Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
mandarintonetrainer.com
mandarintonetrainer.com
And in the mean time let them browse the page as normal, instead of force-hiding the content scroll bar and presenting a full screen overlay modal. If your page explains what it's for, locking people out of that content just because they don't trust you yet is intentionally crippling the experience for no good reason.
IMO there's no replacement for hardcore practise here - at the end of the day it is most like a physical skill so the learning tools you use for practising an instrument or sports technique are going to serve you well.
Focus on shortening the tones you sound (while staying accurate) and focus on combining tones.
Thankfully there are only 4 tones so only 16 unique combinations of two tones (actually only 15 because 3->3 isn't really used) And only 64 combinations of 3 tones
If you master those combinations in terms of speed and accuracy (both speaking and listening) the rest of it can be composed.
Then begins the long path to memorizing every phoneme+tone -> character pairing :)
The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all.
The first phase of language learning is mostly theory. Mostly vocabulary and grammar. The second phase is mostly reading, reinforcing the theory, forming a good understanding of how the language is used. Additionally writing things, chatting and the like. Third phase is immersion with speaking and listening.
Those phases overlap, of course, but in my opinion that's the overall process. I've used it successfully for English and Spanish (though I haven't completed phase 3 in Spanish yet). In Mandarin I'm currently struggling towards mastering HSK 4 vocabulary, though relatively advanced.
I would suspect that in order to get up to HSK4 or even HSK5, just the audio portions of course, you'd need like double or triple the amount of lessons, which would be impractical.
Of course, most people will start speakind and listening, in various forms, in phase 1 and 2. And that is actually necessary. But I think you won't be able to really grok "random" speech before having a good grasp at pretty much all the vocabulary you would encounter.
I have passed HSK4.
I am not competent in Mandarin listening comprehension, or in speaking (to be fair, speaking isn't a part of the test). Those skills aren't necessary to pass. The audio samples for HSK4 are a lot more generous with you than actual speech is.
> But I think you won't be able to really grok "random" speech before having a good grasp at pretty much all the vocabulary you would encounter.
But you will be able to grok small conversations about subjects you're familiar with. You can expand from there. When you try to learn a new language, you should be speaking from day one, no matter how limited the range of subjects you can speak about.
I've seen too many students who learn using the traditional theory-heavy approach and who, after years of study, are like deer caught in the headlights when they're confronted with the actual spoken language. They're also often saddled with poor pronunciation forever (which really degrades native speakers' perception of your language proficiency, regardless of how fluent you are).
Some theory is helpful, particularly for languages with lots of grammar (i.e., Indo-European languages with case, gender, agreement, etc.), but like playing an instrument, learning a language is 90% practice.
Is that really practical with Mandarin and the crazy amount of Chinese characters?
I always assumed learning to speak/understand Chinese alone would be sufficiently difficult.
The thing about reading is that it is the fastest way to review and reinforce vocabulary and grammar.
You can read at your own pace and look up anything. You can't do it that easily when listening, speaking or writing. And with a certain minimum level of theory under your belt, reading will be faster than spaced repetition of vocabulary you mostly know already.
Of course, there are different levels of proficiency in Chinese you might want to achieve. If you want to be able to interact while traveling, you wouldn't need the full complement of HSK Level 4.
However, if you want to have more interesting conversations or you want to understand technical texts...
Writing, on the other hand, requires truly knowing each character, every little stroke in the right place. Totally different beast. It takes many years to master and constant practice to keep up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia).
I feel like there are so many great books in English where it probably wouldn’t provide much value to fully commit. But I’m a big fan of China and Chinese. I even watched a stupid Chinese soap opera about rural people moving to Shanghai and was totally fascinated by the lifestyle and growth of the city. But only a few episodes were translated. It was called something like Narrows or living in small quarters.
Most of the most popular Chinese sitcoms I've read about seem to be a strange bunch as an outsider. Very much about boy-meeting girl following standard Chinese traditional get a job -> married + boy supporting girl and families. Which I find interesting from a cultural perspective of a maturing middle class economy. That plus a hundred awful period pieces about ancient China, which seems like 50% of their output, especially movie-wise - an easy way to ignore the tough realities of modern China.
But I don't know Chinese and only have a superficial grasp of what they are really like. So I've been interested in learning mandarin.
I've found close to nothing culturally worthwhile from the mainland.
Edit: actually, now that I think about it... I could never find anything when I was outside the mainland but I went there for a 3 month business trip one time and I signed up to various local services (Spotify / Netflix equivalents) and there f;r the first time I felt I had access to a decent amount of content I enjoyed.
