It’s crazy that Chinese blogs still have to write about this. Tones matter in Chinese. A lot. Still, I hear learners and native speakers dismissing the importance of tones all the time. Here’s a breakdown of the most common reasons why people say tones don’t matter.
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1. Chinese people don’t pay attention to them
Frenky, a commenter on my blog said: “Tones seems not important in daily conversation..” Why do some Chinese speakers feel this way? Because they don’t think about tones. If you’ve ever tried asking someone on the street “What tone is that word?”, you’ll notice that they don’t always come up with the answer right away. Tones are so ingrained in their mind that they don’t have to think about them.You don’t pay attention to half the things you do… but those things are still important.
Walking is another example of such a task. It’s very complicated, involving balance, timing, weight, speed, terrain, and multiple muscles firing in the right order. All of these elements have to be taken into consideration in order to walk properly. But no one walking down the street is thinking about these things. Walking is automatic. For native Mandarin speakers, tones are automatic, too.
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2. Chinese people will understand you without them
Jose from China (seriously) explains this typical fallacy well:
However, in reality, if a foreigner speaks wrong tones, we native speaker can also understand what he or she is trying to say. For example, my grandmother from Dalian city (a coastal city in the northeastern part of China), she speaks with a strong accent. Other than calling ants as ‘ma3yi3′, she says ‘ma3yi4′, but we Mandarin speakers also know her very well.
This may be true for native Chinese speakers with strong accents, but it won’t be true for you, the Chinese learner. Besides, even Chinese people have trouble with non-standard accents. That’s why farmers are always given subtitles on the news. Until they develop a real-time subtitle system for foreigners speaking Chinese (RTSSFFSC), you’ll need to get your tones right.
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3. Tones matter less when you’re advanced
This one goes like this: tones matter at first, but as you get better, they matter less. Um. No. In some ways, this is similar to #1, but is said by a Chinese learner instead of a native speaker. Tones don’t matter less as you get more advanced. As you get more advanced, you get better at tones. They become ingrained in your memory like muscle memory.
Naturally, you end up thinking about them less, but that doesn’t make them any less important. When you’re Chinese is really good, one bad tone can turn a good conversation into a confusing one.
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4. It’s not taught in my class
Ah, Chinese class. I have so much respect and thanks for my Chinese teachers. They were given an impossible task: cram all the knowledge necessary to speak good Chinese into a few semesters. Introductory Chinese has way more material than class time to teach it. Some subjects are bound to be under-emphasized. Unfortunately tones and pronunciation tend to fall by the wayside. That doesn’t mean they’re less important, though. Your teacher is secretly hoping that you’ll listen to her advice and go to the language lab to practice listening.
In Mandarin Chinese, tones do matter. Please pay attention to the tones.
Those mostly aren’t the reasons I would have thought of, but yeah, people saying that the importance of tones is overrated do have a point.
Before I say anything else: Yes, tones DO matter! If you want to learn Chinese and learn it properly, and if you don’t want to sound like a foreigner for the rest of your life while speaking it, I suggest you pay attention to the tones.
However, I very much disagree with the usual teaching methods… From personal experience (watching my own attempts and those of others) it does not help your progress in Chinese very much if you learn the tones by rote memorization. You won’t be able to recall the tone you learned fast enough to speak fluently anyway. Tones are best learned by – now hold on to your undies, ladies and gentlemen – listening! Listening to lots and lots of native Chinese will eventually cause you to pronounce the right tone when you speak a word – you won’t be able to help it.
Also from my own experience, Chinese natives DO understand a foreigner even when their tones are off. Or maybe I’m just overly talented and have some magic skill in knowing the right tones, because I never memorized them, and people still understood me even in my first blundering attempts at speaking Chinese. I don’t think that’s very likely, though. So this is not only true for Chinese accents…
And there is a reason for it, too. Linguists even offered the thesis that in Mandarin Chinese, tones are NOT actually phonemic. The reason for this is that, while Chinese has a very limited number of syllables and therefore uses a lot of homonyms, most of the Chinese words consist of two syllables or more – and most of those words are in fact very much distinctive, i.e. they mostly don’t have homonyms. Another reason takes care of almost all the cases in which they do have homonyms: Context, or “actual connected speech”. This is also the reason why Chinese even works – there are homonyms even with the tones, but still people understand each other. If you say “Limao”, and are talking to a hat vendor, it will be amply clear what you’re referring to.
So, yeah, those people claiming that tones aren’t important do have a point. You can get by very well without sweating over them. Still, if you want to speak good, natural-sounding Chinese – do pay attention to them!
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. It would be really interesting to figure out which words actually do depend on tones, and which don’t.
Incidentally, a few days ago I found where one linguist, Professor Christopher Beckwith, argues his case against the phonemic nature of Mandarin tones, in the introduction of: Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II, Brill Academic Publishers (2005). I’m repeating most of what I gleaned from this below.
He, too, uses the argument that foreigners who have achieved fluency in Mandarin often actually speak it without any tones at all, or mostly wrong ones, and still have no problems being understood or understanding the natives; and the related argument about speakers of different Chinese dialects who use the wrong tones in Mandarin being understood nonetheless.
(I also remembered other observations I have made in that respect:
One, think Chinese music. While singing to a tune, tones play no role at all, and yet the lyrics can be understood.
And secondly, think of the pinyin input systems for computers, which work without inputting any tones – and they work the better the longer the string of words one puts in without interruption.)
If tones were really phonemic, none of these things would be possible.
Random syllables of course can’t be understood out of context, but those mostly can’t be understood with tones either – however, the same is true for random English syllables (or of disconnected syllables in any other language, I suppose).
