spent a month in China with my (chinese) wife and kids , only my wife and some younger people know what I’m saying but all the older relatives have no idea what i am saying I think because my tones are not so good. I’m going to backtrack now and get them better!
I have been awkwardly using the hand tone tracing technique for years until I gave up and hoped that the listener understands me from context [facepalm cry emoji]....Over time my fluency increased because I didn't overemphasize the perfect tone, however 1 in 5 conversations result in an awkward pause when the native listener would stop and tell me I didn't catch that which affected my confidence to ever use that word again if I had other options which is [sad emoji].
This actually makes sense to me. People have the exact same problem telling and pronouncing *vowels* apart in a sufficiently different language, and the solution is the same as with tones: training your ear. English has like 20-something vowel sounds, and people do just fine
We have all the Chinese tones in UK English but of course they don't change lexical meaning although they usually have an attitudinal or grammatical or focus function. General pitch and volume of speaking can also make a difference :)
It's a good practice but it leaves out 1 important thing that i came to realize - tones on their own can be very hard to distinguish, thinking of them as of a melody helps (which is why this practice works well, because it incorporates moving to longer words). The pitch relation between tones is what really helps your brain distinguish between them, eg. in the example you brought up, the biggest difference between the 1st and 4th tone in kai and tone 3 and 2 in shi is the starting pitch in the former but then the pitch relationship of the first syllable to the second is what really lets you identify both with ease. This melody is what is really picked up by the brain during regular speech and learning it can be made faster if one is conscious of this.
(in another words, if you were to split the two syllables and pitch shift only their relation to each other, you could make the two words sound almost identical without actually affecting the "direction" of the tone at all, perhaps even unrecognizable in regular speech, similarly you could take tone 3 and 2, and pitch the first syllable up and it might be very hard to distinguish from pitch 1 and 4, of course this isn't all there is to it but this pitch difference between the tones and the melody it creates is what's really the easiest for us to hear, rather than thinking about "directions" of the tones)
@@DMSBrian24 @DMSBrian24 I think I know what you are saying, it was very discouraging to feel I was supposed to think of those directions for every single syllable. I agree that what you said above is how it works in the mind (although like you say there will be other factors). I thought I would be fated to forever pronounce in monotone despite knowing of the existence of tones...
my method that is working well so far: 1. I download the subtitles of a Cdrama I like (I use a youtube sub downloader online), this becomes my sentence, grammar and vocab textbook 2. I ask gpt to give piyin and translation of a sentence, and sometimes to explain the grammar 3. I add the sentence to Anki with its translation + the pronunciation from the drama (you can use the "record" feature), I also add a computer pronunciation to get the slower and very clean version (I might actually ditch the latter in the future) 4. train as usual with Anki. Not only did this improve my pronunciation tremendously, but my listening skills too! And my sentence structures are much more natural too. I would never understand shit before even though I knew each words that were said. Chinese speak fast and TBH I don't think they respect tones all the time. To me it sounds like context takes over and the tones are quickly brushed off when the sentence is said fast.
What has helped me with tones: associating a tone with a colour on Pleco, training tone pair drills, learning characters and words in context from whole phrases.
the most usefull exercise for me was saing "la la" with different tones combinations..there are only 20 tones combinations, like 11 12 13 14 10 21 22... the more you repeat the faster you recognize combination of tones in live speech
What I have experience in past 3 years is that you will get adjusted and will improve day by day if you keep talking with native people. So basically you will get tones right if you keep listening and keep talking
I first noticed this issue when trying to practice with my girlfriend. She is a native Chinese speaker and I am not. Even though I can understand "textbook" Chinese I can't understand a word she says. But unlike your mother, her mother just yells all the time so I can understand her perfectly haha!
I think this particular problem is the one that has vexed me the most, and it seems that the answer is pretty simple, but needs a lot of practice, and therefore quite a lot of time. However, I think if I focus on the most common words first, I'll become more and more comfortable speaking. Thank you for this video!
mandarin chinese student here! I'm strugggling a lot to learn how to distinguish chinese tones and since now I've attempted to master them without a real strategy and without succeeding. This video is pure gold!
Pronunciation is a very important step and it’s one I’ve been focused on. I will work with these tips. I should also ask my Chinese friend to check my pronunciation and see if there are any mistakes 👍
this video is so helpful and i feel like youre completely right😢 we may think we know the tones but we actually can’t recognize them in a fast sentence. thank u
Exactly how I intuitively picked it up; never memorised the tones, but I would listen closely and always try to repeat it exactly how I heard it. In this way, I was able to speak quite well, even as a beginner! This is a brilliant insight to keep in mind when improving one's spoken Chinese. Best of luck to everyone!
