Clearly, there is some confusion about some of the concepts in the first post. Let me clarify a couple of things:
- First of all, no one is arguing that poor pronunciation is good. Of course we must try to get every learner’s pronunciation right as early as possible. The question here is when and how, we achieve that, not if we should do it. My belief is that a gradual, ‘global’ approach to pronunciation is more effective than drilling it into learners before they learn to say anything. (This obviously depends on how much drilling is involved.)
- Secondly, it is indisputable that ‘pronunciation is very important’, and that ‘bad pronunciation can lead to a failure to understand’. These are truisms. Stating them confuses the discussion here, since (a) they are self-evident, and (b) they imply that someone is arguing to the contrary. (No-one is.) A lot of things are important in learning a new language and a lot of things could cause misunderstandings if you get them wrong. Obviously. Again, the real question is how we should approach the study of pronunciation, not whether pronunciation affects communication. [If I wanted, I could probably make the case that the weather affects communication.]
I think we also need to look at some terminology at this point. Much of what I described in the last post on pronunciation concerned phonetics: the study of how speakers articulate the sounds of a language. (My definition.) Since Mandarin employs sounds that do not occur, say, in English, the learner is required to move his vocal tract in new ways. These ‘gymnastics’, and phonetics generally, are studied outside of context or meaning.
Phonetics, however, is only one of the things that affect pronunciation.There is, for example, the study of phonology – the sound patterns/sound systems, or repertoire of sounds that characterize a language. Sometimes these are studied in context, for example, things such as stress, tone, intonation, and rhythm, all of which come under the label of phonology (subset ‘prosody’). This includes the four tones in Mandarin.
In teaching pronunciation, the teacher must distinguish between these two: On one hand the unique sound features of the target language, and on the other, strategies to help learners articulate the new sounds. [An implicit element of both is reception or recognition: the neophyte must learn to receive/understand the sounds of the language.]
Traditionally, Mandarin instructors tend to emphasize two elements in teaching Mandarin at the early stages, often to the exclusion of other things. These are:
- Articulating the sounds (based on phonetic charts)
- Identifying and producing the tones
My position is that this approach has inherent flaws, particularly if too much instruction time is spent on them. (My experience has been that some teachers spend way too much time on them.)
I hope things are abit clearer now.
I have yet to really explain how I arrived at this position, but this post is long enough already. I’ll save that for Part 3.
Ken Carroll
OK, we’re coming closer together on this stuff now.
I find the phonology easy, it’s just a matter of copying what you hear, and it’s pretty easy to hear from a model, just a variation on my current vocal repertoire. My problem has been not having the phonetics to phonologise. That part’s real hard to hear.
I don’t think you can get the phonology right without hearing speech at near full speed. Recent newbies lessons have included some faster speech which is great. I’d like to hear a lot more of our tiny newbie utterances spoken at speed, because they sound completely different. It gives me a picture of what it is that I’m saying slowly. Since hearing newbie stuff spoken faster, I’ve gone back and re-worked how I say them slowly and how I think about the phrases as a whole.
Also I like the way that Jenny often brings out the phrasing, is that what you call it? Identifying the points where you could put a little break, which is not where I would have expected. That knowledge helps to make sense of the grammar and word choice/usage, so they all support each other.
These types of things are easy and fun to follow, for me at least. But I still can’t do it if any words contain an r
Ok who’s stolen the lesson comments submit button?
Interesting thread. I’ve had a number of “traditional” chinese teachers using “traditional” methodologies, and the concepts of phonetics and/or phonology never once have been brought up. In many cases I as the student asked for more practice and review on tones, because I found it fascinating and one of the keys to my understanding. I’m pretty thick skulled, maybe that’s why…. But anyway, in a typical 50 minute one-on-one lesson (which is the only way I have ever learned mandarin, outside of CPod) , on average maybe 5 to 10 minutes were dedicated to concentrated lessons on tone articulation and differentiation. Even in my newbie days, it was never more than 15 minutes per lesson. I don’t know if my scenario is out of the norm, just adding it as a data point. But it’s important to keep in mind that the bottom line is the bottom line: if there is a more effective and interesting way to master the tones using new paradigms and methodologies, go for it. Sign me up as a guinea pig. I would suspect developments along this path would tend to be “learning without knowing you’re learning” type approaches. Some students don’t want to learn about Maslows hierarchy of needs, they just want to be told what to do.
