Mastering Tones in Thai Chinese and other Tonal Languages by Polyglot Stuart Jay Raj
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ส.ค. 2024
- 'I can't learn a tonal language like Thai, Chinese or Vietnamese - I'm tone deaf!'
If that were the case, does that mean that tone deafness only afflicts people who don't speak tonal languages?
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I have wanted to make this clip for a long time. Since starting my latest binge of making language videos, I have been receiving up to 10 emails an hour of people suggesting topics and asking questions.
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Of all of those emails, about 30% of them include requests for a lesson on tonal languages and how to go about learning tones.
When I was shooting this clip, I did a whole lot of sections on Chinese - Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese tones also. I decided to trim it down for time's sake and also so that I could keep it focused in one direction and make it most useful to most people. I will put the other Chinese portions up in another clip.
Regardless, I believe that the information in this clip will be helpful for people struggling to get their tongue and their ears around any tonal language and I hope by the end of it, tonal languages will become a lot less mysterious.
Please mail me any suggestions or questions via my blog through the contact section at stujay.com
Stu Jay Raj เจ 王懷樂
Your Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese pronounces are fantastic!!
My dad is Chinese, my mom is Vietnamese . i was born in Thailand.
when i heard you spoke those 3 'languages
it was like ......... GOD! HE IS DEFINITELY NATIVE SPEAKER !!!! :)))))
how long have you learned them?
Then you will surely nail all three tonal languages and that makes you to learn any language in the world easily.
" Krai-Kăi-Kài-Gài " (Who sells (a/the) chicken egg(s)? = ใครขายไข่ไก่)
" Mai-Mài-Mâi-Mái-Măi "
(This could mean "Is the new microphone burnt, Mai?
OR "Is Mài's microphone burnt, Măi?" = ไมค์ใหม่ไหม้มั้ยไหม OR ไมค์(ของ)ใหม่ไหม้มั้ยไหม)
Try to master these two sentences! :)
Finally I understood how all this tonal system works! Now it's only a matter of practice. Thank you so much!
Great tutorial! Helped me a lot to understand the tones. Thanks a lot Stuart
Hi Kevin. The word เสียง 'siěng' comes from the Chinese word 聲 shēng - literally meaning sound / voice. It's also cognate with the Vietnamese word tiếng which is extended to mean 'language' - tiếng Việt =Vietnamese. It doesn't imply 'tone' though. Just 'sound' or 'voice'. If you aska Thai about วรรณยุคต์ 'wannayuk', most will say there is siěng èk, siěng tho etc. THis was originally from 'throat position 1, 2' etc which corresponded originally to the wanayuk classes / markers.
OMG! I had been struggling with the Thai tones for quite a while now because I was "tone deaf" but Dennis and his mom are really helpful! Thank you so much!
Thank you so much, Stuart! Let me say this is the best explanation about how tones are working I ever have been listening to!
I've been in Thailand for the last 5 months and I have been TRYING to sort those tones, to hear them and then say them. Not a big success. And today I have stumbled across this video! I love the story, the graphs and exercise! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I feel I got the idea now and just need to practice it ;)
holy smokes. i was struggling learning thai because i was having difficulty with tones (amongst other things haha..) but this is seriously one of the most helpful videos about tones. thank you so much!
Stu: I, and I'm sure many others, appreciate this raw enthusiasm for learning languages and positive encouragement. Helping people to dissolve their doubt barriers is a great service. What I hear so often in many countries is constant negativity regarding language learning - "oh, (insert language here) is so difficult, foreigners can't learn it". It's so ubiquitous and so discouraging. Keeping on doing the opposite, mate. Keep on telling people that they absolutely *can* do it. There's nothing like being a living example.
Everybody: You absolutely *can* learn any language you want to. Just ignore the people who say it's too difficult.
Thank you and Yes yes yes. I find a lot of the frustration comes from someone not quite understanding the system they're learning and then start to draw conclusions about things that seemingly don't make sense... in this case TONES, because they are a perhaps foreign concept. Many books then come up with elaborate systems to explain at face value What to do on the surface which in many cases might not seem to be too coherent or logical and peoples brains go into overload and shut down. Often the native speakers of that language might not understand how to articulate why something is the way it is so just accept it as a fact that it's difficult because they always see foreigners struggle. It doesn't need to be like that.
Yeah and often the native speakers aren't consciously aware of some prominent speech patterns in their language. For example, in Hungarian and Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable, but when I tell them that they often say, "Oh, really?"
Those kinds of patterns are really useful for a foreigner learner to know.
Another example is in German, where nearly all German nouns can be known by looking at the ending of the word (suffix). For example nouns ending with -ung are basically always feminine (die). But most native German speakers don't know that, because they learned the gender organically by growing up there.