Thanks for explaining this issue. I always not confident in speaking Chinese because it's difficult for me to say it correctly with the right tones. But I will take your suggestion to put more time on training my ears rather than memorizing the tones. Your advise is like opening my eyes on this new approaching method for learning tones. Thank you so much.. ❤❤
I said Mai Dongxi right on the first try so I am now graduating from my chinese studies and onto bigger things. It's been the journy of a life time. I love you all. Mwah. Mwah. Taa taa. 😘
I've found that it is best to convert accents into "letters" according to the following system: 我们可以说... _wo men /.ke_yi -shuo... (一个人 => /.yi\ge/ren) because to Europeans accents count as secondary things and are often left out. (the . marks tone changes, because it was far from obvious for me which 3rd tone changes in practice before another 3rd tone. Also, yi and bu change tones and it is best to keep them "phonetic")
I really recommend Pimsleur for practice speaking. Each lesson is 30 minutes of speaking practice that you can do while driving, doing housework, etc. I think it made my pronunciation quite good. But it's really only good for speaking; you need other resources to learn listening, grammar, reading, and writing.
this is such a good video! this has completely changed my perspective on learning tones and tackling chinese. it all seemed so daunting at first but now i finally get how i can accomplish this! i mean, chinese baby’s dont learn what the tones are for each word, do they? nope! they just know because only one sounds right! acquiring is such an important part of language learning but i didn’t know exactly how to apply that to chinese until now. thank you so much! ill be sure to update my progress!!
Always impressed with your unorthodox method of teaching Chinese language making learning them so enjoyable and easier to master. You are such a wonderful teacher and I do learn a lot from you . Thank you very much
I think the thing to keep in mind is...the context of the situation you're using Chinese. If you have a good understanding of the language, even if you don't know it perfectly, it's not a problem.
This is where I think a native speaking teacher is crucial--to ensure proper pronunciation. I've often thought it would be useful to record words from a native speaking teacher, and then have the ability to listen and compare my recorded pronunciation to this reference. I think you could even compare the waveforms of the recordings as a way to evaluate the correctness.
I did something like this back in college for a couple of semesters. I played tapes that came with my introductory text and recorded myself reciting with the taped lessons. Playing a wind instrument in high school years before that also helped greatly, I think. Learning pinyin well helped a lot, too. My first teacher only let us use the old zhuyin fuhao system. I don't think it worked as well after I was given a great pinyin guide that described in detail how the mouth and tongue worked for each sound combination. Once your mouth and tongue are doing the right thing, proper pronunciation is effortless. Of course, the biggest help was studying in China and hearing the language being used in the wild.
Thank you for the tips! I am using a translator with the microphone to repeat tones after chinese characters from movies- it is like hit and miss mostly everytime , but sometimes the tones are right and the translation is accurate.
even in languages with VERY simple pronunciation like Japanese, you can misunderstand since the words can be so similar, and at times you can mistake one sentence for another. i think listening is important for every language.
This very helpful advice and guidance about improving your tones and sensitivity to hearing them. Related to this, however, is learning they rhythm of phrases and sentences. In your interview with Steve Kaufman he made this point too, as something he found very helpful.
Thanks a lot for this video! I’m actually good at listening to and repeating tones. But sometimes it can happen that I can’t pronounce some sentences very fluently. I noticed that Chinese native speakers kind of put the words into different blocks and make short pauses between them. Maybe I should try that, too… 🤔
I try to read aloud the dialogues in my textbooks. If I can't read a sentence confidently and fluently (slower is fine) then I repeat it again and again until I can. The repetition makes such a big difference. I also practise speaking at home to myself (or my teddies 🧸😆), and that helps too. And yes, I break the dialogue into sections like you suggest. My only problem is I'm not sure if I take breaks where a native speaker would. To remedy that, I try to listen to Chinese, even if I don't understand any of it. I listen to livestreams of church services (they speak clearly, but not as clearly as the news or a drama, so I find them a great stepping stone between perfect pronunciation and normal people speaking) and podcasts. I find my listening skills are honestly my biggest weakness, so I need to do this much more than I do. Watching dramas and movies with subtitles is also the fantastic way to improve if you have the time!
Is there a similar thing like this pinyin chart for Thai? The tones of Thai had stressed me out so much that I quit it. If this can be applicable to Thai as well, that would be great.
