In his book Chinese through Tone and Color, author Nathan Dummitt presents his system of color-coded tones. In his own words:
I hope that my system gives a context, even for non-visual learners, for distinguishing between the four tones in Mandarin and providing a mnemonic system to help them remember which tone goes with a particular word.
From the moment I first heard of this idea, I was intrigued by it. Associating tones with colors does open up a lot of possibilities. Once the system is internalized, you can drop tone marks and tone numbers altogether, and you can tone-code the Chinese characters themselves using color. (The best non-color approximation to this would be writing the tone marks above the characters, which you will find in some textbooks and programs.) So I was very receptive to this idea.
Despite being very open to the concept, when I saw the actual colors chosen to represent each tone, they just felt wrong to me. The pairings Dummitt chose were:
Why would these colors feel wrong to me? How could the tone-color associations be anything but arbitrary?
The reason that the colors felt wrong to me was that I had already thought about the relationships between the tones and my own perceptions of those tones. I had even (briefly) considered color when I sketched my “Perceptual Tone Contours” idea:
Specifically, I felt that first and fourth tone feel similar, and that second and third tone feel similar. I believe that perceived similarity is strong enough that it affects both listening comprehension and production. This is why I purposely colored first and fourth tone red in my diagram, and second and third tone blue.
An Alternate Color Scheme
OK, so now we’re getting down to the point of my post. As a thought exercise I asked myself: If I had to assign colors to the four tones, which colors would I use?
In answering this question, one has to believe that there are underlying principles which, when followed, might produce better results. Otherwise, arbitrary assignment is fine. So what are the principles? I have two:
The colors need to have a high degree of contrast so that they will stand out on a white background and not be confused with each other.
The colors chosen need to reflect the appropriate perceptual similarities.
There are other considerations you might take into account if you want to be super-thorough, of course. From an Amazon reviewer of Dummitt’s book:
If a person was going to design a color code tone system they would probably want to avoid using red and green in the same color scheme. Red – green color blindness causes an inability to discriminate differences in red and green. Hence the testing when you get your driver’s license. 5 to 8 percent of males have this color blindness.
Using red and orange in the same scheme is also not very bright. Much language learning is done on buses, trains, planes and their attendant stations. Lighting is sub-optimal in all these situations and much worse in China. Low light intensity impairs the ability to discriminate red from orange.
These points have some merit, I suppose, but I’m not sure what colors they leave. I’m sticking to the two principles I listed above. I don’t see how you’re going to avoid either red or orange altogether if you need easily distinguishable, high-contrast colors.
Regarding the principle of high contrast, I can’t disagree with Dummitt’s choices. You can’t choose yellow, and the ones he chose are easy to distinguish quickly.
As for perceptual similarities, I would reflect these similarities by grouping the four tones into two warm and two cool colors. In my Chinese studies over the years, I have often associated fourth tone with aggression or anger, both concepts which I would associate with the color red. Red = fourth tone is the strongest association I have, but from there, all the others fall into place. You can’t use yellow (poor contrast), so orange is your other warm color, going to first tone. My diagram has fourth tone and second tone diametrically opposed (falling versus rising), and green is directly opposite red on the color wheel, so I would go with green for second tone. That makes third tone blue.
The results:
Problems
By following certain principles, you can arrive at a certain color scheme in a non-arbitrary way. Still, my choices were based on an initial personal judgment that fourth tone is red, after which everything else fell into place. If you don’t agree with that, then the other the resulting choices probably don’t make sense either.
You might find that the example characters I gave work quite well for red and blue, but not so much for orange and green. I think you’ll find the same for any color scheme you choose. Orange especially, and green to a lesser degree, just don’t seem to associate as readily with either concepts or real-world objects (exception: green to plants). Why this is, I have no idea.
It would be nice if the tones of the Mandarin words for the colors matched up well, but they just don’t. Of the colors considered above, all are either second tone (红, 蓝, 橘黄) or fourth tone (绿). Dummitt’s original scheme matches only on second tone (orange), and not for red or blue (the important ones). Mine doesn’t match on any.