To clarify: This is the way skills develop when people extensively study but barely learn a foreign language, the way typically happens in classrooms. It is a cruel method with poor results.
All of the actual learning of the language per se happens from listening to (or reading) comprehensible input, which should start from day 1 (yes this takes considerable effort for teachers to implement). Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
I am far more competent in written Japanese than spoken, both reading and writing it, essentially through understanding grammar. "Total waste of time" seems a harsh appraisal.
The first person is going to learn something, but it’s not an efficient use of their time if the goal is language fluency.
If you want to learn to read, then by far the most effective use of time is to practice reading, with whatever minimal bootstrapping is necessary up front to start reading very basic material.
This is not just speculation. There has been a ton of scholarly research on this topic.
It doesn’t work like that. For the student to make any progress he need to be able to understand most of the things in the speech (this is called comprehensible input, and the theory is both applicable to listening and reading). That’s why there are people living in foreign country for years yet cannot speak or understand the language at all.
Also it’s kinda stupid to say that language learning must be either grammar/voc learning or listening: it needs to be both. Classes are needed because they make portion of listening material comprehensible, which is impossible by listening only.
Notice the link I put in my first comment.
Yes, the more comprehensible the early exposure, the faster the student will advance at the beginning. If content is too advanced learning will be much slower.
It would be great if more language teachers and curricula put more significant effort into developing hiqh-quality materials aimed at being largely comprehensible to complete beginners. Many extant materials and courses do a very poor job at this.
> there are people living in foreign country for years yet cannot speak or understand the language at all.
Learning a language takes consistent deliberate effort.
> kinda stupid to say that language learning must be either grammar/voc learning or listening: it needs to be both
Grammar lessons have low marginal value for language learners, and are by no means necessary. Many people learn a foreign language without any formal grammar instruction whatsoever.
I mean, it may depend on your goals. If you are focused on communicating, and don't actually intend on using the language efficiently and competently, then maybe formal grammar is a waste of time.
Otherwise you need to have this information. You have a choice to get it in a systematic way or to decipher it on your own.
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/teaching_grammar_w...
> Research on the relationship between formal grammar instruction and performance on measures of writing ability is very consistent: There is no relationship between grammar study and writing (Krashen, 1984). Perhaps the most convincing research is that of Elley, Barham, Lamb and Wyllie (1976). After a three year study comparing the effects of traditional grammar, transformational grammar and no grammar on high school students in New Zealand, they concluded that " ... English grammar, whether traditional or transformational, has virtually no influence on the language growth of typical secondary students" (pp. 17-18).
> In addition, research is equally consistent in showing that writing ability and reading are related: Those who read more, write better (Krashen, 1993a). The reform school boys in Fader's Hooked on Books study who read self-selected paperback books for two years outperformed comparison boys on writing fluency, writing complexity, and reading, as well as on measures self-esteem and attitude towards school (Fader, 1976).
> It is well-established that one can become an excellent writer with very little formal instruction in grammar, and those who do often give reading the credit for their writing ability: "I wanted to write and I did not even know the English language. I bought English grammars and found them dull. I felt I was getting a better sense of the language from novels than from grammars" (Wright, 1966, p. 275).
> Finally, our ability to consciously learn the rules of grammar is very limited. Linguists have told us that they have not yet succeeded in describing the rules of language, and anyone who has studied linguistics will attest to the complexity of the rules linguists have described. Studies in second language acquisition show that even experienced students have an incomplete knowledge of the rules they are taught, do not remember the rules well, and have difficulty applying them (Krashen, 1993b, Alderson, Clapham, and Steel, 1997).
> [...]
> I am proposing, in other words, a two-step procedure: 1. Students first acquire (absorb subconsciously) a great deal of grammatical competence through reading. 2. Students are taught to use a grammar handbook to increase their grammatical accuracy further, using consciously learned rules. The grammar handbook can be introduced in junior high school or high school. If a great deal of reading has been done, and continues to be done, the grammar handbook will need to be used only occasionally.
Sometimes even the definition of "grammar" is confusing. If you study Indoeuropean languages, they are so similar that "studying" grammar is mostly getting the conjugation and declination right. Sometimes you only have to switch some endings between languages. With other languages, the entire system of morphology is different, because for example they have more "persons" or whatever.
Additionally, English or Chinese may seem to have easier grammar, but then the complexity is hidden in the vocabulary or usage patterns.
And the thing Krashen seems to be talking about is actually phase 2 in my model. The students may have taken the long way towards basic knowledge in English, but in order to advance, they need to spend time reading text to assimilate the grammar and vocabulary more.