I learned the tones a while back and can produce them to some extent (I might need to work a little on tone recognition), but I still have to stop a minute when someone talks about 1st or 3rd or whatever and think "which one is that again?" I just didn't learn them as different numbered tones so much as knowing how many of them there were, their respective qualities, and to just say whatever word or sentence comes up EXACTLY like the native speaker, to the best of my ability. Knowing that 馬 is 3rd tone is alright, but it's better to know that it's a low falling/falling-rising tone. 反正, 大好視頻說老師. 謝謝你!
very intersting. That's more or less what I've been doing without noticing it. I recently told my wife: repeating sentences in Chinese is like practising music!
hahaha I just realized and laughed when you started explaining the different tonations using kaishi🤣🤣apart from the correct pronunciation, the rest sounded like noise😅😂it was just so funny because it got me wondering, is this the kind of noise Chinese hear when we're speaking to them in wrong pronunciations?😂😂thanks shuo laoshi you're literally the best!!
After self studying Mandarin for a year I realise that I can get the real tones by listening to a sentence, then I exclude the words with the tone by copying the tone of that word in the sentence. It works exactly same in Vietnamese when you have to study the tones. now something like shi hou when I feel like I dont know how to read I will search for a sentence with shi hou in a dictionary then copy the tone of shi hou in that sentence sound, not by the sound of shi hou alone.
ive been practicing using this method for 2.5 years~ i can hear others' tones, but still cannot use them correctly myself in full sentences. so many mistakes, constantly. i think a big reason is because I began learning in my mid-twenties, not as a child
it doesn't matter how old you are, there are technique to acquire language like children do which is actually very effective at languages learning, "you probably already know this since you have been studying for so long", but in case you didn't know here is my two cents on the matter just type on TH-cam search "comprehensible input" and/or "Steve Kaufmann" and hopefully you will learn a lot.
This is basic when learning any language: intonation (the «music» behind a language, as «sung» by native speakers) is far more important than pronunciation (which might vary a lot between speakers of different regions). I think this video provides some sensitive advice, thank you! I must say that watching live streams on Chinese social media for the past few months helped me improve a lot very quickly, despite not understanding the majority of it as of yet. But I got whole language bits that I can later use to make sentences, the same way a child would learn. Learning isolated words never did it for me.
Omg I just found you (and follow u of course) I don’t really know why but I started seeing Chinese pronunciation videos and it became kind of a goal to learn it!! (At least a little bit) but God it’s really to hard the tones 😅😂 I’ll try to do everything you teach today.. I hope I can learn at least the basic conversation 😊 thank you!
Someone who's got the guts may try learning the tones of Hokkien or Cantonese which has 8 and 9 tones respectively including their entering tones. In comparison to those two, Mandarin is just a piece of cake. These are widely used in overseas Chinese communities like in America, Australia and South East Asia.
I’ve been using the Glossika tool, and it seems to fulfull some of your suggestions here. I’ve noticed that my RECOGNITION of tones has much improved using this tool. Any opinions on this tool? I don’t remember any videos you’ve done on this.
As an anglophone I can conceptualise the tones and their supposed directions in theory but find them very difficult to imitate. I'm not confident that I can produce anything other than monotonous Chinese yet but will try your method in terms of listening now that I can sort of distinguish the tones. Come to think of it, it's quite interesting how we (humans) naturally think of a higher or greater frequency as a "high" position and a lower frequency as a "low" position. I'm sure this thought is not original but the point is it's not a self explanatory concept that we can put into practice just like that.
ohhhhh thank you!!! i was thinking I would stay at the I know how to read directions and restaurant menu but no talking for me ever... chart here I come!
If you're searching for a way to be less tone deaf DONG CHINESE has a tone trainer where you can select which tones you want to practice It helped me a bit it's worth checking out in my opinion
I feel like this issue comes from pinyin, if you associate a character with a sound you don't have to think about the tones as much. Obviously, this can be an issue for the changing tones but it probably comes naturally with time.
I did this unknowingly by watching Chinese dramas for a year almost everyday then start learning Chinese. I had two teachers until this day and both of them were surprised by my pronunciation, i still have a long way to go but listening too much Chinese before start to learn it helped more than i can imagine😄
I really need to expose myself to more Chinese! Similar to you but with Japanese, I watch a lot of Japanese media so my pronunciation (and more than that, my listening ability) is much better than my Chinese even though I started formally learning Chinese munch longer than Japanese TT. I'm virtually tone deaf to be honest.
Completely support this. I have been watching Cdrama for the past year and have had similar results.
Same with korean
I've been watching kdramas for years, recently a friend began to learn the language and we noticed that i already know a lot of vocabulary and i can identify the pronunciation of words whose meaning i don't even know
fairy and demon?