I do think that there is a big fear cloud hanging over the heads of chinese language students all over the world about the impossibilities of the tones, and I know fear in any learning environment decreases learning effectiveness. So kudo’s to cpod for tackling this subject head-on.
Ah, glad that’s cleared up. Thanks for explaining. So, when and how do you approach the study of pronounciation? The when is easy: as soon as possible. There are some who still can’t pronounce words right after a year of study, and in my opinion, that’s too long. After a year you should be able to pronounce every word you come across. Especially since Mandarin is so easy, because unlike English, Mandarin has a set amount of words, so any new word they come up with will be one you already know how to pronounce. So I say, lay the foundation before building the house (grammar would be the walls-the structure if you will).
How is a harder question. But why can’t we have pronounciation tags just like grammar tags? Maybe links to videos/pictures/sound files that explain at least the phonetic gymnastics? At first I thought of having rollover links in the exercise dialogue, but that’s only for paying subscribers. So you could retain the global approach by focusing only on the few hard to pronounce words in the lesson, and use those as pronounciation links. Maybe paying subscribers could get the full rollover links for the pronounciation of every word.
As for phonology, Cpod already has that. The dialogue exercise allows you to listen to groups of words/sentences/words in context. The only thing is, it’s for paying users only. So I have no solution for you there. People will just have to listen to the podcast over and over. Maybe someone has a better idea. Or maybe in the podcast you can explain which words to group together, that way people could use that same grouping in other sentences. Just a thought.
I still think the listening is the foundation.
I disagree that you should be able to say every sound by the first year, because that statement alone implies failure for those that can’t, remember there are plenty of adults who have speech impediments or pronounciation problems in their first language and still cope well. Also taking the Mandarin sounds in isolation there are only a limited amount but when you start jamming themtogether it is a different story.
There will be no universal solution. Even taking the oft-quoted “If you get into bad habits you won’t be able to unlearn them” that is rubbish for many people. As I have noted before, we have very strong regional accents in the UK take two adults from one area a place them both in a radically different area. Within a couple of months one may speak English the same way as his new counterparts and the other still speaks with his original accent (and may continue to do so for the next fifty years, finding it impossible to change even if he wants to).
So whatever the solution is it needs to fit in with the “Maandarin your way” philosophy.
Every student is different and has their own needs and strengths. What we need is a pronounciation gymnasium where we can work out where we see fit. It is not going to be easy.
Chris, this is where you and I appear to be poles apart, but we’re not really.
“I disagree that you should be able to say every sound by the first year, because that statement alone implies failure for those that can’t….”
I’d disagree with that, but wait… No, I don’t care if it takes ten years for me to be able to pronounce everything right. What I do want is to know, within the first few weeks, to know how to pronounce every sound, whether I can actually do it yet or not. At least I can try-in-the-right-direction. Of course if that info is delivered in a single session (out of context) I won’t remember it so it’s pointless. Actually I want to know how to pronounce each word as it is introduced to me. Listening first of course, then I’ll try an approximation, but if they’ve used some funky mouth tricks to get it they should fess up. To know how, not necessarily to be able to.
The important thing is to have the information and understanding to recognise which sounds you’re making sorta correctly, which you’re not, and why. If you can’t distinguish between shi and she, between qu and chu, it’s not good enough to deem them to be the same sound for the first year. If you can’t make those sounds perfectly, that doesn’t matter, so long as you know _what_ to try, you can try. You can fix your mouth after a year, but not so easy your brain. In dictation, I still can’t get the difference between qu and chi, unless they’re spoken close together, but that will auto-improve over time because I do know what I’m listening for. When I didn’t have the knowing, any amount of exposure would not help.
The bad outcome, as I see it, would be to learn for a year and still internally regard shi and she as the one sound with variable spelling. What you know, what you hear, how you classify it in the brain, that’s what’s important in early pronunciation. Get the mental processing right, up front, and you can improve the output over time without going too far astray.