So in each language there are so many shortcuts and patterns that can make understanding and learning easier. I can see that's what you do with the Thai lessons. It's great. It's all about breaking down the mystical barrier between the learner and the language.
I recently started to learn 20+ languages simultaneously (that's my goal), and your videos will help me a lot with Thai for sure.
this is so helpful, so glad I found this video.
as a cantonese and mandarin speaker myself I have been struggling with thai tones for a while now, but this video actually helped me liken the 5 thai tones to the 4 tones in mandarin and 9 tones in cantonese so I can remember them more easily!!
Fantastic! It's all in the throat :)
I'm glad this helped you! .. working on more tools in this area of 'tones' that will hopefully be useful to you too.
No one could explain the tones like you...where can I get your tutorials ?
That is a very good point and taken with thanks! I will remember for future clips :)
This is my new favorite channel! I'm subscribing!
I have to admit that your explanation is so clear and even Thai people will not be able to explain as good as you do. Chapeau,!! Very intelligent .
Just subscribed. You are indeed the expert teacher for tonal language. You are a gifted teacher. Jia uou Stuart .
One of the most valuable video I've ever seen!!!
great vdo! your enthusiasm is infectious
I am from Vietnam, sorry for my bad English but thank you so much and I really enjoy your clip about tone of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai. It's really clear and exactly how I do when I'm speaking my nature tone.
Stuart, your explanation is very helpful. Thanks
Thank you Stuart for the video! This was crucial to learn before I begin learning Thai! It was very helpful, especially with the graph, so I can be assured of what tone I'm using! This video has been great, and I thank you so much for posting it!!!!!! Much praise for your speaking abilities and retention! As well as sharing!!!!
Stuart, thank you so much. I’m English & married to a Thai lady, we live in Bangkok. My sister in law has lived in England for over 30 years & speaks English & Thai. She is here visiting us & we had been out for a meal & on leaving we went to get in the lift. A number of Thai people pushed past me to get in the lift, which was marked on the floor for social distancing. I said “it’s ok, I will get the next lift.” Then I heard it “Kao ma, kao ma.” I got in the lift & said to my sister in law, “I understood kao ma.” She replied along with some other Thai people, “I don’t understand. You said something about a dog.” I repeated myself, “kao ma, is come in.” They replied “No, you are saying something about a dog!” I told them that I would add it to my list of other Thai words that I am incapable of saying.
I really had a desire to return to the UK but went onto you tube in an effort to come to grips with the tonal side of the language. You started to use the example ‘ma’ & went on to kao ma. As I said before, thank you Stuart, it is starting to sink in at last
Man, this has just increased my excitement/curiosity level beyond what I thought possible and it's only been a few days of looking into 'passat Thai'! and it's more than just the language.
Off I go now to get this "Cracking Thai Fundamentals" thang. I just wish I thought of studying another language before now. It is common in Australia to be mono-lingual but now I see how impoverished I have been!
This was really informative, made me think about tones in totally different light
Still watching and learning from it almost 10 years later. Thanks.
Wow! This is the break down of tones I have been desperately searching for thanks bruh! Subscribed🙂
Great! What language are you learning?
Thai, so far I have learned most of the consonants and a few vowels.
Amazing video, that was really helpful! Tones were one of the major reasons I failed at learning Mandarin a few years ago, but now I've decided to take up Cantonese instead and this has given me a real confidence boost.
โห!!!คลิปนี้10ปีแล้ว อาจารย์สุดยอดมาก😊
wow.. What a great, insightful and easy to understand tutorial on tones. I have been struggling to grasp this concept from a native Thai tongue,. Thank you for the free tutorial and for sharing! Very kind of you Stuart. :)
That was REALLY, REALLY helpful. Thanks for that, it was quite a simple explanation and the story helps to make it stick. I'm going to Thailand to teach English in a few months, so I started to study Thai. It's my first tonal language! (Japanese, Spanish, and French aren't known for Tones as Thai is.) But you've helped greatly!
omg this is soooo easy!!! I always thought tonnes were impossible, but you have somehow succeeded in teaching the impossible in just under 20 minutes! And, guess what, this was so simple even I was able to learn it. I cannot thank you enough!
Daniel Sampaio That's great to hear!
That was really helpful! Thank you Stu! :)
Great explanation of tones! So helpful.
wow thank you so much you are an excellent teacher i was having difficulty learning thai and your video helped alot
Good video. It brings out the commonalities between languages and thus the shared cultures and histories. Well done, Stuart.
Learning languages since I was a kid. Vietnamese is much more recent though. Still a long way to go to bring my Vietnamese up to par.
You are brilliant Stuart. Brilliant!!!!
i'm a chinese cantonese learning thai i must say your video is the best when it comes to tones. great video :D
This is amazing, it helped me a lot. Thank you!