Same here.
I believe listening skill is waaaay more important than pronunciation, and practicing listening ones naturally adapt to the tones
I think speaking helps tune your listening as well. I know plenty of kids who grew up in the U.S. but their parents speak Chinese at home. They understand Chinese very well, but can't speak it well at all becausae they would typically reply to their parents in English.
@@yeroca Speaking helps you to increase your active vocabulary and maybe train your grammar.
How could it help to "tune" your listening is beyond my understanding
@@AJ-fo2pl not my experience. In fact active vocabulary is almost always much smaller than active one, so it can't make a big difference in comprehension. There're also lots of people who can understand another language but not speak it.
I also find that concentrating solely on input in the beginning, speeds up the learning process.
And speaking is honestly stressful in itself, even on the higher level, so I doubt doing it early could reduce your overall stress level. But it may be different for different personalities.
Listening does no good if you can’t recognize words . Practicing pronunciation makes recognition of words a lot easier .
Yes, if you can hear the difference it's easier to speak
just today i complained to my teacher that I can not retain tones and prononciations from card-method hanzi learning, no matter how hard i try. But I can joyfully use everyday words that I heard in chinese dramas and be understood. Now, I just need to find a chinese drama about botany and organic pigments...
If you find a drama with those let me know!
Did you try Text-to-Speech apps (Google Translate, Narakeet, etc.)?
I always said that foreigners focus way to much on the tones exactly how you mentioned in this video. Listen to the way native speakers speak and just try to imitate them. Once you know how the tones sound it's much more efficient than trying to memorise tones.
Thanks for this video... one of my Chinese teachers told me that tones are important but the rhythm inside the sentences is even more important. Every language has its own rhythm.
Greetings from Italy!
This method is how my university Chinese speaking course began. I think it’s set me up well with “Chinese ears” and even though I haven’t studied Chinese in over ten years, I can still distinguish the tones pretty well.
Good advice. You can memorize the 5 tones in minutes, but that is not how people speak. The tones are used for isolated words, but sentences use intonation (and pauses) for meaning, and that often over-rides the isolated tones. It's part of the language.
Great point
I think the most important thing is that you keep trying to communicate. People are generally very gracious when they know that you are trying and will help you!
That’s also important!
@@ShuoshuoChinese
Wow, you are tooo beautiful!!
whomever see you shall believe that God is real
and whenever I see you I am always in a dream
and when we wake up we all will realize that all this life was nothing but a dream and that only God is whats true and real.
I dont know how can atheists believe that such a very attractive beauty queen like you came from monkeys hahaha
😄
There was a teacher whom didn't believe in the existence of God, He said to his students do you see God?,
the students replied no we don't see God, so the teacher said if you don't see God it means there is no God,
then a smart student stood up and said to the other students hey guys do you see the teachers brain?,
then the students replied no we don't see the teachers brain, the student then said then the teacher is crazy he got no brain
:0)
God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident.
one God for all of us, all the universe shows unity with diversity, there are different things different creatures and different materials but are all made of particles and atoms
God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident.
This life is temporary, while the next is forever, eternal, either in paradise, or in Hell fire!
so lets all try to be good humans in life & not to be bad, and be kind & try to obey God through following his words and commands and following his great final messenger to humanity, and the true rightly successors of his final and last messenger whom are an extension of the messenger of God and of his light.
Shine and spread the light sunshine. 😘
I wonder how will this look like in Chinese
😊
@@ShuoshuoChinese
Wow, you are tooo beautiful!!
whomever see you shall believe that God is real
and whenever I see you I am always in a dream
and when we wake up we all will realize that all this life was nothing but a dream and that only God is whats true and real.
I dont know how can atheists believe that such a very attractive beauty queen like you came from monkeys hahaha
😄
There was a teacher whom didn't believe in the existence of God, He said to his students do you see God?,
the students replied no we don't see God, so the teacher said if you don't see God it means there is no God,
then a smart student stood up and said to the other students hey guys do you see the teachers brain?,
then the students replied no we don't see the teachers brain, the student then said then the teacher is crazy he got no brain
:0)
God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident.
one God for all of us, all the universe shows unity with diversity, there are different things different creatures and different materials but are all made of particles and atoms
God initiated everything, and he redo too, and it is evident.
This life is temporary, while the next is forever, eternal, either in paradise, or in Hell fire!
so lets all try to be good humans in life & not to be bad, and be kind & try to obey God through following his words and commands and following his great final messenger to humanity, and the true rightly successors of his final and last messenger whom are an extension of the messenger of God and of his light.
