You will be sent an email within 24 hours with your personal link to the Sing & Learn Chinese pronunciation course.
In the meantime, you can check out this introduction to the course:
Why focus on tones? Especially in the beginning. Isn’t vocabulary more important or something? You can always learn tones later, like a lot later, right?
Short answer: No.
Tones are a critically important part of Chinese and if you’re learning Chinese, you NEED to pay attention to them FROM THE BEGINNING before you learn everything wrong and have to relearn it.
Here’s the thing. In Mandarin Chinese, there are only 405 different syllables you can make, combining different consonants and vowels.
That sounds like a lot until you remember that in English there is something like 11 THOUSAND possible syllable sounds you can use to create different words.
I mean, just think about all the different ways you can pronounce the letters “ough,” depending on what word they’re a part of:
- THROUGH is pronounced through
- TROUGH is pronounced trough
- THOUGH is pronounced though
- BOUGH is pronounced bow
- OUGHT is pronounced ought
- ROUGH is pronounced rough
See how complicated English is? I mean, seriously. You should be grateful you already know English and you’re only learning Chinese. Compared to English learners, you only have a measly 405 syllables to worry about. Plenty of English learners would kill to be in your shoes.
But anyways. In Chinese, you don’t have that thousands of possible syllable sounds made with changing vowels and whatnot. For example, the letter “a” as represented in pinyin, is always pronounced “ah” whether you are talking about
- mothers (MAMA)
- or eggs (DAN)
- the color blue (LANSE)
You see? It’s all “ah” It never turns into “ae” or “a(ck)” or “awe” or anything else. It’s always just “ah”
So in order to get enough differentiated sounds in the language to name and express sufficiently complex ideas in a big, big world, Chinese has tones.
That means that the same syllable pronounced with a different tone can mean something totally different.
The most famous version of this, is of course the syllable “ma.”
- In the first tone, which is high and light, “MA1” means mom
- In the second tone, which is the rising tone, “MA2” means numb
- In the third tone, which is the dropping down low tone, “MA3” means horse
- And in the fourth tone, which is the exclamation tone, “MA4” means to yell at or scold someone
MA1, MA2, MA3, MA4. They’re all the same syllable “ma” but they all mean something different because of the tones.
So, let’s go back to basics.
What exactly ARE tones?
They’re basically variations in pitch used to distinguish meaning between words or syllables that otherwise have the same pronunciation in Mandarin Chinese.
They’re not fixed in the sense that a vibration of 440Hz is always first tone. Rather, they’re relative. So you can say the four tones high pitched or low pitched, and it all means the same thing. Whether you’re a man or a woman, have a high or low voice, it’s the relativity of the pitches to each other, their placement and movement through YOUR vocal range, that matters.
And here’s a fun fact for you:
There are tones in English, too, but
- they’re not as rigid as the tones in Chinese, and
- they only change the subtext of your words, not their dictionary definitions.
I mean, just take the word “Yes.”
You can say it super excited and high pitched, like “YES! Let’s go!”
You can say it firmly, with determination, like “Yes. Let’s go.”
You can say it sarcastically, or ironically, like, “Yeeesss, let’s go….”
Those are all different tones, but they don’t change the meaning of the word “yes” they just change the connotation of the word.
But in Chinese, different tones literally DO change the meaning of the word.
And that’s why it is CRITICAL to learn Chinese tones FROM THE BEGINNING and NEVER ignore them.
But, how do you learn tones? And what do you need to know about them?
Now, I may be going against the grain here, but I would say you don’t really NEED to know anything ABOUT tones. You simply need to KNOW tones.
In the same way you know your friends’ and family’s faces.
If I put your mom’s picture in front of you, you shouldn’t have to say to yourself, “well, this person has full lips, and brown eyes, and a rounded nose, so that eliminates Dad and brother John and possibly my friend Mary…”
Nobody does that (or nobody should, rather)
You should be able to see a picture of your mom and instantly recognize: “That’s mom.” Or a picture of your friend Mary and instantly say “That’s Mary.” You don’t have to consciously go through their features to figure out who they are.
That’s the same kind of recognition we want to build in your mind for tones.
You hear a tone, and you know what it is. Even if you don’t know what NUMBER it is, you RECOGNIZE it. Just the same way you recognize faces.
Or for another example, if you’re a musician, especially an experienced musician, if someone were to play a scale for you, you should be able to tell instantly whether it is a major scale or a minor scale, without having to sound out all the notes in your head and assign their letter names and figure out the intervals between each note in order to deduct what kind of scale it is. You should just know.
That’s the same kind of recognition we want to build in your mind when it comes to tones.
Now, this takes time, and this takes some training. Which is why this pronunciation course exists.
You need to learn to recognize tones, instantly, subconsciously. Not consciously.
So first I will teach you the tones, consciously, just so your brain has a category, or a scaffold to build future learning on. Because right now, if you have never learned a tonal language before, the subconscious, language part of your brain doesn’t even have a concept of what “tones” are yet. So we’re going to talk about tones in a conscious-brain, logical way, but then we are going to go through a process that will focus on training your subconscious so that you learn TONES, and you don’t just learn ABOUT tones.
…There’s more in the course itself.