Sir, you are brilliant. This clip is amazing. Impressive. Even though I am a native Mandarin speaker, I don't know how to teach people in such a impressive way. Thank you very much.
Thanks. I hope that for anyone that is finding difficulties in getting their tones in Thai or Chinese ... or other tonal languages, they can watch this a few times over and hopefully it will iron some of the problems out.
Best explanation ever. Thank you very much.
Best thai tones class ever!
I've been wanting to do this clip for a while now. I shot about twice as much footage, but had to chop out a lot of it and keep the main bits.
fantastic explination of the tones.
thanks. hopefully there will be a lot more soon after watching this :)
This an awesome video.So much better than many I've seen.I would still say that as an English speaker,beginning Cantonese, that a Cantonese video with the tones really exaggerated would be great.After explaining these tones then a Cantonese speaker would say different words in a tone,heavily pronounced,and the student would identify the meaning of the word.This was done a few times,but I think we need a lot more repititions,or at least I do.This would help,enormously.
Your Thai accent is as clear as a native speaker.
That's really amazing 😄😄
I'm moving to Thailand to teach English in 2 weeks this video has REALLY helped me learn the the tones, khob kun maak! :)
Bro, thank you. From the bottom of my heart... Thank you.
stuart , you r an amazing polyglot and true inspiration. can you give us a crash course on the pronunciation and tones of mandarin???
There might be some minor glide down depending on different factors, but really, if you keep the general contours as I have written them, you won't go wrong.
Only 4000 views for a great video like this? You gotta be kidding me!! Thanks so much stuart for this usefull video : ) Keep it up :)
Fantastic explanation! I will use the "Dennis" method!!!!
your a life savior , thanks a million
+EIKE Chang Hope it helps! Are you Chinese? If you speak any Chinese dialect, what I explained here should help with that too.
Epic vid Stu. How do these videos not get a million views?
That's one good way of doing it ... though it's important to know the 'back end' of it just what the tones are - not just approximates so that you render them correctly. For example in Cantonese there are 2 falling tones - Yiin (higher register) and Yang (lower register). An exclamation might be used for both - but they are different tones. As a basic guide though, it does the trick.
Amazing. Tones are difficult and you get them all cleared in different final languages. Wow
Thank you.
Thank you very much. It helped me a lot with my Thai.
The best tone explanation I came across seriously. The standardization of teaching those peculiarities has came at the expense of intuitive explanations. Which makes it hard for self taught persons like myself to progress. Xie xie ni. shukriya. Hindi is also on my list. Which resources would you recommend? I have a relatively good Farsi background which helps with some vocab. Do you have any experience with Turkic languages. (Many questions at once you don't have to answer them all :))
Wood new not burn (with vocal question word ending - 'mai' - ). In Thai this is said with five different tones (or short and long vowels) of mai. Translated meaning is 'new wood does not burn, does it?'
There are a number of these textbook 'tongue twisters' in Thai and I hope Stuart will demonstrate and lecture us along with his unique insights. Seeing a tone graph of this sentence would be helpful.
+Paul Hai Not five different tones. "Not" and "burn" are synonyms, pronounced identically. There is no mid-tone in this example.
Nicely explained! @ 17:25 "Tones are all in the throat"; what the muscles in the throat & mouth are doing
I could not find your video on Tone Sandhi.
Such a great video!!!!. Very clear and you really sound like a native Thai. I recommended this video to my friends who is interested in Thai. Just one comment, 16:20 sounds to me more like ไหม(silk) than หมาย. Greeting from Czech Republic :)
Before you finished the 5 tone thing with the "why"s and "yeah" I realized what you were doing at about 12:08, that those happened to be pretty good approximations of thai tones.
I've actually done the same thing when I was studying Thai, Mandarin and Cantonese, put the tones in a relative order that is easier to remember in comparison to the others, and kind of "sing" them in the order that I just put them in. It helped me remember how the tones should sound within a word.
I also put them in order, as a Mandarin native speaker
Right! - and you can see from the spelling that သံ in burmese is ส 's' in Thai which corresponds to many southern Chinese varieties of the initial sound in 聲 (声) ... And it's interesting that the English word 'Sound' links into Sanskrit 'Svara' - Indonesian / Malay-Suara
Tones are in the throat! It took me about 2 years of learning Mandarin before I came to realize this on my own, and this is the first time I've heard anyone say it. This should be taught from the beginning! It is the most fundamental thing to know about tones and it isn't typically taught.
I think for anyone struggling with tones, this clip should take some of the mystery out of them. Good luck!
