But the tones. F'in A, the tones.
I know I've given many of you the tone briefing already, but bear with me. I don't mean to be patronizing, but before I set foot for the first time on Chinese soil I had no idea how tones worked and I've since found that neither do the vast majority of native English speakers. I knew there were a few tonal languages, and remember that was one reason some people warned me against studying Vietnam. Tonal, I thought, must just mean extra hard. I guess I figured these tone things just added an extra flourish to a language, that they were just a part of having good pronunciation or the right accent. I had no idea that tones could be part of the basic underlying structure of a language. Not, fool that I am, that it would have stopped me.
So here's how it works:
In English, tones are employed for emphasis, emotion, and communicative subtleties. But regardless of whether I say "ma" in a high register or a low one it always means the same thing. I can employ falling tones or rising ones to express degrees of displeasure or confusion but I am still always saying 'mother'. Not so in Chinese.
In 中文 the sound 'ma' is accompanied by one of five different tones.
妈 ma with high tone = mother
马 ma with rising tone = horse
麻 ma with falling-rising tone = hemp
骂 ma with falling tone = scorn
吗 ma with neutral tone = question particle
To give another example, if you say "Shanghai" with a falling tone followed by a falling-rising tone, you're referring to the city, but if you say it with one high tone followed by a falling tone, you are referring to someone having been injured.
And the whole damn language is like this.
Sounds like wacky fun, right? Well sometimes, but in most situations screwing up tones is wildly frustrating rather than hilarious.
My tones aren't good. They are certainly better now than they have ever been before, but I often forget to remember that when I'm surrounded by classmates who are heaps better. I didn't get a very good foundation in pronunciation at IU and I've been struggling to establish one ever since. Reviewing flash cards, listening and repeating my tapes, visiting teacher's office hours; all these things have made me think a lot about why this process is so difficult, where the obstacles lie, and how I can get better.
Students with good tones often have a musical background. One of the superstars on campus has opera training and it shows in his precise, clipped oratory. I don't think the benefit of musical training lies as much in the ability to make the sounds so much as the capacity for a musical memory. I am very good at remembering letters as associated with meanings, but not very good at remembering attached tones. I've learned a few ways to trick myself into remembering, but they don't work in every case. One is that I am much better at remembering tones in combination than by their lonesome selves. In particular, I am ace at recalling two high tones, two falling tones, or a rising and a falling (this last combination always makes me think of a mountain slope). Thus when I study a new character I try to put it in context. Oftentimes if I can remember it in relationship to another character I can get it right. Unfortunately this is far from failsafe as some characters have different tones in different contexts and some change their tones depending on the character they are followed by. Jerks.
The hardest tones to remember are the ones that just seem very counterintuitive. When I first got here I had a difficult time breaking my habit of saying "wen" (to ask) with a falling tone rather than a rising one. This is a continuing problem, as I tend to use rising tones whenever I am asking a question (as is done in English), and often that makes whatever I am trying to say incorrect or just unintelligible.
Even if I remember the correct tones they often come out wrong when I say them aloud. Partially this is because it feels weird as hell to have a string of rising or falling-rising tones all in a row. I'm also not very good at many consecutive falling tones, which as I once complained to my teacher, make me feel like a cheerleader (he chuckled briefly and then instructed me to repeat the passage several more times).
I also attribute these problems to my brain being hardwired to think and speak in English, where tones are attached to states of mind, not underlying meanings. I wonder what kind of research has been done in this area and what the findings were. I would really like to see a catscan of my brain. I wonder if it could show me what parts are in use for consciously using tones in Chinese versus unconsciously using tones while speaking English. Not that it would be useful, but at least I could locate a reason for this endless frustration and blame not my own shortcomings, but those of the brightly colored language centers of the left hemisphere.
Tones are a huge part of why learning Chinese is such an endless process, as well as why my life of practice practice practice can be so monotonous and unsatisfying. Not that I have much of a choice. When the brain won't cooperate there is nothing to do but drill it into submission.
I am getting better, contrary to the dire prediction of an early teacher who said that with a bad foundation I would be stuck with poor tones forever. These days, instead of having to check the dictionary or ask Jessica what the tone for something is, I can often just say it aloud to figure out the right one. Although I used to always have to think for a second before I used "mai" (with 3rd tone it means 'to buy', with 4th it means 'to sell'), now I can't imagine ever not knowing which was which. It just feels right.
There is a suffix in Chinese, "gan" (感), that means 'to have a sense of or feeling for', as in a sense of direction or feeling of sympathy. Jessica and I were talking about grammar last week and how you can have a "yu gan" (语感) or a feel for what is grammatically correct, without knowing the exact rules. I hope I get there someday with tones.
And there you have it. Welcome to my brain, I hope you enjoyed your visit. I apologize if this was tiresome reading, but with the exception of the CCP's Tibetan disinformation campaign it is pretty much all I ever think about these days.
Oh, and of course rabbit fashion. I am always thinking about that:
5 comments:
You are amazingly courageous to study a tonal language -- I KNOW I can't groc them, and you know I have great language ability otherwise. We use tones, but as you say, we use them to communicate emotion or question, etc. How do Chinese express the emotion that we pack into our tones? Is there any intersection -- for instance, does the word for "disappointment" have a falling tone? Is "happiness" denoted with a high or rising tone? Is the word for "boring" a monotone? OR is it all a lottery? With constant use, yes you get a sense of what "sounds" right, just like in languages which have masculine & feminine (Romance languages,etc) and neuter & non-neuter (like Swedish), after awhile, you just have a sense or an ear for which article goes with which noun. But no matter how poorly you think you're doing, your tones are improving. The humbling thing about learning a language is that the more you know, the more you know how little you know. So keep on. At just about this point in the Urdu program in Lahore (March) I had no clue how I was doing, and then I went to Delhi and visited a friend who had been in my Hindi class back at the UW, and he was mightily impressed and assured me that I had gotten really good. So keep on. Anyway -- you're not learning to be a linguist, you're learning a skill to help you in your fieldwork. You rock!
My love for that rabbit will never die!
Cool post E to the KA. I like the nerding out posts.
Alia:
You brought up another couple complaints, er, points, that I forgot to make. Words that describe feelings rarely have the tones that seem logical to English speakers; another thing which is very hard to get used to. You can express a spectrum of emotion either by modifying the feeling (a little sad, a lot happy), and/or by emphasizing the word itself in speech. I've worked with the teachers a few times on trying to emphasize parts of sentences without modifying the original tones but it is crazy difficult.
BUN-NY!
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