The reason why Mandarin does work without tones is that there aren’t very many true homonyms even among the monosyllabic words. There are a few of course, and those get cited repeatedly (the reason why the mā má mă mà example is cited so often is because it is one of the very few that actually exist), but many other syllables are just simply not used, at least not in everyday speech (where no characters are available for clarification). An example is the first person singular pronoun 我 – the syllable wo does exist as a monosyllabic word in connection with other tones but the third, but none of those are widely used. The same is true for the second person singular pronoun 你. A big portion of Chinese words are made up of two or more syllables, and among those, there are even fewer homonyms.
So, if one uses full, idomatic colloquial sentences, they are usually understandable without a single tone-mark.
He concludes that, if tones in Mandarin are to be phonemic, they certainly can’t be phonemic in the way that consonants and vowels are; so tones in Mandarin seem to be an extra, for fine distinctions to add clarity to speech.
When I first heard him talk about this in a seminar, I didn’t feel that stupid about my own suspicions anymore.
I hope you find it as interesting as I do – the topic certainly warrants some discussion!
I look forward to reading Professor Beckwith’s paper.
I’d like to make two points:
1) The mistakes that a native Chinese speaker with who speaks a different dialect can’t be compared to the mistakes of the average non-native Chinese learner. Someone switching from a Chinese dialect to speak Mandarin Chinese will make consistent mistakes. Their tone mistakes will follow certain rules. As will their sound mistakes.
But non-native Chinese learner’s mistakes tend to be more erratic and random. The former takes a little getting used to; the latter is like someone throwing random syllables into the middle of sentences.
2) Current pinyin input systems are based on n-gram frequencies. They look at millions of documents and figure out what characters are most likely to represent a string of toneless pinyin. The frequencies create the context needed to choose the appropriate word. Older pinyin systems weren’t as strongly tied to frequency, which made using them excruciatingly slow.
Good points.
1) Of course there’s a difference between natives with an accent and foreign language learners. I think the important point here is the “full, idomatic colloquial sentence” part. If the sentence is a “real” Mandarin sentence, in grammar, structure and use of words and idioms, it will be understood without tones. Of course some garbled gibberish from a beginning learner won’t be understood – but tones won’t probably change much about that either, hehe.
2) Of course they are based on frequency, but I would argue that real language is as well. You’re much more likely to understand a sentence or expression you expect to hear, because it is one that occurs often in that context or situation, than something that sounds more like it but would make absolutely no sense or represent a completely obscure use of your language.
Granted, it’s not a good argument against tones being phonemic. But it helps illustrate how the right use of natural Chinese sentences makes the specification of tones more or less redundant.
I want RTSSFFSC.
Nice post – I’m going the route of just listening non-stop to podcasts to try and imprint tones (thanks chinesepod.com) rather than memorization. I spoke my first ’2nd tone without realizing it’ the other day, felt great.
With regard to being understood by native speakers, I think pronunciation is part of it as well as a knowledge of English. I’ve found young chinese speakers easily can piece together what I’m saying but that with less studied individuals, it can be a real challenge. Which is similar to other languages – if you speak some spanish, it’s much easier to understand their beginning english because you can pronounce english words as if reading spanish etc. At least that’s been my experience.
-Brandon
I’m accepting donations for the RTSSFFSC (real-time subtitle system for foreigners speaking Chinese). Once I get to to $1 billion in donations, I’ll start the project. A little short right now.
楼主分析的不错
1 中国有很多的方言，比如粤语，闽南语，四川话，上海话，北京话等等。
2 其实很多人听不懂方言，我想主要原因是没有那样的环境，如果把一个不懂方言的人放近另一个方言地去生活一段时间。他慢慢就听懂了。
3 如果哪位朋友想学中文，我可以当陪练，我的skype是xuenglish
我(wo3)想(xiang3)学(xue2)英(ying1)语(yu3).
我(wo3)想(xiang3)学(xue2)英(ying1)语(yu3)
我(wo3) = I
想(xiang3) = want
学(xue2) = study or learn
英(ying1)语(yu3) = English
It’s about exposure to Chinese with improper tones. In the Mainland, I guess there’s a lot of it…? In my experience as someone who has only studied in Taiwan, you will not be understand by those who have no exposure to poor tones, at least not if you’re saying something reasonably complicated. I studied with a private tutor here for more than a year before taking any classes with other foreigners, and, besides the ABCs who were already fluent Canto speakers, it took me a few weeks to be able to understand anything my classmates were saying that didn’t have a clear context.
I’ve also had classmates that have told me that, for example, in Shanghai they can say virtually anything and it’ll be understood, whereas Taiwanese are much more demanding.
@o7o: Interesting theory. It’s always seemed to me that Chinese people have difficulty when someones tones are wrong. I see it happen almost every day. But it seems that lots of people seem to get by somehow.
I agree that saying something more complex increases the chance that you’ll be misunderstood. I imagine it’s sort of like adding a random sound to the middle of the sentence like this:
ME: “I feel that the American economy was affected adversely when glabowazzle were given without proper checks.”
THEM: Glabowazzle?
ME: Glabowazzle.
THEM: Glabowazzle? What’s that?
Me: Glabowiggle?
Them: Glabowiggle?
Me: Home loans.
THem: oh! Home Loans.
Me: (phew)
In some cases, the mistake you make might be another word, but that’s not very helpful either. Take 联系(lian2xi4: to contact) 练习(lian4xi2: to practice) for example.
I need to practice him. (我要给他联系。）
If I want to improve my Chinese, I need to contact more tones.（如果我想提高我的汉语，我得好好练习我的声调)
If we heard these sentences in English, we’d have no idea what the person was trying to say.