MegDesk

Learning Chinese Pronunciation

The tonal language concept comes up a lot when people try to explain how difficult it is to learn Chinese, but I think that’s just because it’s a completely foreign concept that doesn’t show up when you try to learn most other languages like French, German, Japanese, etc. However (and I’m probably going to be in trouble with the Foreigners Learning Chinese club for saying this), the tones really aren’t that bad! My biggest problem is actually just in pronouncing the various sounds.

They say that the part of your hearing-understanding mind that parses speech sounds pretty much shuts off at the age of 2 or 3, and that if you don’t know a sound by then, you’ll never understand it. So when adults try to learn new sounds in a new language and can’t tell the difference between them, it might really be that they can’t hear the difference. I don’t know how true this is, but I can certainly identify with it, because in learning both Chinese and Hindi, there are some sounds I just can’t figure out.

Thanks to a lot of patience from Lan and Songling, and having coached Japanese friends through the L vs. R issue, I know the difference in mouth shape and tongue position to form all the different consonants. While my kind coaches have said (on a particularly good day) that they can tell which letter I’m trying to produce, I still can’t hear much difference between them myself!

Finally, after breezing through “bo po mo fo” and stumbling blindly through “zhi shi chi,” I finally started to learn basic vocabulary and grammar. One of the first grammar points we learned was the formation of questions, so one of the first things we learned how to say was, “Are you going to Beijing” (Nǐ chù bú chù Běijīng?). Unfortunately, with my miserable pronunciation, Songling laughed, and informed me that it sounded more like I was asking, “Are you going to eat Beijing” (Nǐ chē bú chē Běijīng?). Pretty bad, considering “go” (chù) and “eat” (chē) not only have different vowel endings, they have different tones as well!

I’ve since decided that part of my chù – chē problem stems from Japanese, where a U is pronounced vaguely like a Chinese E. A Chinese U would translate more like a Ū in Japanese. With the many ways to recreate Asian sounds in English letters (Hindi has yet another version different from Japanese and Chinese), I’ve actually found that sometimes it’s easier to write things out phonetically in Japanese characters to keep me from getting confused! Until I get a better handle on things, I’m certain that the Chinese will have to forgive me when I ask about eating their historical landmarks!

This entry was tagged with pronunciation and filed under China, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.