Comments on: Car Tones

By: baolou

baolou — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:53:53 +0000

Actually, I think of the third tone as a sound I make when asking a one word question to unnerving statment. Someone unknown comes up and says out of the blue. “I need your name and adress.” I say, rather cautiously, “Why3? ” “I can fix your knee without surgury for $5″ “How3?” “Are you finished going to get out of the bathroom soon?” “Yes3, why3″ The car thing works not for me either.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:15:53 +0000

ah the tones. These pictures don't help me at all, the tone marks are obvious enough for me. My problem is though that i have very bad tonal hearing, if this is even a correct english expression. I mean that i have a hard time hearing the difference in tone between different sounds. I usually try to remember the combinations of tones and then figure out wich one has the most emphasis, or at least their sound relative to each other in stead of their absolute sound. I don't know if you understand what I mean, but in my 'hearing', there are only harder and softer tones and i try to imitate this. Off course I will have to find a better way and learn the tones correctly but it's going to take a lot of time to first improve my hearing and after my speech.

An easy example: when chinese say 'da de', big one, the 'de' is so soft you can barely hear it. When they say 'xiao de'., small one, i can hardly hear the 'xiao', but a very long 'deeee'.

I never found something or someone to really help me getting the tonal thing. It's like me trying to teach a chinese to pronounce a rolling r. No verbal explanations, pictures, tonal graphs, ... ever did the trick for me.

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:24:55 +0000

Has anybody else noticed half-third tones used in isolation? I remember talking with my students several years ago, and one of them said some word, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what they were saying, so I asked which tone that word was. This was in Taiwan, and seems fairly common there (although I hadn’t noticed it before that.)

By: Wilson

Wilson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:33:37 +0000

On second thought, it could be a fitting example of the phenom, “Superflat” (Japan).

By: Wilson

Wilson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:33:08 +0000

Great find, John!

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:18:14 +0000

Hey I recognize that… Is it from one of the Yuwen books for little kids?

By: Henning

Henning — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:17:40 +0000

changye, it is always a pleasure to read your contributions which provide historical and ethymological depth to Chinese related topics.

You should start your own blog. I would become a devoted reader.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:51:21 +0000

My dictionary lists both “shang4sheng1″ and “shang3sheng1″ as alternate ways to pronounce “上声”. In any case, I never knew before that “上” could be pronounced with the third tone, so thanks changye for this interesting titbit.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:37:09 +0000

On the subject of 3rd tones… When I first started learning it helped me to think of 3rd tone words as almost having two sllyables. I know, I know, this isn’t true, but it helped me when I wanted to enunciate clealy. (It’s more apparent when someone is epmhasizing something. Ex. “Shei? Wo-ah?” <-points at nose)

By: ChinaMatt

ChinaMatt — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:25:21 +0000

It's a good thing I no longer drive or I'd start thinking about Chinese tones every time I'd drive on a hill.

Now that I think about it, a better analogy to go along with this would be the different ways in which we yell, "*#%@ you!" when driving. But maybe that's just for the Jersey drivers.