Implications for Pedagogy
The obvious question I’ve been avoiding until now is: does any of this matter? Is this worth putting extra thought into? Is the tone-color system actually going to be adopted?
I really have no clue whether or not the use of color to indicate tone will make a significant impact on a new learner of Mandarin Chinese. I would love to see a longitudinal study putting it to the test. Whatever the case, though, I doubt that it will see wide adoption in textbooks used in high schools or universities. The leading textbook publishers are set in their ways, and the added hassle of always having to print in color doesn’t help.
Where tone color coding could be easily implemented, however, is on the web. Printing, paper, and stubborn institutions are no obstacle for electronic media, and technical implementation involves only minor tweaking of basic style elements. As more and more people learn from a computer screen rather than off a dead tree, this change could make a (small?) difference in the way a new generation learns Mandarin.
I bring this up because tonal color-coding is already built-in to Anki’s pinyin plugin. Popular online dictionary MDBG has added the color-coding as an optional setting. I hear other browser plugins are adding the feature too. All of them are following the colors set forth in Dummitt’s Chinese through Tone and Color. As one commenter on Laowai Chinese has noted:
Colors match those used in the book Chinese Through Tone & Color; I’m guessing a convention is already forming around these colors. This is great!
A common standard is indeed a good thing. In the end, the tone-color assignments shouldn’t make much difference. It will be interesting to see how far this goes.
We’re going to be doing this on Skritter as well, and will follow the standard Dummitt has set. It is a bit too bad, because I’d think of fourth tone as red, too. But I’m probably too set in my tonemark-reading ways to internalize the colors myself.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:16 amIndeed, the trend for adding color tones is growing. Loqu8’s iCE popup translator/dictionary also features color tones.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:16 amI love this idea of associating the colors with the tones and will start incorporating it into my studies. But I have to point out how backward Dummitt’s colors are according to basic color theory. Is it too late to prevent yet another bad and awkward “standard” from being applied to Chinese language studies? I would suggest this, which seems simple, obvious, and correlated with all our visual and spacial instincts:
I’m no academic… merely a former Art Director who lived, breathed, and applied color theory every day of my working life. The Dummitt color scheme fights against our nervous system — isn’t learning Chinese confusing enough? Oh well, I’ll just do it my natural, no-need-to-memorize-a-system way for myself… in the end, learning the language is all that matters and we all have our own methods. Thanks for introducing me to the idea, John!
August 11th, 2009 at 10:03 amWhy use colors instead of tone marks? Anyone? Both are visual. I’d say the tone marks more so since they visually indicate the tone/direction of your voice.
Personally, I don’t care for the use of color to represent tones. However, I would definitely agree w/you that the 4th tone is RED.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:11 am@Lin, personally, I think it’s an aesthetic thing — tone marks over characters are just… unattractive :).
I mostly use the tone colors on the definition side of flashcards when there is a character I know how to pronounce but whose tone I always forget. It seems more pleasing than adding pinyin in brackets or something like that.
I started off using my own color scheme (RGBO), but have since switched to Nathan’s because as you indicate it has been adopted widely. I personally doubt the choice of colors matters at all, and that as long as you adopt a single scheme and stick with it you’ll pretty quickly make the mental connection between the tone and its color, though some study backing it up would be nice.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:50 amJohn,
Thanks for the interesting criticism! I use the color scheme in my high school classes, and over the years I’ve come to realize that there will always be students who feel strongly that the colors I chose are simply wrong, either because of the points you mention above (I can appreciate the red-anger-tone 4 association) or because they are actually synestheticand see certain sounds in certain colors.
I chose them arbitrarily, at the time following the color wheel you posted above clockwise from red in numerical order. A red-orange-green-blue set is also fairly high contrast (roughly on the four ‘poles’ of the color wheel) and easily identifiable for younger students or for students adapting the system in their own studies (it can be hard to find “traditional chartreuse” on a Word document). That said, there is plenty of room for criticism and you make some very valid points. I’m not so sure about the reviewer who claims that all of China is poorly-lit (?) and therefore an impossible environment to distinguish orange and red.
