The ultimate goal of ChinesePod instruction is ‘communicative competence’. Perfect grammar, perfect pronunciation (or perfect anything else) is not a realistic goal for the neophyte adult learner of Mandarin. With limited time and resources there’s always a trade-off in objectives – in this case, between perfect accuracy and a functioning communicative ability. We’ve designed ChinesePod for the latter.
A holistic approach probably serves this purpose best: you learn pronunciation in the same way you learn vocabulary, grammar, etc, that is, gradually, over time, and through input and practice. Generally speaking, this is as true for Mandarin as it is for all languages.
However, pronunciation does pose specific challenges for the Mandarin learner that may require extra attention. The tones are an obvious example. So too is the large number of homonyms (and near homonyms), or the similarities between certain consonant clusters - ‘q’ sounds and ‘ch’ sounds, for example. It is by no means certain that learners would acquire such pronunciation subtleties without the benefit of explicit training. (Even local schoolchildren need formal instruction to master the ‘official’ pronunciation.) And not only is Mandarin short on syllables, it is also a non-phonetic script. You get my drift.
So, what is our ‘official’ line on pronunciation in our instruction? Here, for your edification, are some internal guidelines that we use for teacher training and the podcasts:
• Aim to make the learner sound intelligible in the target language. Model the new items, and have the learner work on producing the new sounds, but holding her back until she produced every new word perfectly would take thousands of hours. Avoid that.
• By all means adjust absolute beginners to the new sounds, but do so wherever possible in context. (It would be a huge waste to subject anyone to hours of pronunciation practice without actually teaching them any new words.)
• Embed pronunciation features throughout the lessons so the learner gets a steady stream of it, rather than having long bouts of de-contextualized pronunciation practice – every ChinesePod lesson has some treatment of the tones, for example.
• Isolate the issues that cause the greatest difficulties and attack them.
• Make pronunciation exercises as integrative as possible, by looking for patterns. You cannot ‘discrete-point’ teach every single word for pronunciation.
• Use a diagnostic to ensure the learner is free of irritating, or absurd pronunciation ticks (we know which ones the westerners are likely to make)
• If you do use pronunciation drills, make them as interesting as possible – pop stars for teenagers, animals for kids, bridges and dams for engineers, etc.
• Real conversational practice improves pronunciation just as it improves all other aspects of the language. It is the single most effective tool there is.
• Too much focus on the micro-level, (below the level of meaning) pronunciation is de-motivating and tedious (although the threshold varies from one individual to another).
• Consider tghe case where a low intermediate speaker spoke Mandarin with total accuracy in pronunciation. Spooky.
• The bold John O’ Sinosplice will set you straight on all of this here.
Ken Carroll
Alright, it gets my seal of approval.
Yeah, good stuff, but now I’m worried that if I accidentally pronounce my dozen words right, I’ll spook people
But hey, I don’t think I’m up to spooking level yet, and even if I was, they’d figure me out in the ten second gaps between words.
Ken,
Are you ready to take a guess at an ETA for the new features your list suggests will be showing up in future lessons?
Tom
Tom,
Much of this is already part of what we do - on-going tone work, pronunciatuiion in context, the diagnostic, etc. We can make these a bit more explicit, starting within the next week, so that people know we’re treating them. In addition we will try to drum up some drills and something more explicit as well. I’d say 2 weeks for that.
Ken
Yes, that makes sense. But could we get a “need help now” QuickReference? Like an audio accompaniment to the Bould John’s commentary? Maybe Jenny could be persuaded to walk us through the sounds that John describes? For use in emergency, only. Of course.
Clarification - we were cross-posting. Getting something along these lines in 2 weeks would be great. Go raibh mile maith agaibh.
Stuck in bed with a savage flu, feel like a rant to get at least something off my chest. You’ll probably disagree but go ahead, that’ll make it interesting. Anyway here’s my hobby horse…
Why do all Mandarin teachers assume that tones are hard, and then make them so? I insist they’re not hard to learn, only hard to teach.
Tones are potentially the easiest part of speaking Mandarin, but quickly become difficult if not taught right.
Ignoring tones leaves it up to the student to struggle with the concept and simply copy the sounds, with growing insecurity if they hear the popular half-truths about tones.
On the other hand, most explicit teaching of tones I’ve seen just makes it harder to understand, because it’s full of fallacies, oversimplifying to the point that the instruction bears little resemblance to what one hears, therefore the student loses faith in their ability to hear tones. It’s as if the teacher is afraid that their teaching of tones will be ineffective so they don’t try hard. Oh we’ll tell them there’s precisely four tones, and let them blame themselves if they can’t hear it like that? It’s not the intention, but it’s the effect.
Hint: If you need to tell someone to say “ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4″ several times then you’re not teaching real world, you’re teaching the student some fantasy to prove that they can’t hear tones properly. Real world tones don’t sound like that. They’re theoretically based on it, but they don’t do that in the real world.
In the beginning we don’t need to learn how to say our tones perfectly, so long as we know we should do a fair stab of imitating the whole phrase including the intonation. But we DO have to start early to learn to HEAR tones correctly. In order to do that, we can’t cope with white lies. They harm us. What we’re told and what we hear have to coincide at every point. We need to know right up front the truth about how tones sound, and that’s not “ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4″. As soon as you first utter wo3 hen3 hao3 or even some consecutive 4th tone words descending markedly in pitch without explanation, you introduce confusion and reduce auditory confidence.
There is theory of tones, which anyone can pick up in five minutes from anywhere. It must always be followed in the same breath with a huge “BUT!” We need to know about that theory, but not expect to hear it in real conversation, from the start, before we lose faith as our teachers have done. Actual tones, as they are spoken, are interesting to the extent that they vary from the theory in context. Real tones exist only in context. We’re getting all of our learning in contextual chunks, so we need real world tones, not oversimplified theory which can do more harm than good.
Tones should be made as simple as possible to learn, BUT NO SIMPLER.
When I studied beginner Spanish at Uni (decades ago) I was interested to note that, four weeks into the class, everyone was imitating the tapes of the lessons with the precise tonal contours of the speaker. Without thought, it just happened, because nobody gave us permission to do different. (Note that Spanish is not a language we hear in Sydney.) Then in week 4, the teacher said a familiar Spanish sentence with different emotional emphasis, and we were gobsmacked. We had to consciously loosen up and apply (after discussing whether it’s OK) the same range of undulations that we would in an English sentence. Doing it (unnecessarily) with precisely identical tones was the most natural thing to do for a couple of dozen students, until we were actually instructed to vary it. Do you remember being taught your first limmerick? You did the same thing with the tones, right? It’s natural. Could you analyse the tones? Probably not, and why would you.
So what happens when people learn Chinese? Not everyone copies the tones exactly, but I bet most do when repeating the phrases at the same pace and rhythm. (This is much easier to do when the phrases are a little quicker and not disjointed) So when does it start going downhill? As soon as teacher, worried about the unquestioned mythical difficulty of tones, starts teaching them. Nothing wrong with that, except that what’s being taught is not what’s being heard. The difficulty experienced then is enough to reinforce for the teacher that oh yes tones are very hard. Bull.
I claim they’re ONLY hard to teach. And if we can front up to it and call a spade a spade, take a positive approach to learning to hear what’s really there, then that doesn’t need to be so any more.