Tone Bootcamp Part 1: Single Tones
An Introduction to Mandarin Tones
Mastering tones will be your biggest challenge with learning to hear and speak Mandarin well. As a highly tonal language, Mandarin relies on pitch variation when communicating meaning. In other words, the relative pitch of your voice will partly determine what you mean when you speak.
This concept is strange to English speakers, but it should not be, since English is a tonal language as well.
The inflection of your voice (i.e. pitch variation) will communicate many important things like emotion and irony. It's also important for differentiating questions from statements (e.g. "It's you?" vs. "It's you!").
The reason we think of Mandarin as "tonal" is because pitch variation plays a larger role in determining meaning.
The Handicap to Overcome
When approaching the challenge of tonal mastery, you need to be aware of two very important things:
- If you have little or no previous experience with Mandarin tones, you will NOT be able to hear a difference.
- With enough exposure and attention to detail, you CAN develop an appreciation for tones very quickly.
Mandarin students get discouraged when they do not immediately hear the differences between the tones. They will attribute it to "Tone-Deafness" or some other innate inability to appreciate Chinese languages, as if the ability to speak Chinese was pre-written into our genetics. Researchers have measured signals emitted by the auditory cortex and found that the untrained mind will fail to perceive any difference in tones.
But there is hope. The reason English speakers are insensitive to Chinese tones is because they play absolutely no role English, so your brain thinks in order to process these differences. But as you should know by now, you can build this sensitivity through repetition and conditioning. Click the link below to go to the next page.