That's how I started reading. Basic grammar, and some vocab. Vocab I didn't know was simple to look up; grammar I didn't know rendered the entire sentence incomprehensible and looking up the individual words did very little to help. If I knew the grammar but not the vocab, thirty seconds to comprehension. If I knew the vocab but not the grammar, order of magnitude more time to understand, often requiring assistance from someone else. Knowing the grammar felt like doing it on easy mode.
Not knowing the grammar rendered it a waste of time. THAT was the "total waste of time".
It was basically how it worked. "Here is some more reading to do, in order to comprehend it, here is some grammar that you will need." Literally front-loaded. My experience of effective learning is basically the complete opposite of what you advocated; no front-loading of grammar rendered it extraordinarily inefficient.
I dread to think how long even the basic sentence structure of "topic - comment" in Japanese would have taken me to realise if I'd had to learn it by just listening to people use it; like I'm meant to be some kind of linguistic detective. Telling me that before hearing the sentence spoken rendered it SO much more understandable, right from the start. I was able to start making valid, meaningful sentences in Japanese within sixty seconds. Topic - comment. Here's some nouns, here are some words that are like adjectives, here's how you mark the "topic" which you could think of as similar to the "subject" in English grammar, but go easy on that because the grammar is different, here's the copula, off you go.
Great work, that was a nice sixty seconds of comprehensible and correct Japanese, none of which you had ever heard before - you constructed it all yourself. Pretty good for someone who's been studying the language less than ten minutes. Here's the copula in the past tense, off you go with that.
My God, I genuinely flinch to think about how long that would have taken me without any front-loading of grammar. If I was meant to just guess how the language worked based on listening to it. What a waste of time that would be.
I reckon someone could listen to Japanese for a very long time before realising that some of the things that are kind of like adjectives can change depending on tense, but for some of them the copula changes. A native English speaker would have to really be good to spot that quickly. What a waste of time that would be compared to simply learning that piece of grammar.
You may have some success in a language related to your native language. Good luck with something truly foreign...
It is not that there’s no value whatsoever in formal study of grammar. It might come in handy if you want to be a linguist, an editor, a high-level writer, a lawyer, or the like. If students want to take a grammar course in high school or college that seems okay with me.
It just doesn’t teach basic language fluency.
Native speakers don’t start studying grammar until they have had 10+ years of full-time experience with the language. And anecdotally, the students who spend a lot of time reading independently don’t really need the grammar lessons (they already have a subconscious understanding of what is or isn’t grammatical, and the typical school grammar lesson is very slow and obvious for them), and the students who don’t spend any time reading independently and regularly speaking with educated adults would get more value out of instead spending the time reading or listening to someone read. YMMV.
That said, brute force practice work reeeeally well for language. And naturally people will build a kind of internal grammar anyway. But knowing what is what can help with that too.
On the other hand, once you know a few specific instances, it's helpful to explicitly point out that they're governed by the same rule and give an abstract statement of how the rule works. That way you can check yourself without relying on a teacher to point out your mistakes.
The first time you see an example of the rule, there's no need to explain the rule yet. You can just memorize the example. The same is probably true of the second and third example. Explaining the rule only makes sense once remembering the explanation becomes easier than remembering the set of examples you need to know.
When I'm into a new language I can learn 20-50 words a day, sustainably. Short term more.
By the time a child is 2.5 or 3 years old they can be learning dozens of words per day.
The most efficient way to teach new words to kids is to spend as much time as possible reading books with them.
That's by necessity because you can't explain perfect tense to a newborn.
Untrue; formal grammar instruction begins not later than first grade in many curricula, which is age 6-7, which would require using the language several years before birth to reach 10+ years prior use. Native speakers begin studying grammar about as soon as they have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the concepts associated with grammar.
When primary schools try to teach grammar it is boring, stressful, and generally unhelpful to the students.
The dominant factor affecting students’ reading comprehension and writing ability is how much time they spend listening and reading, especially to material which is at an appropriate level to slightly stretch their abilities.
If schools want to spend a relatively small amount of time formally teaching grammar to 12–17 year old students there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s mostly only useful insofar as it attaches names to concepts so that students can have conversations with each-other about what makes communication effective of ineffective, or more explicitly discuss their existing subconscious grammatical knowledge. Formal instruction in grammar (or other kinds of formal analysis) is still no substitute for practice listening and speaking and reading and writing (ideally with effective feedback), which should be the main focus of language arts instruction.
Maybe we need to bring back grammar school.
I am not knowledgeable enough about the topic to say how efficient or helpful medieval Latin schools were at teaching Latin as a second language, but the idea of “grammar” as part of the “trivium” (alongside logic and rhetoric) meant something substantially different than the modern usage of the word.