As for the reason I chose color, I wanted something quick and easily identifiable to use in the classroom – Pinyin diacritics are sometimes hard to distinguish when the fonts are small, and once a student “graduates” from Pinyin annotated text to only Hanzi, the characters can maintain their colors to provide somewhat of a crutch. Also, if students eventually come to think of 国, say, as an “orange” Hanzi, it is my hope that they will make fewer mistakes in speaking. I wrote my master’s thesis on this idea, but have zero empirical data to back up this intuition. I would love to see an experiment done someday.
As Nick mentioned above, if my system gains more traction in other platforms, I’m all for standardization. It could also of course be applied to other tonal languages as long as there were not too many tones to distinguish – Cantonese for example might be problematic. If it helps even a few students improve their tones (a vital and yet sometimes woefully neglected area of CSL education – especially at the high school level and below in the States), I’ll be happy.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:57 amCarl,
Nice suggestion! I tried to be somewhat objective (or at least systematic) in my approach, but in the end, it did boil down to a “4th = red” subjective decision. Your scheme is good because it uniformly applies a subjective approach. I like it.
I especially like 3rd = brown, because to me, third tone sounds kind of ugly, and brown would be the ugliest color in the set. Also, when you look at the dip in the pitch contour, you think “trough,” which brings to mind dirt as well.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:22 pmLin,
Good question. I also always appreciated the way the diacritical marks imitated the pitch contours of the tones. I do like them, but I think color has more potential for making unconscious associations with tones through repeated exposure. Somehow tone marks always need to be “processed” by the brain (same for numeric pinyin), whereas color is different.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pmNathan,
Thanks a lot for the comment!. I never thought about the synesthetic angle; that’s pretty cool. (Is there any consistency between people in synesthetic perceptions?)
I think your system is already gaining a lot of traction. If there were to be any changes to the system, it’s probably best that they came from you, and that they happened ASAP.
That said, I want to reiterate that I think in the final analysis the colors chosen don’t make a huge difference; it’s just a bit of cognitive dissonance for students first getting used to it.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:32 pmThis is interesting – like John, I’d like to know if there’s any theory on memory or cognition that indicates this would be more successful. I’ve explored some ideas in the past to use colour and spatial information to learn words (for gender, not tone) and think there’s some promise there.
How about I put this to the test? I could make two lists of 50-100 new words, one with colors and one with tone marks, and review the flashcards for a week. Assuming there are enough words and they are randomly assigned to the lists, the final scores after a week would give a good way to measure if there was a difference. Will I remember a word as red-green more reliably than up-down?
August 11th, 2009 at 1:10 pmColjac, I’ve read of studies where the word for a color is displayed in a different color (i.e. the word “blue” is shown in yellow). It creates a lot of cognitive dissonance and is hard for the brain to process. Not sure if that’s what you were asking about…
Nathan, thanks for your response — and thanks for putting this whole idea out there. I know I’m one of those who feel strongly that the colors are wrong, but I think the basic idea is wonderfully clever and extremely useful. I do think that if you polled the designers whose work is featured in magazines like Communication Arts, most or all would agree with me. As would the authors of Made to Stick. But I could be 100% wrong about that! I’d love to know.
As John says, it probably doesn’t matter much in the end, it’s just a tool. But I’m very glad to have been introduced to it. I have a very hard time remembering the tone for zou, for example. With this mmemonic system (doing it my way, of course ;-> ) I was able to imagine walking up and down some hills — and now I think I’ll always remember that zou3 is the zou that means “to walk.”
August 11th, 2009 at 2:19 pmJust like the joke “Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like itself?”, I always get confused with 2nd and 3rd tones when they are described in Mandarin (di er4 sheng & di san1 sheng). Fortunately yi1 and si4 are perfect.
As with colours, why not try those that are said in the corresponding tones (although some might not be practical, like white or black).
1st – black (hei1 se), gray (hui1 se)
2nd – white (bai2 se), blue (lan2 se), yellow (huang2 se), red (hong2 se), orange (cheng2 se – perfect!)