Wow, that was awesome
Thanks :)
I've never seen the Michael Thomas course - sounds interesting. I did this clip the other night to upload for youtube - I've wanted to do it for a long time. This section is part of my Cracking Thai Fundamentals programme. I want to get a proper video version of the whole course produced and deliver online to participants.
excellent video
Best explanation of tones on TH-cam. Thank you!
@Levente Maier - because instead of adding blocks length-wise, tones provide a way of getting more out of a single syllable.
Very helpful thank you very much
Help spread the word!
That was why the languages became tonal in the first place - usually, tones were devised in order to distinguish words that lost consonant clusters. Consonant clusters English are exactly what they mean - cl, pr, bl, br, etc. If you look at tonal languages such as Tibetan, the further west on the Tibetan plateau you travel, the less tonal the variety of Tibetan becomes, and the more consonant clusters it retains.
One thing I see most teachers do, especially when using their hands to tell time, or draw diagrams in the air for learners, is to draw things backwards. It's forward for you to draw tones from your left to your right, but when you are showing tones to students with your hands, try to start from your right. It will save your students from trying to focus on the learning AND flipping everything that you're drawing. (notably difficult when you add a graph that is opposite from your actions.)
Hi. Please can you explain why 'Gor' (meaning 'also') has a falling tone? 'Gor' has the mai-dtai-kuu symbol above it. As it does not have a tone mark, it must either have a mid or a low tone. Following the tone rules, a falling tone here cannot be a possibility. As it is a live syllable, it surely can only have a mid tone. Thanks
I'm living in Thailand during my exchange year, but however, living in a thai family, going at school ... etc... I find many difficulties with thai tone. Listening you it's really easy to think, but for practice you must be very meticolous...
Thanks krubphom
Dear Jay
To describe various tones, you use the intonation produced by Dennis and his mother.
Can you tell me how does it work in languages such as Thai and Mandarin when it comes to singing, and expressing emotions.
Many thanks
You are very smart เก่งมาก
i am chinese, you did it so well with professionalism
Eureka!!!!! I finally get it.. I absolutely get it.. Light Bulb Moment.. Thanks so much .. Bless u for this.. Tamil is child's play compared to Thai..
I understand this idea in theory that tones correspond to where the sound is coming from in the throat or mouth but I still don’t get the system for apply consonant compass to tones. I’m trying to apply this to Vietnamese. Six tones, when I try to pitch my way around the tones it always sounds just a bit off. But how do I move beyond that to know okay this is back of the throat so it’s x tone?
Another example you can use to show westerners that tones aren't hard is to use examples from English! English has tones too! I can say "what" a few different ways, and depending on how I say it, the meaning changes.
so nice) and at the same time funny. i an not say i understood everything, but i liked this video
wow the Dennis scene really did work to understand
Thai common words are derived from / share the origin with Chinese words. However, academic / abstract nouns are derived from Pali - Sanskrit words.
awesome!
hi, you mentioned Chai with a falling tone but it has the tone marker of a low tone above Chaw Chang. Why?
i am thai people u are very good and expert thai language
Stuart Jay Raj 聲's Sino-Vietnamese reading is 'thanh' while 'tiếng' is the nativised cognate.
Teh Vanarch yeah, shengdiao = thanh điệu
Teh Vanarch ✋🏻
Some similarities between Thai and Mandarin/Cantonese can be traced back 2,500 years ago when proto-Tai-Kadai speakers still lived in the basin of the Yangzte River where they inhabited the state of Chu and the state of Yue. Linguists have long recognized trances of Archaic Chinese in Tai languages including Thai and Laotian, indicating that proto-Tai-Kadai must haven lived adjacent to the Chinese or under their rule at a very early period in history. Therefore, there is no surprise that similarities can be found between Thai and Chinese dialects including Mandarin.
Aren't there still Tai-Kadai languages spoken in parts of China?
Great video, as always! Yet it seems you might be confusing ejective consonants with unaspirated ones. As you mentioned, the distinction in Thai stops in one of aspiration, yet the closure in the throat happens in ejective consonants, which are found in languages native to the Americas.
Every time I watch one of your videos--I learn. I am using a different approach to get the different tones and I wonder what you think of it: rising tone = asking a question. I visualize a ? mark. The falling tone is the exclamation mark ! And the high tone is the Fah in Do Ra Me Fah. I think of it as high go higher and then drop off slightly. What do you think?
I have a question. My language is lithuanian, it seems its a tonal language. We have three types of stresess - ~; `; and a third one i dont have on my phone. I cant hear the difference between them. Nobody in lithuania can, and we dont hear any change in tone... Why? Or am i confusing something?
Not gonna lie! When you spoke Vietnamese and said "Tiếng Việt có được không?", it completely freaked me out because you sounded really good. Amazing pronunciation!
Ngoc-Tran Le still hurts my ears although it's clearly
That story is surprisingly helpful 🤣