Speaking from experience, I gained basic conversational fluency in Spanish from English in a few months by spending a ton of time with LingQ (essentially reading and listening to untranslated passages and creating digital flash cards), obsessively practicing pronunciation, and listening to lyrics in Spanish music for hours on end. I focused on grammar to the extent that I had to, but no more than that. For instance, I learned only those conjugations I actually needed for simple speech. I compiled the ones I needed to study based on what I actually encountered in real passages.
Now, by no means did that render me fully fluent in the language. But, case in point, I took two years of Spanish instruction in school with lots of grammar front-loaded and I gained more or less no speaking or listening ability at all. For me there was a dramatic difference in efficiency between the two approaches to language learning.
I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verbs, for example, I now understand more information about every sentence (e.g. omitted verb subjects and tense/mood information). It will still be necessary to listen and read extensively in order to internalise the formation and meaning of the verb forms, but it skips a lengthy process of reverse engineering. Ditto for producing your own sentences, which I think is also fundamentally important for learning a language.
> Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
This is absolutely true; when using flashcards or spaced repetition, it is vastly better to have a full sentence with the target word blanked out compared to only having the definition.
Self studied Japanese to fluency that way. AJATT method but largely concentrated on front loading all the grammar in 4 months then built 10k vocab over the following year. Worked like an absolute charm.
I estimate you need around 20k of common words, characters and phrases for understanding a large variety of vocabulary for everyday use (e.g. watching television, reading newspapers, daily conversation, business discussions, books, songs, poetry, etc.). This takes a considerable amount of time to commit to memory, so doing it efficiently is important - at 2000 hours a year, this is two years of memorising 5 items an hour, which is ambitious. While learning, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the same word might be used in different ways in different contexts.
I agree grammar is relatively irrelevant from a wider perspective - there's just not that much of it compared to vocabulary, and an intuitive understanding is fine for the most part. However it is also typically taught at a beginner level with basic vocabulary and varied sentence structures, which are useful in themselves (not "a total waste of time"). Understanding the terminology also makes using reference materials easier in some cases.
In practical terms then, carefully graded tuition and listening practice might be the ideal, but in practice this is an expensive route for most people when you are looking at two years of full-time learning. Realistically drilling vocabulary will get you a long way towards understanding native materials (e.g. movies with subtitles), and allows you to self-study by looking up definitions in the native language. It also allows this to happen relatively cheaply, as you can study yourself.
You're not going to get to fluency without a wide vocabulary, and from a vocab / time unit level, drilling vocab is not a bad way to get there.
Studying grammar can be fun - and it feels like an accomplishment to be able to say some pretty complex things in Chinese.
Sure my listening isn't that great.. but on the other hand being limited to a two year old's conversation ability isn't particularly enticing.
Also, fwiw, reading and listening is a way different skill... Thanks to the ability to rewind when reading
You have to learn the grammar rules somehow. If you want to do it through assimilation, as supposed to somebody telling you how it works, well, that's possible but takes a lot longer and is more error prone.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do "output" exercises. I'm just saying that in order to learn information, you better receive it somehow. And you can receive that information either in an orderly fashion ("front-loading") or in a random incomplete fashion. You can't guess your way through language learning.
The skills you develop are the skills you practice. If you practice listening comprehension, you'll develop it. If not, you won't.
That's all there is to the ordering.
And children don't have the level of language skill you normally want to achieve.
Completely backwards, in my experience. Start with simple audiobooks, listen to them a million times, and you will be amazed by how much comprehension and speaking ability it gives you
Could you point me in the direction of some of these simple audio books?
* substudy is here: http://www.randomhacks.net/substudy/
Conversation practice with a native speaker is probably the ideal, but audiobooks are cheap and available. You can get around the disadvantage of not having a native trying to make themselves understood to you, by using an audiobook that you know well in translation. So I find that knowing the book well in my native language (or another language I know) is the most important initial requirement. Beyond that, it should be in simple language, though not boring. Maybe middle school or high school reading level.
On the first listen of chapter one, I find, I don't pick up more than the characters' names. After one or two dozen listens of chapter one, and I can follow the plot along pretty well (if it's a book I know), and can pick up words from context, and can start listening to the whole book.
Audio versions of the Bible are available in every language, and can be used as a first/last resort, depending on interest. If you can't find an audiobook Bible from the normal web apps, the Jehovah's Witnesses have audio versions in an insane number of languages (translated from their sometimes peculiar English version though). I like Tolkien, which is at about the right level, has audiobooks in many languages, and is familiar to me.
Grammar comes in very slowly using this method, and can use some augmentation using traditional methods. Pronunciation and comprehension, however, are supercharged.