3rd – purple (zi3 se – almost blue)
4th – green (lu:4 se)
Ideally the 5th tone should be gray for neutral, but that’s the only 1st tone colour that is not black.
August 11th, 2009 at 3:07 pmFunny, I’ve been revising my Chinese and I looked at the Michel Thomas method to see if it helped me remember the tones. The CDs associate a hand movement and a colour with each tone. First – green thumb out sideways Second – blue finger pointing up Third – red V sign Fourth – black finger stabbing down
I don’t always think of the colours, though, and the thought that there are several other colour systems around makes my brain hurt.
August 11th, 2009 at 3:19 pm@Carl – I’ve seen that sort of thing before, it’s indeed confusing. But doesn’t follow that the parts of the brain associated with color are more closely connected to the language centres than those that deal with shape (tone marks). Making the finger moves seems promising – it involves a whole new part of the brain (c.f. Total Physical Response).
I’m certainly skeptical that any color scheme is better than using audio in your learning experience, but of course you can’t get far without reading books.
August 11th, 2009 at 3:52 pm@Carl
I think the test you’re referring to is the Stroop Test. Interesting, but probably unrelated to tone-color in Chinese. I like your image for 走 – it sounds like the kind of mnemonic that will stick.
@coljac
As a language teacher, I’m more skeptical than hopeful about TPR, but if it results in better pronunciation for certain students, I’m all for it. Most of my first year students spend at least a little time in the phase where they bob their heads and/or hands as they pronounce tones.
It always comes down to what works best for you as an individual learner. If a certain student finds that wearing pink underwear and batting their left eyelid as they speak results in fluid, perfect tones, great. The tone/color method I use in my classroom is certainly no panacea, but I’ve found that it helps a majority of students:
be more conscious of which tone they are using with individual words (an extremely important part of first year Chinese that often seems to be brushed under the rug – simply trying to absorb “the music of the language” doesn’t cut it), and
to have fewer problems with remembering the pronunciation of a word, but not its tone – a problem that John B touched on above that I think plagues all learners at some point in their study a language with so many homophones.
My tests on quizzes are all in black and white, and obviously any learner will have to wean themselves off of a system that relies on coloring text, but I’ve found it to be a useful tool in my classes.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:41 pmIf nothing else, it looks like a fun a colourful way to advertise the language. My first Chinese book had no colour and was small and kind of pathetic looking.
I’ve tried my own colour scheme before, I found it sort of got in the way with tone changes (不，一 etc…) I would have a word in a certain colour but would mix it up when recalling it, does this book have a solution for these tone changes?
August 11th, 2009 at 4:45 pmI have just started learning Mandarin myself, and have started blogging about it.
I find the idea of colour an interesting one, because it probably would help me remember the homophones’ different tones in another way more easily than the standard characters/pinyin only because the colours would stick in my mind and would then forever be associated with that colour.
One thing that does strike me intially though, colour tones probably should not take over completely, (what about colour blind people: for example) and I personally think that colour combined with pinyin with tonal marks may be a better way forward for the learner, and then slowly remove colour as you get better. As throughout other text(books, online), conversations through texts and emails, most people wont be using colour when communicating.
It does however interest me, and I will be looking into this more as a memory aid for the characters. Thank you for bringing this up, it is very interesting.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:51 pmI think this is something that could be good for beginners but becomes less useful as one gets used to the tones. Surely once one can easily differentiate the differences between tone by ear, then the easiest way to learn them is by their sound; the same way Chinese people learn them.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:53 pmSurprised you didn’t mention the Tone and Color Firefox plugin:
http://popupchinese.com/downloads/
It takes a few seconds to process the entire webpage and colorize the characters appropriately, but is quite a useful tool. Anything that layers additional phonetic meaning onto characters is helpful.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:18 pm@trevelyen
Hey Dave -
Sorry about that. But the plug-in does need to be updated for the latest version of Firefox.
It’s of course highly recommended once it has been updated. :) I agree that any clues to help the beginning learner especially internalize tone are useful.