Tones
Everyone has to know that “second tone” means, and know it very well. That takes precisely 5 minutes of drill to learn, and ya gotta do it.
Then it should stop. For good.
The tones we hear in conversation are not like the tones we hear in the drill. Each word has a tone that belongs to it, and a set of variations that it uses in different contexts. Nobody drills those variations, it’d be pointless. You know the tone number that the word owns, and you learn how it expresses its melody in context with words having other tones.
If you don’t know which basic tone the word owns, you’re forced to learn a couple of dozen apparent “tones”, which is too much work. That’s why they always need to be mentioned, but not drilled.
Aunty Sue, I think as you say we are both the same and different.
What if you can hear the difference between she and shi and between chi an qu before you even have a clue how they are pronounced?
Then surely you can progress?
Chris, sure you can.
The aim of learning about pronunciation is better listening, not perfect speaking.
Without taking the illustration too far, I think listening would be watching someone else build a house, and getting the gist of how it’s done. Following Lantian’s phrase of the week, thought would be the blueprint, the idea of what you want the house to look like. Communication is coveying information to another person. How we convey that information varies widely (many times when I can’t think of a word I just point to the object, some people can communicate just with a look!). Every house needs a foundation, four walls, and a roof. You could have just those three parts and people would say, “Okay, I understand that it’s a house”. The information would be conveyed, therefore you would have “communicated” with someone else. This can be done without grammar, pronounciation, etc. So here I have been corrected: Information content would be the foundation, walls and roof-the most basic parts of a building. Now, an improvement would be to add support to the structure-vocabulary. Vocabulary is like the pieces of wood that make up the frame. The more vocabulary, the more you have supported the building. So in terms of importance, vocab is next. Grammar would be the internal structure, how the pieces are connected together. Pronounciation is like the workmanship. It can be shoddy or it can be precise.
Okay, maybe I did take the illustration a bit far. The thing is, in English pronounciation is not *that* important. In Mandarin, though, pronounciation is very important. Getting a tone wrong or saying “chi” instead of “shi” can mean a big difference. Bad workmanship can lead to the house’s collapse.
By all means I’m not saying that after years of bad pronounciation a person is doomed. They just have to work that much harder to form the correct neural pathways. Their brain is so used to saying it a certain way that it has to be taught to stop going down that path, and then go down the right path. Twice the work. It’s much easier to know from the beginning which path to take. Of course you have to learn how things sound when grouped together, but first you have to know what they sound like alone. Just like when we first started to read, we had to know how to pronounce each letter before we could say a word.
Lastly, I’ll say I wish I had the convenience to learn Mandarin while surrounded by native speakers. But I do not. I want to do my best under the circumstances.
The first class I ever had of Chinese in China with my first Chinese tutor:
My tutor sat down and started to explain the theory of Mandarin pronunciation to me–in Chinese. She started going on and on, pointing to diagrams of the oral cavity in my book, pointing to the position of her tongue in her mouth, aspirating p’s, etc. I was completely lost–maybe stunned is a better word. I sat there for a minute or so, and then finally said, in English, “Um, how about we do it like this. We’ll just go over each sound and if I’m right we’ll go on to the next one and if I’m wrong we’ll work on it a little, make note of it and then move on.” And that’s exactly what we did. We spent maybe twenty or thirty minutes on that, and then I said, “Now, how about we try some dialogues.” And we did that too. We proceeded like this three days a week for maybe two months, until my tutor was fairly comfortable with my pronunciation. For me, that was an excellent strategy.
This worked well for both of us, because we had a deal. I’d teach her an hour of English and she’d teach me and hour of Chinese, but the catch was that she prepared her own English lesson and I prepared my own Chinese lesson. That way, she didn’t lose any face by me saying, “No, I don’t want to do it this way, I want to do it this way,” because I wasn’t going against her plans, but my own, and I didn’t lose any face when she wanted to approach the study of English differently than what I thought was appropriate. Furthermore, I was far more motivated to prepare my own Chinese lesson than I was to create some English lesson for her, and I’m sure she felt the same way.