Shine and spread the light sunshine. 😘
I wonder how will this look like in Chinese
😊
They are when learning Mandarin, French on the other hand... 😄
@@StevenHarmonGameswhich is one of the many reasons i don't plan on learning french
When I first started learning Chinese 14 years ago I spent a lot of time with this online pronunciation chart of pinyin syllables and I’ve always gotten component on my pronunciation. Chinese sounds and tones were so foreign to me at first, I couldn’t produce them before I trained my ears to hear them. Great advice!
Going to leave updates here: day 2 of practicing with a chart, before I could make out less than half of the tones I was hearing, and now i can pronounce them better and when using the maorma site i get more than 70% right, let's see how it will be after a month
Wow, impressive!
So, how you're doing?
三个月了，你怎么样？
How did you manage to capture footage of me trying to learn (1:30)?!?! That's my problem exactly - learning individual words' tones, and then failing miserably at the whole sentence!!😂 I'd actually started getting discouraged about pronounciation and so I've been focusing more on reading/writing characters - but this video was a huge encouragement! It showed me what I'm doing wrong and gave me a new technique to practise my pronunciation going forward, and I can't wait to get started! Thank you so much!! New subscriber :)
The method I used was take a sentence and first say the tones one by one, then small phrases, and then the whole sentence.
我，喜欢，吃，苹果。
我喜欢，吃苹果。
我喜欢吃苹果。
Because if you go from the first step straight to the third step you'll surely go wrong.
Wo Xihuan Chi Pingguo....Is this sentence used as an universal example. Like every apps, books, videos I've used, read and watched they use these common sentences 😭😭
So true!!
I just spent a month in China with my (chinese) wife and kids , only my wife and some younger people know what I’m saying but all the older relatives have no idea what i am saying I think because my tones are not so good. I’m going to backtrack now and get them better!
I have been awkwardly using the hand tone tracing technique for years until I gave up and hoped that the listener understands me from context [facepalm cry emoji]....Over time my fluency increased because I didn't overemphasize the perfect tone, however 1 in 5 conversations result in an awkward pause when the native listener would stop and tell me I didn't catch that which affected my confidence to ever use that word again if I had other options which is [sad emoji].
This actually makes sense to me. People have the exact same problem telling and pronouncing *vowels* apart in a sufficiently different language, and the solution is the same as with tones: training your ear.
English has like 20-something vowel sounds, and people do just fine
We have all the Chinese tones in UK English but of course they don't change lexical meaning although they usually have an attitudinal or grammatical or focus function. General pitch and volume of speaking can also make a difference :)
Same in Spanish.
It's a good practice but it leaves out 1 important thing that i came to realize - tones on their own can be very hard to distinguish, thinking of them as of a melody helps (which is why this practice works well, because it incorporates moving to longer words). The pitch relation between tones is what really helps your brain distinguish between them, eg. in the example you brought up, the biggest difference between the 1st and 4th tone in kai and tone 3 and 2 in shi is the starting pitch in the former but then the pitch relationship of the first syllable to the second is what really lets you identify both with ease. This melody is what is really picked up by the brain during regular speech and learning it can be made faster if one is conscious of this.
(in another words, if you were to split the two syllables and pitch shift only their relation to each other, you could make the two words sound almost identical without actually affecting the "direction" of the tone at all, perhaps even unrecognizable in regular speech, similarly you could take tone 3 and 2, and pitch the first syllable up and it might be very hard to distinguish from pitch 1 and 4, of course this isn't all there is to it but this pitch difference between the tones and the melody it creates is what's really the easiest for us to hear, rather than thinking about "directions" of the tones)
@@DMSBrian24 @DMSBrian24 I think I know what you are saying, it was very discouraging to feel I was supposed to think of those directions for every single syllable. I agree that what you said above is how it works in the mind (although like you say there will be other factors). I thought I would be fated to forever pronounce in monotone despite knowing of the existence of tones...
This is exactly what I needed to hear today! I’ve been hitting a plateau with my tone recognition, and I think this info will help me a ton. 非常感谢 💗
my method that is working well so far:
1. I download the subtitles of a Cdrama I like (I use a youtube sub downloader online), this becomes my sentence, grammar and vocab textbook
2. I ask gpt to give piyin and translation of a sentence, and sometimes to explain the grammar
3. I add the sentence to Anki with its translation + the pronunciation from the drama (you can use the "record" feature), I also add a computer pronunciation to get the slower and very clean version (I might actually ditch the latter in the future)
4. train as usual with Anki.
