Tone

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thaen
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Tone

Post by thaen »

I know that this is a subject we tend to not like, but whenever I pronounce vowels with tone, it is just like saying two identical vowels, but one with, say, low tone, and one with, say, middle tone, and that equals rising. I listened to some people speaking Vietnamese and Mandarin, with what they were saying in front of me, but I couldn't pick out the tones, necessarily. Any tips/help?
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Re: Tone

Post by Visinoid »

thaen wrote:I know that this is a subject we tend to not like, but whenever I pronounce vowels with tone, it is just like saying two identical vowels, but one with, say, low tone, and one with, say, middle tone, and that equals rising. I listened to some people speaking Vietnamese and Mandarin, with what they were saying in front of me, but I couldn't pick out the tones, necessarily. Any tips/help?

I loooooooooooove tones. :) I've got so much chinese friends at school and they all want to teach me their own dialect. @_@ I'm now stuck to know hundreds of ways to say "I"...

And it is what's supposed to be: the same modulated vowel.

FIRST, I'd suggest you to forget (yes, forget) that low-middle-high-central-high-mid-close-to-blarg-barg thing... O.o

Each language having tones has its own system. SO, before beginning to speak with tones, start to learn a single system. (Let's say Mandarin, because it's the most spoken language on Earth as of now.)

Also, in Chinese, tones tend to change depending on their surrounding...

Your ears aren't well adapted to listen to tones; hence, we don't use any in English, and it's normal.
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Re: Tone

Post by Ossicone »

I'm not sure if there is any quick way to learning to hear tones.
At least, if there is non one told me!

I think it's just a growing process of lots of listening until your brain starts to build the ability which has been neglected.
You might feel better by knowing that speakers of langs with tones aren't very good at hearing the tones of other languages.

My advice would then be - practice, practice, practice! But focus on one lang, like Visinoid said, because tone varies from lang to lang. If you wan something more direct you could look into tonal minimal pairs in whichever lang you choose. Find some audio files on a dictionary online and try to hear the difference. But, also like Visinoid said, be careful because tones will change when put into a full sentence. Tone is subject to sandhi and general coarticulation factors like other phonetic elements.
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Re: Tone

Post by Sankon »

It just requires a lot of practice. :-(
If you're not used to hearing tone, it will be difficult to catch up on it.
Try to listen as often as you can, to the radio, news, tv, movies, conversations on the street...

Also keep in mind that tone sandhi will screw things up. Tone sandhi is when tones change in proximity to other tones.

If you don't know the language, it will be even harder to pick out the tones. All I can say is practice.
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Re: Tone

Post by Trailsend »

thaen wrote:I know that this is a subject we tend to not like, but whenever I pronounce vowels with tone, it is just like saying two identical vowels, but one with, say, low tone, and one with, say, middle tone, and that equals rising.
It depends on the system. Some languages have a "register tone" system which is similar to what you describe. Other languages have a "contour tone" system, where the key feature is not the difference in pitch but the shape of the contour.
thaen wrote:I listened to some people speaking Vietnamese and Mandarin, with what they were saying in front of me, but I couldn't pick out the tones, necessarily. Any tips/help?
Trippy fact that you probably already know: reality arrives at your consciousness pre-processed. The tone features of Mandarin are not something that your brain has ever had to notice before, so it is not wired to do so. However, you do "hear" the difference on some level. It's just a matter of being exposed to it enough that your brain finds a need to rewire a perception of this new thing.

This happens faster in an interactive environment--your brain is built to detect patterns that will help you deal with your environment and get things done. So, if you put yourself in an environment where hearing tones is a requisite for getting things done, you'll start perceiving them quicker.
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Re: Tone

Post by Ear of the Sphinx »

I think I can pronounce tones properly. Only I have to challenge myself in hearing them.
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Re: Tone

Post by xijlwya »

As I percieved it, which may undoubtedly be wrong, tones are quite similiar to the English stress system in a way. When we distinguish between "I can hear you." and "I can hear you?" We use prosody and rise the overall pitch in the end of the question sentence. We are just not used to distiguish things on a semantical level by this.
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Re: Tone

Post by cybrxkhan »

xijlwya wrote:As I percieved it, which may undoubtedly be wrong, tones are quite similiar to the English stress system in a way. When we distinguish between "I can hear you." and "I can hear you?" We use prosody and rise the overall pitch in the end of the question sentence. We are just not used to distiguish things on a semantical level by this.
I think appying this will be the closest you can get to getting tone right. When I took Chinese classes in high school, there was this one guy who would exaggerate the tones when he spoke in class. He was kind of the class clown, but the exaggeration also really worked for him, because I guess it was easier for him to pick up the tones if he really emphasized them. Thus, to practice tones, you might consider first speaking English but with exaggerated stressing or intonation. For instance, say "WHAAAAATTT????" a whole bunch of times, and voila. However, of course, this isn't exactly the same thing as actual tones, but it'll help tremendously.

I speak a tonal language, Vietnamese, and it's like second nature for me, even though I forgot much of Vietnamese between ages 5-10 and had to relearn much of it. So yeah, it's totally fine if you don't get it - it's just how a lot of non-native speakers of English might find it hard to master certain sounds of English, such as the <th>.
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Re: Tone

Post by Darkgamma »

I had a shitty time getting used to Serbian tones.
It's quite annoying when there are both contour and pitch tones :-s
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Re: Tone

Post by Thakowsaizmu »

thaen wrote:I know that this is a subject we tend to not like, but whenever I pronounce vowels with tone, it is just like saying two identical vowels, but one with, say, low tone, and one with, say, middle tone, and that equals rising. I listened to some people speaking Vietnamese and Mandarin, with what they were saying in front of me, but I couldn't pick out the tones, necessarily. Any tips/help?
I am actually taking Chinese this semester. And I love the idea of tones. Just because some Conlangers hate it doesn't mean we all do, nor does it mean you should, heh.