Also, are you studying Chinese this way or a language more similar to English? With all the different grammar and word order in Chinese, I can't see how I could pick up the meaning without some reference, unless I was extremely familiar with the material.
Edit: Also because there are vocal sounds in English that aren't pronouncable in Chinese, even character names are not the same. “Gandalf” becomes “gan dow foo”, for instance
My method is to listen is small chunks (like a paragraph or so), a bunch of times, and gradually expand the length.
> I can't see how I could pick up the meaning without some reference, unless I was extremely familiar with the material.
You would be surprised at how good you are at it. The human brain is built for picking up a language from scratch by listening, and human languages are similarly built for being acquired in this way.
Only after years of studying more theoretically am I able to learn new words from context.
The "reference" comes from knowing the stories in English first. And also the reader's voice acting, etc.
My experience has been that listening is basically a way to learn the language with a minimum of effort. Context and non-verbal communication often make it clear what many unknown words in a sentence mean, making it not only possible to understand speech far above one's vocabulary level, but to actually to increase one's vocabulary through listening. These non-verbal cues and context are mostly absent in written texts.
Your method also seems counter intuitive as children learn languages primarily through listening, as they are for the most part illiterate.
And the context stuff doesn't work for me in audio, not until years into a language. It might be easier with a language close to my native, but otherwise...
So not true. Maybe depends on the way you study but I focus on listening skills hardcore early on. It's what helps build the natural accent. It's definitely not all or nothing. There are islands of understanding. They tend to grow and grow. It starts out with single words, then grows to two words together then grows to partial sentences and then to full sentences among a paragraph. So on and so forth.
When I start learning a new language, I can totally "listen comprehend" stuff that's close to the material I already studied. But the same isn't true for random content at realistic speed.
And the "island" part is compatible with "all or nothing". Because yes, within those islands, you understand everything, and over time, as your proficiency in the language grows, there are more islands of knowing all the words. But it seems to be a lot easier at first to get told what a word means and how it is used, rather than depending on it to appear in a useful context a couple hundred times.
My definition is of listening comprehension is any information I can glean from listening. Information being a reduction in uncertainty. Doesn't need to be complete. Progress is directional.
I know my language learning algorithm well and I pound it on repeat until my goal is achieved.
This is an excellent description of the process I used to learn to speak 3 foreign languages to a level of professional fluency, and 3 others to conversational fluency (this was in my 20s, I now only maintain fluency in 2 languages, although sure I could regain it fairly quickly).
I do think this depends on the individual. Some people successfully use other techniques.
If you want to speak a language in a useful but relatively broken way, as fast as possible (for example as a refugee), you might want to prioritize a smaller amount of theory and more practice early on. But that would actually prolong the time to proficiency.
Speaking is harder
> The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all.
Disagree; you can make sense of parts of a sentence and infer the rest or get some clues; actually that's the normal state while learning.
Eg: "How do I go to the station?"
"It is XXXX, you YYYY ZZZZ walk there, you need to take a taxi WWWW KKKK Uber"
Your example isn't really random. You already seem to recognize the pattern. But there are a LOT of patterns.
https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-tones-learn-the-right-way-...
I think this is good advice. When I first started learning mandarin, I really emphasised the tones, I guess because my untrained ear found it difficult to distinguish between them, and also because I thought people might understand me better.
But the first time I went to China, it was immediately obvious that people had a hard time understanding my (then rudimentary) mandarin, which I believe was in large part because of the over-exaggerated way I was using tones.
In the 3 weeks I spent in China, my understanding and usage of the tones came on tremendously - way more than it ever could have if I wasn't immersion in the language. Your ear does need to kind of train before you hear and understand tones at a more intuitive level.
To anyone learning Chinese, my advice would be to get yourself out there, even if it's just for a short time.
5
Though I also wouldn't really consider my formal Mandarin education to be particularly rigorous or thorough...
1. You may realize that the tones are realized differently in a variety of ways depending on context, speaker, etc.
2. Just as you can parse a different accent, native speakers can still figure out what you're trying to say if your tones are slightly whack. After all, tonal information in Mandarin is lost when sung.
My strategy so far has been to take intensive classes with a private teacher (a professional from a language school), 2h every day I'm in town. Each course is 20 classes (i.e. 40h), and after 10 courses you're supposed to be reasonably conversational. Because I only take classes when I'm not out of town, and I'm constantly traveling, I've completed about 3 levels in 6 months.