Not only did this improve my pronunciation tremendously, but my listening skills too! And my sentence structures are much more natural too. I would never understand shit before even though I knew each words that were said. Chinese speak fast and TBH I don't think they respect tones all the time. To me it sounds like context takes over and the tones are quickly brushed off when the sentence is said fast.
What has helped me with tones: associating a tone with a colour on Pleco, training tone pair drills, learning characters and words in context from whole phrases.
Pleco is really helpful. I also need the characters and the words in context to memorise better.
the most usefull exercise for me was saing "la la" with different tones combinations..there are only 20 tones combinations, like 11 12 13 14 10 21 22... the more you repeat the faster you recognize combination of tones in live speech
😆
What I have experience in past 3 years is that you will get adjusted and will improve day by day if you keep talking with native people.
So basically you will get tones right if you keep listening and keep talking
I first noticed this issue when trying to practice with my girlfriend. She is a native Chinese speaker and I am not. Even though I can understand "textbook" Chinese I can't understand a word she says. But unlike your mother, her mother just yells all the time so I can understand her perfectly haha!
😂😂😂
That's babling sounds that only native speaker can understand (in any language). Thanks for bringing that up.
I think this particular problem is the one that has vexed me the most, and it seems that the answer is pretty simple, but needs a lot of practice, and therefore quite a lot of time. However, I think if I focus on the most common words first, I'll become more and more comfortable speaking.
Thank you for this video!
Thank you. This is the first useful advice I've gotten for studying tones!
mandarin chinese student here! I'm strugggling a lot to learn how to distinguish chinese tones and since now I've attempted to master them without a real strategy and without succeeding. This video is pure gold!
Pronunciation is a very important step and it’s one I’ve been focused on. I will work with these tips. I should also ask my Chinese friend to check my pronunciation and see if there are any mistakes 👍
this video is so helpful and i feel like youre completely right😢 we may think we know the tones but we actually can’t recognize them in a fast sentence. thank u
I'm a Chinese,I study English recently,Can we exchange language？
Your Fang fa is so accurate and simple it makes most difficult language in the world very easy. Thank you.
Thank you for this tip, I’m just starting but this tip will shift how I study. Pronunciation is very important in my opinion.
Thank you so much for sharing tone with pin yin, it's really helping me a lot
One of the complicated languages but I will soon start learning it.
Exactly how I intuitively picked it up; never memorised the tones, but I would listen closely and always try to repeat it exactly how I heard it. In this way, I was able to speak quite well, even as a beginner! This is a brilliant insight to keep in mind when improving one's spoken Chinese. Best of luck to everyone!
Thanks for explaining this issue. I always not confident in speaking Chinese because it's difficult for me to say it correctly with the right tones. But I will take your suggestion to put more time on training my ears rather than memorizing the tones. Your advise is like opening my eyes on this new approaching method for learning tones. Thank you so much.. ❤❤
I said Mai Dongxi right on the first try so I am now graduating from my chinese studies and onto bigger things.
It's been the journy of a life time. I love you all.
Mwah. Mwah. Taa taa. 😘
I've found that it is best to convert accents into "letters" according to the following system:
我们可以说... _wo men /.ke_yi -shuo... (一个人 => /.yi\ge/ren)
because to Europeans accents count as secondary things and are often left out.
(the . marks tone changes, because it was far from obvious for me which 3rd tone changes in practice before another 3rd tone. Also, yi and bu change tones and it is best to keep them "phonetic")
Finally! It makes total sense now why I felt so tone deaf! Thank you so much~👍
I really recommend Pimsleur for practice speaking. Each lesson is 30 minutes of speaking practice that you can do while driving, doing housework, etc. I think it made my pronunciation quite good. But it's really only good for speaking; you need other resources to learn listening, grammar, reading, and writing.
Is it free?
@@leoamina2125no you either buy the course in full or do a monthly subscription
this is such a good video! this has completely changed my perspective on learning tones and tackling chinese. it all seemed so daunting at first but now i finally get how i can accomplish this! i mean, chinese baby’s dont learn what the tones are for each word, do they? nope! they just know because only one sounds right! acquiring is such an important part of language learning but i didn’t know exactly how to apply that to chinese until now. thank you so much! ill be sure to update my progress!!
Always impressed with your unorthodox method of teaching Chinese language making learning them so enjoyable and easier to master. You are such a wonderful teacher and I do learn a lot from you . Thank you very much
My God, you're a life saver! I'm currently back to self study and this is something I am struggling with
I think the thing to keep in mind is...the context of the situation you're using Chinese. If you have a good understanding of the language, even if you don't know it perfectly, it's not a problem.
