I have studied Chinese by myself and with some tutors for a little bit on and off, but when I started college last fall is when I started studying it much more seriously. The problem I am having is with listening to tones. When I listen to someone speak I am not saying in my head, “that’s a 2nd tone, that’s a 1st” etc. etc., and according to my professors, they don’t do that either. They just hear it apparently. My problem is, I don’t just hear it. I do not listen to the tones at all when listening (again, neither does any native speaker I’ve talked to), I do not know how I can. If someone said the infamous “我要 shui jiao” line to me I would not know what they wanted unless I had them repeat it a bunch of times so I could get the tones. It is also weird because often when I ask native speakers what tone ‘x’ word is in… they don’t know, but they must because otherwise they would have these same confusions, they don’t. Yet another thing that confuses me is… look through any Chinese dictionary and any given word with *the same* tone will have like 10 or 20 different meanings and characters. So, even *if* I know the tone, there are still like 20 shi4’s out there. I am not hyperbolizing, I can flip through pages of *any* given word while remaining on *the same* tone.
As I review I am trying to make sure I know the tones for each word (which again, is confusing because there is no shortage of words with the exact same pinyin, down to the tone) as well as I know the word and character itself, and I am making sure to force my tones even more. But, this doesn’t really help with my listening. I would have to pretty much write down what someone was saying, and the tones they were saying it with to be able to understand them. The only reason I can understand people now is because I know as much Chinese as my classmates so I can guess what they are saying for the most part, or I know the sentence pattern etc. either way, I do not focus on the tones at all.
Not to mention, there is another problem. Even after studying for a couple years I still cannot hear tones. When someone speaks in a sentence, forget it. I can sometimes understand full sentences or more when watching a Chinese movie, but I cannot understand one tone unless I play it back a few times and take notes. This isn’t unique to Chinese either. If someone asked me with what tones (pertaining to English tones such as sarcasm and whatnot) someone used I would have to purposely listen and memorize each word they said to give an answer, the only difference being that in English I can still pick up on some tones as they are happening. But it gets worse. All of this is assuming I can even tell the tones apart from one another. Especially the 1st 2nd and 4th tones. They do not sound stable to me. By this I mean that when just one word and one tone is pronounced for the sole purpose of demonstrating what that tone sounds like… it changes each time they pronounce it. Sometimes it sounds like a fourth tone and I am right, it is, other times is sounds *exactly the same* but it a first tone, other times it sounds *completely different* but is actually a fourth tone again. I am definitely better now, but I cannot tell, for the most part, the difference between the tones no matter how hard I try. And, it’s not like I am failing these classes or anything… I am usually near, or at, the top and getting A+’s on everything. The writing portions I exceed at. The only parts that I tend to lose points are T/F questions where it has nothing to do with my Chinese comprehension, but rather the ambiguity of these questions even when translated into English.
Thank you for any replies
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多听，多喝热水
To adress first the smaller portion you mention about learning meanings and pronounciations of shared tones:
Just in case, to be super clear, please do not study ***characters/sounds*** study ***vocab***.
Chinese is a very context based language, with a lot of characters and a lot homonyms. This means that sometimes there is single character vocab, but far more often vocab is 2-4 or even more characters. This is what allows you to clarify which of the 20+ definitions of the characters to use, or which of the multiple character pronounciations to use etc. This is the way people actually actually use chinese, and I recommend learning it this way 🙂
That said, now lets tie in to tone specifically:
Personally, I think you just need a lot more listening practice, and then later speaking practice. I have never considered it realistic to expect ourselves to say something properly when we cannot yet hear the difference clearly (not to say no speaking practice at all, but I would not make it a main focus until listening skills reach good tone recognition level.)
For personal reference, it took me a few months to reach basic tone recognition– able to say exaggerated tones or understand tones in super clear speech. It probably took me around two years to reach full recognition and pronunciation of tones (and pronunciation in general). This was not super intensive study but was steady, I did have listening practice of some kind every day.
How quickly to learn tones varies wildly by individual, and by individual study plans. You could be much quicker than me, or slower than me. The good news is if you can hear the tones at all, you can learn them, its just practice and finding what works best for you 🙂
In final, I think you just need a lot of focused practice. The greatest chinese master would not be able to recognize chinese by just sounds and tones, you aren’t crazy. It’s normal to not recognize these things without a level of direct study addressing it.