I've decided to focus purely on conversational mandarin, and skip learning Hanzi (characters) entirely. So far, tones is the part I have the biggest trouble with. I'm told I'm alright (i.e. a lot of people are much worse), but I still feel entirely inadequate. I often remember vocabulary without the tone. I also have a ton of difficultly distinguishing tones when listening to spoken mandarin and only distinguish them based on context. That triggers some stupid mistakes like not knowing whether I heard mǎi (buy) or mài (sell), which have exact opposite meaning but sound the same to me unless I'm listening extra carefully. Whereas I can easily distinguish shì (to be, to try) and shí (ten) based on context.
I feel, however, like I'm finally reaching a level of being able to communicate in a useful way outside of my classes. I've used mandarin for basic things in China and Taiwan (e.g. restaurants), and have mostly used it to talk to people when going out.
There's something quite amazing about learning something new (really the first time I've endeavored something this big and different since college), and I feel like this'll be one that will pay serious dividends over time.
So far I’ve used duchinese and wordswing but it’s def not as effective.
I moved to Hong Kong this year from San Francisco to do these classes (and because I wanted to make the move). HK speaks Cantonese, so it's not full immersion. But you're a lot closer to China here and there's a decent amount of Mandarin around. The best thing to do would be to move to the mainland, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but every class my teacher and I basically spend the first hour (before getting into the official material) just chatting about life. A lot of it is about mundane topics (travel, food, what we did in the previous day, my adventures hitting on girls, etc.). We do it all in Chinese. She helps me by adding to my vocabulary as I try to express these things in Chinese. She adds new vocabulary constantly to this as well, waiting for me to get confused and prompt her about it. These conversation are the most helpful part of the class. They're natural and real. They hit topics I'd use in real life daily. They also involve natural repetition helping me naturally add the vocabulary and grammar to my repertoire.
I’m really surprised by this — Chinese is everywhere in the Bay Area.
Suggestions:
1. Contact the Chinese department at a local university (e.g., USF) and ask a professor there. They will know tons.
2. Go to any cram school with marketing aimed at Chinese kids (Maybe something like Kumon. There are cram school ads in Chinese everywhere) and ask if they know someone. There are a lot of folks who teach Chinese to heritage speakers of Chinese (i.e., folks who speak it in the home but have not learned it formally). The teaching technique is a little different, but you can probably find someone who has taught non-heritage speakers if you specifically ask for it.
How on earth are you expected to be "reasonably conversational" after 10 classes (20h) worth of Mandarin?
It's just impossible.
I initially did the same, but for curious and started learning a few characters too. It actually proved to be beneficial to my speaking too, as the characters provided a kind of visual mnemonic in a way I hadn't expected, helping me to remember sounds and tones.
And of course when actually in China, it's really beneficial to be able to read a menu, or at least have an idea of what you're ordering!
Absolutely do what works for you, but I'd suggest trying a few to see if you get the same kind of "visual reminder" benefit I did.
The key to mastering tones (actually all of the spoken language of any language) is to listen more. Receptive skills like listening develop before productive skills like speaking.
In order to supplement your tutoring, I suggest you listen to a lot of Mandarin while you away from the tutor, especially when you are on the road. Specifically, I recommend TV shows, radio shows, or podcasts that are aimed at younger people (maybe 8-20 — younger than that has some strange kiddie terms, and older usually gets you full on adult language). Language targeted to young people usually has a relatively narrow set of vocabulary, and it usually avoids complicated words (e.g., like Latin-based words in English) and idiomatic phrases (e.g., four character combos).
Even if you don’t understand much or even any of what you hear, you will start to develop an intuitive feel for how the language sounds. Once your vocabulary develops, you will start picking up phrases, then sentences, then entire paragraphs. Somewhere in that journey, your ear will (most likely) develop to a point that you can not only hear other people’s tones, but you will naturally hear your tones as well (at least when they don’t sound right).
Best of luck!
Do you have any specific shows or podcasts to recommend?
Doing a quick test, the Slow Chinese podcast may be a good start.
As someone not in China but interested in learning, I'd prefer to try to understand what I'm hearing before working on tonal pronounciation. This is why I'd love and pay good money for a dataset of engaging Chinese tv shows, etc with the English translation and the Hanyu Pinyin displayed simultaneously and perfectly synchronized to what's being spoken on the screen. For me, listening comprehension is everything.
It might feel like an uphill battle but it helps a lot imo
I studied Mandarin formally a little while ago up to HSK 2/3 level, at a reputable university based on a weekly 3 hour lesson. Although not comparable to your experience, I can relate to your approach.
On the course, we were encouraged to concentrate as much on the conversational side as reading simplified/traditional texts, mostly assisted via Pinyin. The only resources available to us were a well stocked library. It took so much longer and proved to be an incredibly frustrating experience at times, especially when desperately trying to find native speakers to converse with or decipher even the most basic of texts. As a lapsed 'student' I feel it was all worth it in the end, despite only retaining 10% of everything I learned, at least the knowledge can be justified as well rounded.