非常感谢, 我学中文靠自己和这对我的帮助很大
This is where I think a native speaking teacher is crucial--to ensure proper pronunciation. I've often thought it would be useful to record words from a native speaking teacher, and then have the ability to listen and compare my recorded pronunciation to this reference. I think you could even compare the waveforms of the recordings as a way to evaluate the correctness.
I did something like this back in college for a couple of semesters. I played tapes that came with my introductory text and recorded myself reciting with the taped lessons. Playing a wind instrument in high school years before that also helped greatly, I think. Learning pinyin well helped a lot, too. My first teacher only let us use the old zhuyin fuhao system. I don't think it worked as well after I was given a great pinyin guide that described in detail how the mouth and tongue worked for each sound combination. Once your mouth and tongue are doing the right thing, proper pronunciation is effortless. Of course, the biggest help was studying in China and hearing the language being used in the wild.
1:40 this is exactly me!! Great video! Subscribed
1:25 "I'm in this video and I don't like it" 😂
IMHO input is important, even better when comprehensible 💯
going to give this a try, good research you did on what worked with people that learned well.
Thank you for the tips! I am using a translator with the microphone to repeat tones after chinese characters from movies- it is like hit and miss mostly everytime , but sometimes the tones are right and the translation is accurate.
Thank you so much for the Pinyin chart!
great video! i find these tips useful for learning tonal languages in general
Wow, thank you!!! Your videos help me so much, you are so great teacher!❤
Thanks!
Thank you!
even in languages with VERY simple pronunciation like Japanese, you can misunderstand since the words can be so similar, and at times you can mistake one sentence for another. i think listening is important for every language.
This very helpful advice and guidance about improving your tones and sensitivity to hearing them. Related to this, however, is learning they rhythm of phrases and sentences. In your interview with Steve Kaufman he made this point too, as something he found very helpful.
Thanks a lot for this video! I’m actually good at listening to and repeating tones. But sometimes it can happen that I can’t pronounce some sentences very fluently. I noticed that Chinese native speakers kind of put the words into different blocks and make short pauses between them. Maybe I should try that, too… 🤔
I try to read aloud the dialogues in my textbooks. If I can't read a sentence confidently and fluently (slower is fine) then I repeat it again and again until I can. The repetition makes such a big difference.
I also practise speaking at home to myself (or my teddies 🧸😆), and that helps too.
And yes, I break the dialogue into sections like you suggest.
My only problem is I'm not sure if I take breaks where a native speaker would.
To remedy that, I try to listen to Chinese, even if I don't understand any of it. I listen to livestreams of church services (they speak clearly, but not as clearly as the news or a drama, so I find them a great stepping stone between perfect pronunciation and normal people speaking) and podcasts.
I find my listening skills are honestly my biggest weakness, so I need to do this much more than I do.
Watching dramas and movies with subtitles is also the fantastic way to improve if you have the time!
@@katyb2793 Thanks a lot - I think I’ll find something in your comment that will help me as well! 😊
@@ZengHuaXiansheng you're welcome! Sorry I ended up rambling on 😅
I'm definitely not very good at Chinese at all, but these things have helped me :)
I think those blocks are generally called "thought groups". They occur in English as well.
@@yeroca oh thank you! That makes it easy to look it up!
I think I'll try this method, perhaps 15 min of practice to begin with as I am a beginner and have been told I am surely tone deaf.
sandhi patterns, you gotta learn them (deliberately or by exposure)
1:41 I mean get out my study room while I’m making a fool of myself like this lol 😂😂😂
Awesome video! I needed this and I didn't even know it
What a coincidence, I believe your mother speaks my hometown tongue, Leng Shui Jiang, Hunan, China. Great 👍👍
Very helpful! Thank you❤
That's how I learnt Chinese up to advanced level, podcasts and spoken language around me
Is there a similar thing like this pinyin chart for Thai? The tones of Thai had stressed me out so much that I quit it. If this can be applicable to Thai as well, that would be great.
Very useful!
谢谢老师🙏😁
I learned the tones a while back and can produce them to some extent (I might need to work a little on tone recognition), but I still have to stop a minute when someone talks about 1st or 3rd or whatever and think "which one is that again?" I just didn't learn them as different numbered tones so much as knowing how many of them there were, their respective qualities, and to just say whatever word or sentence comes up EXACTLY like the native speaker, to the best of my ability. Knowing that 馬 is 3rd tone is alright, but it's better to know that it's a low falling/falling-rising tone. 反正, 大好視頻說老師. 謝謝你!
very intersting. That's more or less what I've been doing without noticing it. I recently told my wife: repeating sentences in Chinese is like practising music!
