Thread: Arghhh tones! Ranting and questions...
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#14
carlo
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Beijing
Posts: 344
Have I said this already? Those of you who are studying in China should check
汉语语音教程, by 曹文, BLCU (ISBN: 7-5619-1057-6).
which is up to now the best I've seen. From easy to advanced, in one book.
The problem with tones is that they are usually not taught well, so it's easy to reinforce bad
habits through practice. The interaction between stress, rhythm (prosody) sentence intonation and
tones in Chinese hasn't been fully worked out, and recent research developments haven't reached
textbooks for foreign learners yet. A great place to start is the home page of one of the gurus in
the field, Prof. Shen Jiong at Beijing Uni (http://chinese.pku.edu.cn/yuyinyj/shenjiong.htm),
which is also a contributor on 北大中文论坛。Note his one paper in English.
As any non-native speaker of English will tell you, it's as difficult to develop a reasonable
approximation of English intonation (complete with primary and secondary stresses) as it is to
master Chinese tones in connected speech. Some people put a lot of effort into it, some people
don't, but to put it bluntly 'toneless Chinese' sounds a great deal like broken English.
There are quite a few programs out there for voice analysis that are cheaper than Voice Vista /
VoicePrint. SFS Speech Filing System has a weird interface (like Praat) but it's quite powerful,
and free. Wavesurfer is also free, and easy to use. My current favourite is Speech Analyzer, by
SIL: very stable and versatile. The full version sells for about US$20 IIRC.
carlo
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