I disagree with Aunty Sue The aim of pronunciation is better (Perfect is unattainable) speaking. Training your ear is different to training your mouth. Although while doing one you may pick up things to help with the other as they are both about the sounds.
Describing the phonetics and phonology of a language is part of teaching Pronunciation an Intonation. I believe it could become a part of teaching listening but I think that simply listening to the language in podcasts gives plenty of this but for people having problems listening to any pronunciation material may give some benefit.
Improving pronunciation should not be getting confused with improving understanding of the orthoepy. You learn parts of both when you attempt to improve either but the teaching methods and exercises (which I believe should be the heart of this discussion) would be different.
*slightly of topic*
One thing I’d like to say is that ChinesePod could (and should) give multiple approaches to everything. It is an inherit ability of the medium. Allot of people work from multiple books as different parts of each book (or other medium) work better for them than others. Rather than changing between content creators in ChinesePod you should have the ability to just pick the bits that work for you. Rather than this is the way that you should approach listening you could say we have these ways.. try them all and use the one that works best for you.
Latley it sounds like there is becoming a single ChinesePod way it’s great that this way seems to be an amalgamation of ideas yet in some ways this amalgamation seems to make the individual ideas weaker. *ok back a bit more on topic
That’s what I’d really like to see come out at the end of these discussions, several approaches to Pronunciation teaching and practise.
AuntySue said:
I totally agree with this. If my pronunciation is wrong, I don’t want to hear “don’t worry about it.” I want to fix it! I understand that it may take time, but I at least need to know what I have to work on, and what I have to tune in to more when I listen to the target language.
pandagator said:
I know pandagator doesn’t mean that pronunciation is unimportant in English. I think he’s referring to a sociolinguistic phenomenon created by English’s status as “world language.” As native English speakers of a world language, we have a huge tolerance for a variety of accents. This is not an inherent “advantage” of the English language, it is a result of years and years of imperialism, language instruction, and globalization. Mandarin Chinese has definitely not reached this status as a language yet, and so its native speakers have nowhere near as much tolerance for non-native pronunciation as native speakers of English do. I believe that this is a factor worth taking into account.
Charles Bluett said:
Trust me, there are plenty of differing viewpoints here at ChinesePod. While Ken and I agree on the major points (communication-centered language instruction, for example), I do favor more explicit instruction of things like grammar and pronunciation, because I believe it has helped me a lot. Offering users various options is definitely part of our philosophy.
John
Just above you say ” so its (Chinese) speakers have nowhere near as much tolerance for non-native pronunciation as native speakers of English do”
I certainly agree, but am I wrong when I think I hear horrible Mandarin spoken by Chinese all the time ? And yet, somehow it is understood by other Chinese people and yet a foreign speaker of Mandarin who might not be really bad often finds difficulty being understood ? I am less interested in the why , the foreign speaker is not understood. That seems to just be an emotional arguement with everyone just having an opinion , but rather can you explain how anyone understands many of the people in Chinese whose Mandarin it seems to my tin ears is awful.
Mike in Jubei
Hi Mike. I’d like to hear JohnS’s thoughts on this also. From my observations it’s because many Chinese people speaking ‘horrible’ Chinese do however have an underlying grammar that is ‘Chinese’esque. Whereas a English speaker for example will have both poor pronunciation, phonology AND a English grammar intruding on the Chinese.
Personally I think instruction should really focus a lot, lot, more on lexical chunks and what words go before and after a word. People have the hardest time understanding me when I throw out just a one-word sound, comprehension for them goes up like a jillion percent if I have the right words just before or after.
And I found JohnS’s comment about English as a world language very fascinating. I think outside of academic-types Chinese people are really really tolerant of regional accents, but maybe it’s because I live in a part of China where a huge percentage of the local population is not local. Although I must say this with a caveat, a pale face does cause lots of dissonance, but not as much as it does for Japanese people!
Oh, one last thing, cause I keep meaning to ask but forget, Mike, how did the question about what instruments your kid-tutors played go? Was just using ‘wan’ enough?
