Some advice on how to learn Chinese tones.

Very often the combination of Chinese tones and characters causes a lot of students to give up too soon. Yet more than one and half billion Chinese, as well as a vast number of foreign students speak impeccable Chinese, showing that Chinese tones are not impossible to learn.

We often tend to see children as the best and fastest language learners, and attribute their success to a brain plasticity and flexibility that we adults no longer possess. One might quibble with the definition of “brain plasticity”, but a key factor in the learning process is often omitted: the way they acquire a foreign language is different from ours.

Children hear whole sentences. They don’t start with syllables. They simply hear chunks of a language and then identify the single components by themselves. As adults, we tend to think that we can figure out the structure of a language by analysing every single aspect of it, and we lose sight of the general, broader picture. As adults, we still have the capacity to hear, but we have partially lost our capacity to listen.

In order to restore this capacity one needs patience and a bit of open-mindedness.

Only a few months after starting learning Chinese “the traditional way”, I realized how important it was to listen to whole sentences. This thought dawned on me when I first used a special software in which a native speaker utters a sentence, and you have to repeat it. The software program then compares both sentences and gives you a mark ranging from 1 (very poor) to 7 (perfect).

Even though this was a machine with all its flaws, the exercise was fun and interactive, and before I knew it, I had tried more than 300 hundred sentences this way. I was repeating sentences without even thinking about tones.

The bottom-up approach had suddenly turned into a top-down approach: one starts by uttering a whole, simple sentence and then moves downward towards its individual components.

Based on my experience I would suggest that one follow these simple steps:

1) Read the introduction on phonetics: it is always helpful to know that Chinese is a tonal language anyway, and that it has 5 tones (4 + a neutral one). This will always be a good reference. Furthermore, at the early stage, one should learn immediately how to pronounce consonants, taking special care in differentiating retroflex consonants (such as zh, ch, shi) from normal ones (z, j, s), and aspirated (p, t) from non aspirated ones (b, d).

2) Once you have a general understanding of Chinese phonetics, start considering very simple sentences. Listen to the sentences dozens of times, and repeat them with your eyes closed, without looking at the tones that make up the individual words.

3) Then consider the individual words, and try to focus on them when they are “embedded” in the sentence. If necessary, write down a list of the words as long as you learn them.

4) Move on to more complex sentences (main clause + relative clause/conditional clause, etc.)

In addition to the tones, it is important to point out that Chinese also has a general pitch (the way a sentence flows) which has to be taken into account. Quality at the beginning followed by quantity at a later stage is a great way to reach an excellent pronunciation!

The tones of Mandarin Chinese are undoubtedly a challenge, but they can be learned with the proper approach. The one I propose is simple: consider a whole sentence and listen to it, try to figure out how it sounds as a whole without focusing on the tones. You’ll find that it is an efficient approach to acquiring tones in a natural way.

If you like Chinese culture or want to travel in China, you can find more free Chinese ways to learn Chinese.