Wow that's very good advice, thank you!
hahaha I just realized and laughed when you started explaining the different tonations using kaishi🤣🤣apart from the correct pronunciation, the rest sounded like noise😅😂it was just so funny because it got me wondering, is this the kind of noise Chinese hear when we're speaking to them in wrong pronunciations?😂😂thanks shuo laoshi you're literally the best!!
Very helpful. Thank you.
You help me a lot with this video. Thanks!!!
After self studying Mandarin for a year I realise that I can get the real tones by listening to a sentence, then I exclude the words with the tone by copying the tone of that word in the sentence. It works exactly same in Vietnamese when you have to study the tones.
now something like shi hou when I feel like I dont know how to read I will search for a sentence with shi hou in a dictionary then copy the tone of shi hou in that sentence sound, not by the sound of shi hou alone.
So helpful! I would say this is also a must if you are learning your Chinese primarily from interaction or from listening to/watching media.
Yes, learning a language interaction is the key
ive been practicing using this method for 2.5 years~ i can hear others' tones, but still cannot use them correctly myself in full sentences. so many mistakes, constantly. i think a big reason is because I began learning in my mid-twenties, not as a child
it doesn't matter how old you are, there are technique to acquire language like children do which is actually very effective at languages learning, "you probably already know this since you have been studying for so long", but in case you didn't know here is my two cents on the matter just type on TH-cam search "comprehensible input" and/or "Steve Kaufmann" and hopefully you will learn a lot.
This is basic when learning any language: intonation (the «music» behind a language, as «sung» by native speakers) is far more important than pronunciation (which might vary a lot between speakers of different regions).
I think this video provides some sensitive advice, thank you! I must say that watching live streams on Chinese social media for the past few months helped me improve a lot very quickly, despite not understanding the majority of it as of yet. But I got whole language bits that I can later use to make sentences, the same way a child would learn. Learning isolated words never did it for me.
So basically just practice listening to different tones a lot.
Thankyou for the tips!
Omg I just found you (and follow u of course) I don’t really know why but I started seeing Chinese pronunciation videos and it became kind of a goal to learn it!! (At least a little bit) but God it’s really to hard the tones 😅😂 I’ll try to do everything you teach today.. I hope I can learn at least the basic conversation 😊 thank you!
Someone who's got the guts may try learning the tones of Hokkien or Cantonese which has 8 and 9 tones respectively including their entering tones.
In comparison to those two, Mandarin is just a piece of cake.
These are widely used in overseas Chinese communities like in America, Australia and South East Asia.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful tip. ❤
I’ve been using the Glossika tool, and it seems to fulfull some of your suggestions here. I’ve noticed that my RECOGNITION of tones has much improved using this tool. Any opinions on this tool? I don’t remember any videos you’ve done on this.
As an anglophone I can conceptualise the tones and their supposed directions in theory but find them very difficult to imitate. I'm not confident that I can produce anything other than monotonous Chinese yet but will try your method in terms of listening now that I can sort of distinguish the tones.
Come to think of it, it's quite interesting how we (humans) naturally think of a higher or greater frequency as a "high" position and a lower frequency as a "low" position.
I'm sure this thought is not original but the point is it's not a self explanatory concept that we can put into practice just like that.
Thanks for the video.
ohhhhh thank you!!! i was thinking I would stay at the I know how to read directions and restaurant menu but no talking for me ever... chart here I come!
Thank you so much. Helpfull
This is what I was looking for. I really believe that learning tones separately makes no sense, cuz in real speech they are reduced
this is so goood!!! and helpful! Thank you!
If you're searching for a way to be less tone deaf DONG CHINESE has a tone trainer where you can select which tones you want to practice
It helped me a bit it's worth checking out in my opinion
I feel like this issue comes from pinyin, if you associate a character with a sound you don't have to think about the tones as much. Obviously, this can be an issue for the changing tones but it probably comes naturally with time.
Omg the studying tones is me 100 percent I was crying 😭😂😂😂 Why is it that your mum has wrong pronunciation?
most people have some accent in china
Thank you!
Nice video thank you!
Thank you! I will try to practice these more. These days, I only watch 《奔跑吧》 (this will be my third run through all of the seasons 😂) and 《追星星的人》第三季。
Liked that video, thank you
Excellent tip!
Very good vídeo thank u!!
Ohhhhh! It's like knowing the melody to a song but not all of the words correctly
My childhood listening F4, 5566, Jay Chou, watching china movie help me a lot better than try memorizing every tones sound 😢