John Pasden recently created “The Process of Learning Tones,” based on his experience learning Chinese. I thought, at the time, that I was easily to step three, edging toward step four in some more commonly used two character words. My tones weren’t by any means consistent, and I still screwed up constantly and seldom remember the correct tone in time to say it in conversation, but I thought I was getting closer.
Perhaps I overestimated my abilities.
Last night I had my first Chinese lesson. Amber, my tutor, was infinitely patient with my horrible, horrible rendition of her native tongue. In my own defense, my Chinese pronunciation is a mishmash of three different dialects — northeast Mandarin, smothered heavily with throaty -er goodness, Fujian dialect, learned from my Taiwanese professor at UCF where I swear to God s, sh, x, and sometimes c (in pinyin) are pronounced exactly the same damn way, and now the local dialect, which is closer to Fujian than to dongbeihua I suppose but still distinct — so for any given sound I have to choose between three different pronunciations and, for the most part, I fuck all three of them up quite nicely.
I also learned that I was pronouncing ‘ch’ wrong, because it is not said with the tongue directly behind the teeth but rather with the tongue rolled up to the upper middle palette, coming down to the bottom of your mouth during aspiration to make the correct sound. I never know that, and now I find it damn near impossible to get my tongue to that position while speaking at any speed whatsoever. Muscle memory, especially where speech is concerned, is difficult to overcome.
I did learn some useful phrases, however. Besides pronunciation, what I really want to work on are practical terms and phrases that I’ll be able to use as building blocks for more complicated speech. I can easily learn new verbs and nouns and all that myself, but putting them together properly for colloquial speech is quite a bit more difficult and benefits greatly from access to a native speaker. We talked about all sorts of things, but I found the most useful phrases from last night to be fast food related (because you can never find that sort of thing in books).
- san1 hao4 tao4 can1: the third meal (replace san1 with whatever number you want). tao4 can1 means a meal with multiple different items included (i.e., hamburger, fries, soda, etc.).
- chao1 da4 hao4: supersized.
- dai4 zou3: take out, to go
The local chinee-takee-outee restaurant taught me dai zou. Of course, I propmptly forgot it, but at least she tried.
Left by Jordan on September 15th, 2003
Amber… an unusual name for a Chinese person.
Left by Dave on September 16th, 2003
I took a phonetics class at UF this past Spring and the class consisted of two parts. First we had to learn all about phonetics, just like one would expect, but the second part was learning all but about ten of the different sounds that have been observed and recorded in a natural language. So, unfortunately, I know an IPA symbol for the sound you are describing and I have a little empathy in regards to the muscle memory comment, because taking this class messed with my muscle memory and thusly gave me a bit of a speech disorder when speaking English that is only now (four months later) going away.
I highly recommend this book if you want to learn exactly how to make just about any human speech sound you’ll ever need to make (or so I was told.)
Left by David on September 16th, 2003
So are you planning to eat all your meals at McDonalds or what? hehe
Glad to hear that Amber’s helping you. Remember, it MUST be painful. Hang in there.
Left by John P on September 16th, 2003
I’ve found that knowing the correct name (and perhaps even the symbol) for the sound you’re trying to make goes a long way to communicating how to say something. Usually in the process you also have to remember the tongue position. I found that after taking linguistics i had a easier time trying to explain how to make a sound. Perhaps some basic phonetics understanding would help you learn the correct sounds to make.
Left by Eric on September 16th, 2003
sd
Left by sds on November 3rd, 2003