@Tzm
Of course once you get a little more advanced in your Chinese studies, you can’t be pausing to color everything. I agree that at a certain point, a CSL learner should be able to distinguish and categorize the four tones by ear subconsciously. I don’t think that’s any more unrealistic than a native Japanese speaker internalizing the r/l distinction, and that’s obviously possible.
August 11th, 2009 at 8:16 pm[...] Another interesting post over at Sinosplice today on the subject of using colour to learn tones in Mandarin. It seems plausible, but not proven, that colour might be a better way to encode tone information visually than he traditional tone marks – plausible, but not proven. [...]
August 11th, 2009 at 8:26 pmNo worries (thanks Nathan and John). Have just upgraded to make the plugin compatible with Firefox 3.5. Should actually have taken care of that earlier.
@tzm – i still find it useful on occasion. Context often gives the definition, but I’ll still find myself looking up unknown words to confirm tones, especially with 书面语. The color-tone mapping is useful, although I like it toggleable since it can be distracting otherwise.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:56 pmtrevelyan,
Sorry about that, man… I thought I had heard something about a tone and color Firefox addon, but I wasn’t sure, so I did a search on the FF site and turned up nothing. Shouldn’t it be in there? Confused.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:29 pm[...] a system he created while he himself was studying Chinese. Read an interview with Dummitt here, and a critique of the book by a fellow linguist. [...]
August 12th, 2009 at 1:04 amTone colors for each character. Interesting concept. Any tool that facilitaes language learning is great ! Are there any scientific studies that validate this ? Also, some characters can have more than one tone (I estimate about 10%), depending on the context. Would we have a multi-colored system for these ?
August 12th, 2009 at 10:44 amCool topic. I think writting tone marks beats the hell out of numbering, which really makes no sense at all (why is straight first). But on the other hand if i ask a chinese for a tone, they will reply in number form, not often direction and never colour. So i think numbers are sometimes needed.
For colour, on paper writting everything out in colour would be a pain in the arse, do you use 4 different pens all the time? I understand you could learn electronically or off palm cards or pleco (which incidentially also has an option colouring system) but I learn charaters through writing them out a million times and tones through grabbing a news article and drawing the tone directions for my tutor to later check. In other words, i need to nut out tones on paper as well as on the screen, and tone marks are more logical than colour there. But i guess number, direction and colour systems could all co-exist. BUt as previously mentioned, if there were different colouring systems floating about that would be bad.
August 12th, 2009 at 3:54 pmThis reminds me of a musician friend of mine, whose father as an experiment painted the keys of his piano in different colors in order to provoke association between the sound of a note with a color. After years of playing this piano my friend could actually very accurately tell you the name of a note he heard because he could “see” the color that the note was related to.
August 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pmI’m happy to see this post on tone and color association! When I first started studying Chinese, my friend and I used highlighters to color code the tones (which obviously narrowed/influenced our color choices) but nevertheless, we had a little method to our madness as well. Our choices and reasons for them are as follows:
1st tone – Yellow (first tone is happy, clear, sing-song, SUNNY!) 2nd tone – Blue (reaching up to the SKY) 3rd tone – Green (dipping down to the EARH – I suppose brown also makes sense, but no brown highlighters!:) 4th tone – Pink (I agree with the author of the post and many of the commentors that red/pink just FEELS RIGHT as fourth tone, i.e. striking down with PASSION) *neutral tone – White (white is not a color – so it is by definition neutral!)
My color choices are practical for students who prefer to study using books/paper more than online (both have their merits). If you arm yourself with these four common highlighter colors, you can color code whatever you’re reading!
As the color system slowly becomes embedded in your mind, your tones will start to become more instinctive, natural, and accurate.
Once you’re confident enough, you can wean yourself off the colors!