Chinese needs context and building blocks of vocab and grammar; this is what allows you to organize the otherwise unrecognizable sounds. Increasing those building blocks and adding more listening practice should be great 🙂
P.S.– multiple kindof similar questions have appeared today, looking through them may help you too. Or you could look through my comment history I replied to most of them (today was my day off and I spent a lot of time on reddit with my cold lol).
Hope this helps, 加油
For them tones, as a native speaker, don’t know if you do this little practice or not. When we growing up learning pinyin and we have this little pithy formula, to speak all four tones of every compound vowels, it’s like áāãà óōõò éēêè (can’t type the third correctly). And this turned into a very memorable thing, when you don’t know you just check with it.
And many characters with the same tone that comes with whole lotta different meanings can be really difficult for people to learn, I think that connect your mother language with Chinese more often may help?
Like the example of 我要shui jiao, 水饺 that means Dumplings comes with two 3s, and 睡觉 that means Sleeping comes with two 4s, try to pronounce it all out in one word and not to think about them characters separately at first maybe easier and more practical.
Best wishes.
Just want to point out as a native speaker, I can confidently tell you the tone of all common characters. And so can all of my friends and family. In fact I think most native speakers can do this easily.
When you listen to non-tonal languages, like English, or any other non-tonal language you might have taken a couple classes in, do you ever remember the exact way a certain word or phrase is said, based off of, say, a quote from a movie you’ve seen a bunch of times, or a meme, or an old vine, or just something your friend said once that’s stuck in your head now?
Like, for example, I like this one little viral video where a guy with a thick queens New York accent says ‘no problem’, but he draws it out like ‘no prāhblem’. I’ve watched the video so many times that it’s just ingrained in my head, and sometimes I’ll pronounce ‘no problem’ in that way. It’s not like I’m putting on a fake queens accent when I do that, it’s just how the phrase ‘no problem’ comes out of my mouth now.
That’s kind of how I’ve come to view tones. If you ask a Chinese native speaker, who isn’t an experienced Mandarin tutor, to tell you the tone of a specific word, you might see them get a little confused as they repeat the words to themselves aloud a couple times before they know for sure. When I started learning Chinese, I didn’t understand how they wouldn’t immediately know the tone, if it’s such an important part of the word. And it IS an important part of the word: it’s inseparable from the rest of the pronunciation, as though it were a letter. But unlike a letter, or at least unlike how a letter works in English (with our notoriously tricky spellings), it doesn’t help to view it as TECHNICAL knowledge.
It’s a little difficult to explain, but the way my brain turns ‘problem’ into ‘prāhblem’, it turns ‘shui’ into ‘shuǐ’ for 水, and ‘shuì’ for 睡. And, I notice the difference when listening to other people, just like my ears would pick up on the difference if an English speaker dropped ‘prāhblem’ into conversation, instead of ‘problem’.
And yeah, it’s daunting that you kinda gotta do this for every word. But that’s why everyone advises ‘just get more listening practice’ over and over again. Eventually, this stuff just starts sticking and becomes second nature, just like I never made any actual conscious effort to memorise the prāhblem video, and I DEFINITELY never sat down and said to myself ‘right, he says that word in first tone’.
Hope some of that helps. It’s just my reflections, having once been where you were. Luckily, once my tones improved, they improved retroactively also, without having to go back and deliberately relearn vocab.
I studied for three years and didn’t have a clue about tones. Three weeks of immersion and it all clicked. In practice, they’re just far more subtle than we learn in classrooms.
You can already inherently differentiate tones. I’m sure in English you can tell whether someone is asking a question or making a statement by the rising intonation at the end of the sentence. It’s just a matter of getting used to it in Chinese. I’ve been there, too. Just keep listening and practicing.
I also struggled with tones early in my studies (early meaning the first few years). I had one teacher who told me something that might be controversial but ended up helping me a lot. He explained to me that in most actual, conversational speech, the tone of each word is not emphasized. Rather, there is a frustratingly impossible to describe “natural” flow of a sentence when all the words are put together, where some of the words have a tone emphasized and most are actually spoken in neutral or with a tone that is much more subtle than if each word were spoken in isolation.
This makes it very hard to determine the tone of each word when they are spoken together in a sentence. And it also means that the only way to learn how to speak is to spend a lot of time listening to fluent people speak, and just pick it up by imitation which eventually becomes instinctual.
I think an imperfect analogy is the English joke of putting the right em-PHA-sis on the right syl-LAB-le. A more subtle example might be the differences in natural intonation in English between an American and a British speaker – British English has a different “lilt” to the pitch of voice during a sentence. You can only learn it by listening to it, a lot.