As a lot of other have said, the most important thing is practice and patience. My tones are pretty good, both the Teacher and the TA have told me, but I know that my dialogue sounds stilted sometimes (like Asania reading what she did on her summer vacation in second grade). But I am working on it, heh.

One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third.
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Re: Tone

Post by cybrxkhan »

Thakowsaizmu wrote: One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third.
I think this is quite true. A few of the Vietnamese tones definitely do this (although admittedly a couple of the Vietnamese tones are kind of... weird, relatively, to Mandarin, and I didn't realize this until I looked it up recently).
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Re: Tone

Post by Thakowsaizmu »

cybrxkhan wrote:
Thakowsaizmu wrote: One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third.
I think this is quite true. A few of the Vietnamese tones definitely do this (although admittedly a couple of the Vietnamese tones are kind of... weird, relatively, to Mandarin, and I didn't realize this until I looked it up recently).
I'd love to learn some Vietnamese too. Maybe after I get a little better with Mandarin's tones, I can branch out into languages with more tones. Admittedly, when someone is talking fast, I sometimes confuse some of the tones still.
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Re: Tone

Post by Ear of the Sphinx »

Thakowsaizmu wrote:One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third.
I noticed the same thing in my Mandarin (I'm not native tho):
Image
(plot made in Praat, this June)

You can easily see the five different pitches:
1) approx. 100 Hz
2) approx. 120 Hz
3) between 130 and 140 Hz
4) between 150 and 160 Hz
5) approx. 170 Hz

This makes:
ā [aː˦] (4)
á [a˧˥] (35)
ǎ [aː˧˨˧] (323)
à [a˦˩] (41)

Here's the recording (I hope):
http://w393.wrzuta.pl/audio/6F4s66J8kPe/a1234
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Re: Tone

Post by Trailsend »

Thakowsaizmu wrote:One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third
Milyamd wrote:I noticed the same thing in my Mandarin (I'm not native tho)...Here's the recording (I hope):
http://w393.wrzuta.pl/audio/6F4s66J8kPe/a1234
But does this effect persist in natural speech? What I recall from living in China is that when people talk naturally (as opposed to ee-nun-ci-ay-ting cleeer-ly fore thee poore lao-wai), first-tone syllables ended up just as quick as fourth. I don't have any actual data to support that, though.
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Re: Tone

Post by xinda »

There's probably still a difference in natural speech, but it's pretty much imperceptible since vowel length isn't phonemic in Mandarin. I also find that even though much of the time people don't actually pronounce tones exactly as they are intended, it doesn't really interfere too much with being able to understand what they are saying. A lot of this variation can be attributed to dialectal differences as well as influence of other tonal varieties of Chinese as you get further away from Beijing.

I don't find that recognizing tones in standard speech is too difficult, but that's probably because I'm a native speaker. Tones are definitely something that you need to get used to. I've been listening to some Shanghainese recently and it's difficult to know if you're actually hearing and pronouncing each tone correctly.
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Re: Tone

Post by thetha »

cybrxkhan wrote:
Thakowsaizmu wrote: One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third.
I think this is quite true. A few of the Vietnamese tones definitely do this (although admittedly a couple of the Vietnamese tones are kind of... weird, relatively, to Mandarin, and I didn't realize this until I looked it up recently).
The nặng tone is particularly short compared to the others, in Southern dialects it can even be only half as long as the other tones. The ngã and sắc tones are also pretty short, but not to such a great extent. The rest of the tones tend to be characteristically long, from what I've heard. This is all based on me listening to videos of people who I assume are pretty public figures, so they'd probably want to have as much of a neutral accent as possible. I also know a Vietnamese speaker in my Chemistry class, but he doesn't know many more words than me so we don't talk in it much.
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Re: Tone

Post by thaen »

Thank you all for your help! I don't dislike tones -- I like them, in fact. One of my langs has tone, but I'm probably butchering pronunciation.
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Re: Tone

Post by Thakowsaizmu »

thaen wrote:Thank you all for your help! I don't dislike tones -- I like them, in fact. One of my langs has tone, but I'm probably butchering pronunciation.
If your conlang has tones, look for a natlang with those tones as well and just find some sound clips. Listening is a great way to get them... eventually.
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Re: Tone

Post by cybrxkhan »

Theta wrote:
cybrxkhan wrote:
Thakowsaizmu wrote: One thing I have noticed is that the tone sometimes dictates the length of the vowel. Now this may just be me reading too much into it, but Mandarin for example, vowels with the forth tone (`) are decidedly shorter (and angrier) than the vowels with the first or third.
I think this is quite true. A few of the Vietnamese tones definitely do this (although admittedly a couple of the Vietnamese tones are kind of... weird, relatively, to Mandarin, and I didn't realize this until I looked it up recently).
The nặng tone is particularly short compared to the others, in Southern dialects it can even be only half as long as the other tones. The ngã and sắc tones are also pretty short, but not to such a great extent. The rest of the tones tend to be characteristically long, from what I've heard. This is all based on me listening to videos of people who I assume are pretty public figures, so they'd probably want to have as much of a neutral accent as possible. I also know a Vietnamese speaker in my Chemistry class, but he doesn't know many more words than me so we don't talk in it much.
Hmm, I was under the impression that whenever I said the ngã tone it was the longest. *shrugs* Then again lots of time in normal speech it isn't easily distinguishable from the hoi tone.
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Re: Tone

Post by thetha »

Are you from south Vietnam? I've read that's a characteristic difference in the dialects there compared to those in the North.
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