August 15th, 2009 at 7:43 amI’ll probably always remember tones through numbers; too old to switch to colors now. The colorization of tones is an interesting idea, but the firefox plugin is a fantastic idea and makes the system much more practical. On the other hand, I’m a big believer in making my own study aids. Am I really expected to switch font colors for nearly every character I write? Aha! But the answer supplies itself: post what I write on to a webpage (doesn’t need to be public) and then the firefox plugin does the rest. Fan#$%ingtastic. Alas, I tried to paste the resulting colorful text back into Word and the color was lost. Bummer. Trevelyan, any fix for this?
By the way, I think Commodore’s idea for choosing colors is the best – by the tones the words for those colors have in Chinese. It’s just unfortunate that the choices for first tone are only black and gray while third tone just has purple. I do think red (danger) can be associated with the 4th tone, but I like the violence of the 4th tone ü in words like 绿茶, which is still the sound I have the most difficulty making.
I was already thinking about Cantonese before Nathan mentioned it. But I think I overheard too many mothers berating their kids when lived in Hong Kong, so I’d make most of the tones harsh reds, purples or blacks. Or puke green ; )
August 15th, 2009 at 10:50 am大家注意。说话用太多第四音很容易上火。小心！
August 15th, 2009 at 2:41 pmThere’s been some good debate on this post, so I’ll make a slightly different observation … note how he chose his example words to (subconsciously?) make you believe that his system makes sense!
Almost convincing enough to make you think it’s the only meaningful colour-coding! :-)
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:34 pmI too use a colour tone system for learning flashcards with the Pleco dictionary on my mobile phone. Although Pleco has a default set of colours, I found they didn’t work for me so I chose my own. Coincidentally, I ended up with the same colours as Carl, with similar reasoning.
From my experience of using colours over the last few months, they have the several benefits:
Like many people, I previously had problems remembering the tones for characters, even though I could remember the pronunciation OK. Using the colours has improved my memorisation of the character+pronunciation+tone.
I think that people who have English as their first language are simply not used to reading/memorising words with diacritic marks, so while you can often easily memorise the pinyin ‘word’, the marks above the characters often do not seem to stick in your memory. (In fact, I previously used tone numbers on the end of pinyin words as I found these tended to be easier for me to remember that the tone marks.)
With the character itself being in colour, I find it does make me associate a tone with a specific character much more strongly than having to look below at the pinyin to find the tone.
I do feel that any computer/web service offering tone colours should let the user customise which colours are used, rather than imposing any “standard” colour system on it’s users (of course this isn’t possible for printed material!).
Ben
September 6th, 2009 at 6:39 am[...] setting is not Dummitt’s scheme; it’s Pleco’s own scheme, more similar to the tone/color scheme I proposed. But the colors, like most everything in the app, are [...]
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:58 amJust re-reading the wikipedia entry on synaesthesia:
’synesthetes show the same trends as non-synesthetes do. For example, both groups say that louder tones are brighter than dull, soft tones, whereas higher tones are smaller and lighter than low ones. Low tones are both larger and darker than high ones’
For me this keys directly into the fact that, as Goethe guessed 200 years ago, all sounds and colours are forms of vibration. Of course since everyone’s tones are different – as are our perceptions of sound and colour – there cannot be a universal correlation of tones and colours.
My personal colour scheme links in with the natural world/elements. (The colours I use are at variants with the traditional Chinese elemental colour scheme, but then that tradition predates the mandarin tones) I favour bright colours – they ’stick’ in the brain better. This scheme works better on a black background , the colours jump out at you, light colours aren’t washed out. on a PDA.
1st Tone: Bright Gold/yellow (yellow best on black background) (GOLD high, like the sun)
2nd Tone: Bright red (FIRE rises, as does a red rocket) (I personally think the 2nd can be the fieriest tone, it can get louder as it rises, but then I learnt my Chinese in Sichuan, so I’m just plain confused).
3rd Tone: Is really a low, sometimes croaky tone – a mid brown and in bold (don’t make it too dark, dark doesn’t ‘stick’ in the brain). EARTH or mud (wallowing low in the mud).
4th mid blue. (for me fourth tone can be aggressive, but equally it can just taper-off, so blue not red for me). WATER (diving into the sea)
No-tone grey, obviously.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:26 pm