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tones again, some hard evidence
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jbiesnecker -

I wonder if it matters that (according to Wenlin) there are no words at all that start with bao1
and follow with 'shou' (either in first tone or with a neutral tone). Like hearing a familiar yet
totally nonsensical series of sounds in English might throw you if you're listening to someone
whose pronunciation is known to be non-standard.

Just a thought...



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in_lab -

In the dialogue, they use 台式電腦 for desktop computer. In Taiwan, 桌上型電腦 is more
popular, maybe because 台式電腦 sounds like a "Taiwanese style" computer.

When I make a tone mistake, I don't usually detect it until I have said a few more words, and then
I'm not sure if I should (a) repeat the word that I messed up (b) repeat the whole sentence, or
(c) just forget it if the other person understood. None of the choices are very attractive.










Lu -

I think I'd correct myself, and if necessary repeat the sentence from there. This way, you show
that you do know, and you say it right = practice.










kudra -

@ in_lab

Which make me think of a possible soap opera lampoon, Desktop Style Divorce.










kudra -

Regarding tones in Mandarin, and their importance.
googled for
chinese tonal information entropy

Here is a paper
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj...nemandarin.pdf
I didn't read the math, but this section of the conclusion is interesting.


Quote:

A quantitative information-theoretic measure demonstrates the
important role played by tone in Mandarin Chinese. In particular,
lexical tone contrast has been shown to have a comparable
functional load to that of vowels for Mandarin, and
higher FL than stress in English, Dutch, and German. We have
also demonstrated that the importance of tonal contrasts varies
among the tones of Mandarin.
...
some
language reformers have suggested that tones do not need to be
represented in a revised alphabet. Our result suggests that such
an alphabet would be as hard to use as an alphabet that represented
tones but not vowels.

Re "Functional Load" is apparently a statistical measure. I don't know if this means in practice
that students of Mandarin should be as careful of their tones as they are of their vowels, i.e.
getting the tone right is as important as getting the vowel right. Presumably you could test this
by making native speakers listen to text with either vowels scrambled, or tones scrambled.
Presumably realistic scrambling of tones by non-native speakers of Mandarin is not random, so it's
not obvious how to make the comparison "fair" -- if that matters.

Also, we have corroboration regarding roddy's advice to use 4th tone when guessing as it's most
common, compared to my self reported defaut guess of 1st tone, although it's close.


Quote:

Table 7: The fraction of syllables with different tones in Mandarin,
based on the TDT3 corpus of VOA Mandarin broadcasts.

Tone High Rising Low Falling Neutral
Fraction 0.27 0.22 0.16 0.28 0.07

skimming, looks like the 1st author is a grad student advised by the 2nd author.
Here's the 2nd authors cv.
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~levow/cv.htm










charlescpp -

we usually call laptop computers 本儿 in 中关村
中关村 == 村儿
去中关村 == 进村儿










mandarin-ka -

www.melnyks.com is another useful Website in a podcast form for those who wants to learn beyong
Pimsleur or Chinesepod.










roddy -

Enough of the self-promotion, thankyou!










bewolff -

I think the problem of tones are a little bit like english pronunciation for Chinese speakers.
There is a point where you are more or less understandable. Practice tones...I suppose. When you
study your new words your should try to learn the tones well then. However if you think about your
tones constantly your will slow your speach making yourself not undertrandable to your Chinese
listeners. Context and speaking a little faster will help them understand you, even if your tones
are quite bad. You should also be doing hours of listening to tv/radio/recordings to hammer the
sounds of the tones into your head. Find out the 5 things that you do very poorly in Chinese
pronunciation and try to work on those directly, one-by-one. From there, if you are still wanting
to punish yourself, add another and another. But you have to do the listening. Forcing your self
to correct your pronunciation is tedious, boring, frustrating...like the hamburger scene in the
new Pink Panther.










Southernjohn -

I haven't listened to that specific podcast, where Ken makes that tonal mistake. However, I have
listened to other Chinesepod segements with Ken and Jenny. Ken does not really speak fluent
Mandarin. He typically speaks a sentence or two, but quickly switches to English. Don't get me
wrong, I am not belittling Ken's Chinese. However, don't read too much into Jenny misunderstanding
him. (again I haven't listened to this specific recording). I wouldn't be at all surprised if
Jenny did not understand Ken because Ken, in his "short-burst", "short-phrase" Chinese provided
very little context. Yes, Ken's tones are not that great some times, but I would assert that
Jenny's lack of comprehension has more to do with Ken's lack of overall fluency, i.e.- vocabulary,
grammar, and time spent speaking the language.

Does that sound so far off?












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