The other resources I leaned upon for assistance consisted of TV, news, movies, meetup and various language courses, which were no substitute for real interaction with native speakers. Wenlin and Plecodict were a godsend, when you did not want to consult a physical dictionary. Amongst others, the forum below sparked more interest in the wider aspects of the language and culture.
1. In both listening and production, differentiate between volume and pitch changes. 2. Tones have pitch contours. They're not just sudden changes from low to high etc. They are continuous changes in pitch over time. Try to visualize or feel the pitch curve (e.g. by using this type of tool). 3. Pay attention to the starting and ending pitches. 4. Don't overly connect syllables together. We tend to do this in English, but in Chinese, most syllables (characters) should not have a constant flow of air connecting them. 5. People usually mess up 3-2 combinations because they connect the third tone's low tone to the beginning of the second tone. Actually, the second tone should start higher than the third tone ends. 6. For each tone, there is a range of acceptable tone contours! This is how Chinese speakers are still able to have sentence-level expressiveness (e.g. happy sentence vs. sad sentence). Maybe try practicing some dramatic readings.
As your vocabulary expands, you start to come across more and more of these "unlucky pairs" that can be confused for one another. Some funny stories from my learning experience include "wo3 yao4 ying4 le!" instead of "wo3 yao4 ying2 le!" and "wo3 ba4ma1 hen3 xin4 jiao1" instead of "wo3 ba4ma1 hen3 xin4jiao4". ("I'm getting hard" instead of "I'm going to win", and "my parents have sexual intercourse" instead of "my parents are religious."
Tones aren't something that people usually master overnight. In fact, almost all non-heritage learners of Chinese never learn them perfectly. And a lot of heritage learners still have accents, even if they are able to speak the correct tone numbers.
Shows like "China Bridge" (Hanyu Qiao）and "Informal Talks" (Feizhengshi Huitan) both feature non-native learners of Chinese from a variety of countries -- the first one is a speaking competition, and the the second is a roundtable talk show -- and are great for comparing yourself to other learners of Chinese. (As an interesting side note, the China Bridge show is heavily biased in favor of learners from Western countries. In my opinion, seeing those dynamics play out on tv is an important part of the Chinese learner's cultural education.)
I've kinda obsessed about my Chinese accent (本人有点声控 哈哈）, and it's still a bit aways from being native. I think it's important to remember that with English, for example, being able to speak American English doesn't mean that you can speak British English perfectly. To truly "lose" any accent takes a lot of work -- but it's definitely possible. A big part of the Broadcasting curriculum in China involves losing your regional accent so that you can speak Standard Mandarin on the air.
Sorry for the discursive thoughts, but best of luck to all Chinese learners here!
Then you didn't really remember the vocabulary, did you? It's critical to remember the tone along with the words. I know it feels like you "almost" got it, but if you don't remember the tone then you should treat it as not remembering the word at all, IMO.
FWIW, what helped me was doing a little finger gesture in the air with the syllable, sort of tracing the pinyin tone marker. Then when I talk I'm sort of habitually waving my finger down out of sight, but at least I'm producing the sounds correctly. Basically, treat learning vocabulary as learning {syllable, tone} tuples, rather than trying to learn a syllable with a built-in tone.
Plus you have loads of homophones, and thinking of which hanzi each word is using makes it far easier to know what you’re talking about.
Example: shí. It means 10. It also means time, as well as dozens of other things. I can’t imagine trying to mentally divide all the overlapping words without the visual assistance of different hanzi when reading. It’d be like trying to learn the differences between they’re/their/there in English as a second language without looking at the spelling differences. It makes it harder.
Additionally the Pimsleur courses are great, with non-interactive lessons you can listen to with a media player. But relatively expensive, if you want to own it legally. They also don't do characters at all, so it can only be a part of the journey.
Other than that it seems to default to the third tone with me, even when the spectrogram doesn't look like it.
Duolingo has speech recognition for Chinese. It seems to check separate syllables, but I'm not sure how precise it judges and the feedback is lacking.
Even more interesting would be multiple syllables in a sentence. And distinguishing the consonants. In my opinion every long enough Chinese sentence is a tongue breaker because I have to switch fast between consonants that my mother language doesn't tell apart.
http://www.speakgoodchinese.org/ https://robvanson.github.io/sgc3/
I remember when I first started having Chinese lessons, my teacher used some Windows-based software to show me visualisations like these. It helped a lot to know where I was going wrong.
The visualisations here are the most useful part IMO, followed by the example sounds.