John/Ken … I was wondering about something on the Forum. It doesn’t deal with pronunciation, but since you brought up “various options” as part of the CPOD “philosophy”, I’ll slip my concern in here (and it really applies mostly to the lower levels):
CPOD strives to be flexible. It’s an advertising point. That’s understandable and pragmatic. Smart business, too. You don’t want new users to feel left in the dust if they didn’t start 4 months ago. You go out of your way to stress that lessons aren’t in any particular order and that they need not be be studied chronologically. You can pick and choose from the buffet. Indeed, that’s the impetus behind MyCourse, no?
Though I appreciate and understand the motives behind it, I’m concerned that you guys might be boxing yourselves in by getting a bit too modular. As it stands, you really don’t have any mechanism in place to reinforce and recapitulate old material. You can’t really build on anything the way (say) Pimsleur will work old material into later lessons.
I’m not sure I have any good answers. About the only thing I can think to suggest is that you guys might want to stop thinking in terms of individual shows and start thinking in terms of “series”. Maybe mini-series? 4-6 episodic shows that use the same vocab, emphasize the same principles, and reinforce each other.
Lantian
Having worked for a Japanese company for 25 years. Absolutely, Japanese have little or no tolerance. We are not capable of speaking or doing anything like ” we Japanese”
So yes for me Chinese people are infinitely more tolerant of my pitiful attempts at speaking Chinese. And yes no one has answered about “wan” for play. I hope some one will do so.
And Lantian I am a believer in lexal chunks. I think it affects pronunication as you have mentioned in terms of multi-character words so it would go with out a stretch in thinking it applies to chunks as well.
Mike in Jubie
It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that there is a wealth of grammar in each newbie podcast that we are experiencing but don’t have to concern ourselves with just yet. I noticed a PDF didn’t contain some of the words in the dialogue and thought great, I only have to sweat over these words, the others might be optional or for lighter learning. Then I considered the amount of work in learning the characters, and thought hey, why don’t I just pick one or three from each lesson and learn them. You could spend a month studying a ten word conversation if you didn’t set some limits.
I too have been arguing that it’s horrible not having a sequence of lessons that build on each other. Now I’m seeing some other alternatives. All aspects of a dialogue (vocab, grammar, phonology, writing, etc) can be studied at whatever depth is relevant to your chosen pathway, and so they should. For example, when we’re told “the le on the end is one way of indicating the past, but there’s many things to learn later on about the use of le, just use it this way for now”, I’m happy, and don’t want anything more than that in my face. (If it really bugs me I’d look it up.) One day I’ll learn about word order conventions, or some grammar thing, and by then I’ll own a lot of patterns that I can look back at and say oh yeah I see what you mean.
So maybe there’s some way around this by having different sets of take home messages from a podcast, the most basic ones mentioned within, and the others for exploration according to each student’s plan?
It does nothing to help the problem of revision and consolidation, but it might be helpful for allowing different depths of analysis by students.
Once you’ve made the decision to be modular, which you know is hard to pull off, you can’t do it by half measures. That means never ever saying “… which we’ve encountered before” or even thinking like that. It’s very hard to teach with no assumptions about the learners, but that’s the task here. The use of parallel threads, in terms of the student’s goals in each aspect of Chinese study, could be interesting.
It’s hard though, I have brain storms but no real solutions. I’m just glad I’m on the student side of this screen
Mike in Jubei said:
Lantian said:
Mike, you’re definitely not wrong. Chinese accents do go all over the place. Some people don’t distinguish “n”/”ng”, others don’t distinguish “s”/”sh”, still others don’t distinguish “n”/”l” or “r”/”l”. Vowels, too… “ai” can become “ei” in certain regions, etc. Not to mention tones. If you think that your tones are bad, you should hear the old generation in Shandong speaking Mandarin. The tones are all wrong.
And yet foreigners are still misunderstood while those with the wacky accents are not. Why? Well, I think there are two main reasons (and I’m in agreement with Lantian’s analysis). The first reason is psychological. Some people simply cannot get the idea of “Chinese coming from a foreigner” through their minds, and it creates a kind of psychological block. This is not my imagination; it has happened too many times to ignore, and I no longer have beginner pronunciation issues. The second reason is related to tolerance. Yes, Chinese people have a wide variety of regional accents in their Mandarin, but many of these accents are familiar. It’s not so different from us listening to New York accents and American Southern accents and British accents and Aussie accents. Since Chinese is not yet a global language, this familiarity does not extend to non-Chinese accents. Another part of the tolerance issue is consistency. Foreigners’ accents (especially with regard to tone) involve mispronunciation in an inconsistent way for which Chinese people have no frame of reference. So if I’m a beginner and my sentence intonation from English is influencing my tones in Chinese, I might pronounce a word in second tone at the beginning of a sentence, but later pronounce the same word as fourth tone because it comes at the end. The Chinese would not do that, and they would have a hard time understanding it.