> when I ask native speakers what tone ‘x’ word is in… they don’t know
It’s like if I ask you how many syllables are in “microscope”. Of course you _know_ but you don’t just have “3” memorized, you’d have to count them. But at the same time if you were in a loud environment and heard “mi-wah” your brain wouldn’t go to “microscope” because you didn’t hear enough syllables.
Have you seen this site before, OP? http://maorma.net/
It lets you practice recognizing tones, in isolation and also in sentence context. You can also use “classroom” speed or “conversational” speed. If you test yourself using that, do you still find that you can’t differentiate the tones?
You sound like a serious Mandarin student (good on you for all those high marks!) , so it’s natural that you would want to get your tones straightened out as well. My advice – be patient and it will start to flow naturally.
Fwiw, I saw myself getting really discouraged years ago about tones to the point that I would overcompensate and nearly jump out of my chair to hit that second tone. Lol! Studying Mandarin suddenly stopped being enjoyable, so I told myself that I would still try to learn each tone but leave it there and not worry if my teacher corrected me. If she did, I just repeated the way she said it and then moved on.
Once I put that to the side, I refocused most of my energy into improving my listening skills and vocabulary. That way I could “talk” my way out of any misunderstanding by providing some extra context. It just followed that as I got more confidence this way, I ended up speaking a lot more and my tones naturally improved.
The usual caveats apply though. If you want to be an interpreter one day or deliver a formal speech in China, you’d better put in extra effort to get your pronunciation up to scratch.
Your shui jiao example is funny, by the way. I’ve heard it before, of course. But think about — if you go to a dumpling store, do you really think the cashier is going to hold up the line to confirm that you really want “boiled dumplings” rather than to “sleep” ?
If you struggle with even English tones, can I ask how good you are with music? like remembering melody, etc?
When I speak with my Chinese friend and I ask him what tone a character is, he has no idea! What he then does is repeat the character 4 times using the different tones (like the famous “ma1/ma2/ma3/ma4” ) and matches what he KNOWS the character sounds like to one of the tones he just said out loud.
This anecdote I feel is a good example of how natives learn the language, repeated exposure to firstly the SOUND of a word. I would recommend to not stress too much about tones and recognising them, focus more on LISTENING. Listen to what a word sounds like and try recognising this instead of the tones.
Let’s just say a lot of word use is contextual, and tones are merely something to help you put context to something, but usually you use the context first.
So it’s basically more important for you to imitate how natives speak, and once you got that “chunking” of knowledge established and pronunciation fundamentals learned, THEN it all becomes easier.
Yeah tones can be a pain. I’m fluent in Chinese, and I’m baffled when someone says they can’t tell the difference between tones. It seems so obvious to my ears! Haha. But I also understand the difficulties learning when the only thing you’re used to are non-tonal languages.
Sometimes I would have difficulties if someone speaks incredibly fast, and natives also tend to not pronounce the tones carefully and it can become a messy blur. But even so I could tell you what tone it is… for some reason… and now that I’ve read this post, idk how. Maybe because it’s messy, but in a sensible pattern of messy. If I hear a foreigner speak without proper tone usage, such as the video of John Cena and his ice cream… I couldn’t understand it without Chinese subtitles lol.
That being said, I think it’s a lot about immersion and hearing a lot of natives speak. From your post, you probably talk a lot with classmates and such, which is fine, but perhaps they don’t say the tones properly either, and then you get confused because it sounds different than when a native says it. Idk, just a thought.
The issue here is that you’re using two years to quantify how much time you’ve actually studied. But two years for someone who does 3 hours a day is basically the same as six years doing 1 hour a day for another person. So to say you can’t understand tones despite two years of learning is meaningless.
If you’re struggling with distinguishing tones, the thing to do is listen. I’ve found sticking on a podcast for at least an hour a day extremely helpful. I started with stuff catered towards learners and then switched to regular made for natives podcasts after about 6 months. Give that a go, it seems to be working for me.
99% of understanding comes from context and repetition of sounds/patterns, not from thinking about tones.
There are things you don’t notice about your pronunciation. For example I bet you don’t notice that you pronounce the word „the“ differently when you say „the dog“ vs „the apple“.
You also guaranteed hear the difference between „yes??“, „yes!!!“ and „yes.“ These are just tones
It’s really difficult indeed. Teaching lexical tones to a non-tonal speaker is like teaching lexical vowels to someone whose native language allows for free variation in vowel quality (e.g. ‘pin’, ‘pen’, ‘pan’, and ‘pun’ all meaning the same thing but with different moods).
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