If you're a native English speaker learning Mandarin: one tip for the second tone is to make it sound like you're asking a question. In English, we raise the tone of the last syllable in a question. So if you pretend you're asking a question, you'll naturally get the right tone.
I'm very very sure I can do the first tone.
Would love it if this thing did work reliably though. Also would be nice to have one Cantonese.
For now, is just a tool we'll be using internally, but eventually it will be expanded to many languages, have a remote class option, and have homework assignments for individual practice, all integrating into our LMS.
What's the training data? Is it trained on both male and female voices? Anyways, very nice idea - I hope you pursue it and I'm looking forward to seeing how it improves over time!
I have learned english and have got rid of my thick accent by imitating how other people speak, I should be able to do that with mandarin. I can just learn the pronunciation of the characters and adapt my accent as I speak. Why is there such a stress on memorising the tone for every character?
E.g. most people will remember which syllable to stress in a word after vocalising the word, but when learning mandaring people add the tone to their flashcards and are expected to have a more direct conneciton.
In context, this kind of thing isn't a problem because a speaker with a heavy accent applies their own sound changes in a systematic way. It's very easy, as the listener, to learn their accent and adjust to it... if they're coming out with otherwise normal speech. As a foreign language learner, you probably have a thick accent _and_ you also can't form a normal sentence, so context can't provide the support it normally would for your odd pronunciation.
(If "dock" and "duck" were actually pronounced identically, that would cause no problems, in the same way that the identical pronunciation of "bow" (archery) and "bow" (decorative knot in a ribbon) causes no problems. That's most of why it doesn't matter if someone's accent causes them to pronounce some words as other words.)
But here, what I'm really asking is:
What's the difference between "saying the wrong word" and "saying the right word in a thick accent"? In my eyes, those appear to be the same thing, so I don't see how anything could be more like one than the other.
Ah, this is where we disagree. In my view, the fact that strawBERry doesn't exist is just a coincidence. It's helpful in resolving what somebody meant by strawBERry, but not meaningful. The structure of English is compatible with a word pronounced strawBERry that means "barstool".
When I was a teacher in an English immersion school, I once asked a student if classes would be happening during a... holiday? I forgot why I thought they might not.
Anyway, the question was whether classes would be happening, and the student understood me correctly and responded "poss", leaving me confused.
He meant that classes were suspended, and he meant to say "pause", and he was aggrieved that the difference between the /z/ in "pause" and the /s/ in *poss meant so much to me when he thought it should be unimportant. But it was unimportant. The real problem was that the single word "pause" is not a valid response to that question in idiomatic American English. If it had been, I would have had no trouble understanding -- after all, there is no word "poss" to get in the way.
I see tone and stress the same way. Consonant choice / tone / stress are all parts of the word, and changing them gets you a different word.
In general, the "standardized" language tries to avoid this problem by encouraging the use of compound words where one syllable might do. That's why pinyin without tone numbers, for example in a chat, can actually be understood quite well. But with a larger universe of potential words, for example subject specific terms, it's hard or impossible without the tones, and at some point even tones don't work and you need the characters.
Chinese is a language with very low redundancy and very high information content per phoneme. If a listener misses one phoneme, be it through noise or whatever, the chance is higher to miss all the information, as compared to, say English or Spanish, where you can often delete whole syllables or multiple letters without losing the information.
I've heard hearing aids are really bad at distinguishing frequencies and locations. I don't know why exactly, but you might want to research that subject further. You might want to choose your next hearing aid for better "Chinese performance".
The Human ear does a Fourier transformation [extremely rough explanation] by sending the sound through a helix. Along that tube, sensing hairs are triggered by different frequencies. Depending on the hearing aids, that process can be mangled up.
Hopefully Mandarin tone trainer will help!
I'm a guy, and it called all of my tones "3rd tone" when said in my normal voice, but when I spoke in a cartoonishly high falsetto, it gave me perfect marks.
Also, the 3rd tone is characterised more by being low than the fall-then-rise. In fast speech the rising part is often not heard; it's only really present in stressed syllables or possibly at the ends of sentences.
If you're not sure what the components are, try reading the corresponding Wikipedia article (usually linked in the phonology section of the article about the given language): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_rounded_vowel
Also, pardon a shameless plug - not sure how your app work because of the microphone permissions, but I also wrote a freely available Mandarin listening comprehension practice tool. It's pretty simple - I downloaded all zh-*.ogg files from Wiktionary, extracted tone numbers from the filenames and asked the user what they hear. You can find it hosted here:
Source code available here:
https://github.com/d33tah/chinese-tones
Anyway, keep up the work, good Mandarin learning resources are always needed!