Once a foreigner can get his tones relatively consistent and most of the sounds of Mandarin under control, he can start taking advantage of China’s variety of accents. You know your Chinese is getting better when over the telephone you’re no longer immediately identified as “laowai,” and people guess you’re from Guangdong. (Discalimer: That’s certainly progress, but also far from perfection.)
-John
FDW,
Good question about the modules. I think there are solutions to the modular conundrum. We could reveiw the level, tabulate the language items, and simply construct a series of review (or overview) lessons based on it. We could even experiment with mixing it up - introduce some lessons that function as a series. As long as we do the tagging well (we’ve spent a lot of time on that) we have options going into the future.
There sare many reasons why we decided to go with modules. It certainly appears to me that internet users generally weant to unbundle content, so short, sweet and flexible seems to be the way to go.
Ken
SOUNDS WRONG - JohnP has mentioned quite catagorically on several occassions that “pinyin decribes exactly the sounds of Chinese”, or something to that effect. Does everyone agree?
When I first read John’s statement I didn’t disagree, I think pinyin does really give a very good representation to the sounds of standard Chinese. The other day however I was talking to someone, and she was talking standard putonghua,but her accent and slurring sure made it sound different. It was almost like I was listening to Korean. So it made me think…and read.
Steven Pinker says this, “No writing system has symbols for actual sound units that can be identified on an oscilloscope or spectorogram, such as a phoneme as it is pronounced in a particular context or syllable chopped in half.” (Chapter The Sounds of Silence, pp. 187).
This made sense to me. Although I can say a well-formed ’sound’ for the word “shi4″ in isolation, I bet that sound wave looks different if cut out from the sine wave that makes up a complete sentence.
So this makes me think that JohnP’s statement is 70% right and 30% proletariat. Instead, “Pinyin represents the exact sounds of Chinese, but sounds for identical meanings vary in different sentences.” …something like that.
It’s just something to ponder, as “alphabets do not and should not correspond to sounds, at best they correspond to the phonemes specified in the mental dictionary. The actual sounds are different in different contexts, so true phonetic spelling would only obscure their underlying identity.” (Pinker, p187)
Rite? Right? 日哎特吗？(re-ai-te ma?)
Lantian says:
So this makes me think that JohnP’s statement is 70% right and 30% proletariat. Instead, “Pinyin represents the exact sounds of Chinese, but sounds for identical meanings vary in different sentences.” …something like that.
I think you have identified a problem I am starting to see. Pinyin is beguiling to us native, educated (at least enough to read) English speakers because it does not represent the same set of sounds as in English.
Take the sound represented by ‘n.’ In English, many of us, but perhaps not all speaking communities, hold on to the ‘n’ sound, however, it seems to me that in all the Putonghua speakers I have been listening to, there is a different quality to the ‘n’ that they speak. Except in second tone, where, it seems to me, the final is usually held onto to ensure that second tone is distinguishable from other tones, the ‘n’ sound seems to be strongly clipped by many speakers …
This then allows me to seque into the discussion from another one of these about the value of pronunciation exercises, and I have to disagree with those who think there is little value.
Especially with what we now know about mirror neurons (where parts of the brain associated with, say drinking, are activated upon hearing someone drink) I think that it is highly likely that the parts of the brain where the neural connections occur that allow us to hear are also involved in the production of those sounds and in distinguishing one phoneme/morpheme from another, and hearing is likely to activate the same neural circuits that control the whole breathing and throat and tongue co-ordination.
It seems to me, that as in their approach to learning math(s), those Chinese using the more traditional language instructional approaches (strong emphasis on pronunciation) have got it right.