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   #33

kudra

Join Date: Sep 2005

Location: Chicago

Posts: 473

My feeling is that if a foreigner is learning Chinese, and he/she cares about tones, there is no
point in putting it off, as it only promotes hard to break bad habits. Since we did not grow up
hearing and making or caring about tones, it takes varying degrees of effort to make yourself hear
the tone differences and reliably produce the one you intend. I say varying because, it certainly
helps if you play/played a musical instrument and therefore have some experience critically
listening and correcting sounds you produce. So unless you are actively working on making the
right tone, that is listening hard in a way your brain is not used to, I can’t see that an adult
brain is ever going to start processing the tone information to allow one to produce, even down
the line after lots of exposure to native speakers. Adult brains just aren’t the same as kid
brains.

So, unless there is a vast body of hard evidence for adult learners of Chinese, I am extremely
skeptical that "tones will take care of themselves" for nonnative speakers.

As for when to neutralize, consider the text Spoken Standard Chinese vol 2 by Huang and Stimson.
They are explicit about neutral tones. Not just in the vocabulary lists, which for example listed
zhi1dao and bu4zhidao4, zhong1guo, mei3guo, rather than zhi1dao4, etc.
But also in the pinyin transcriptions of the dialogs. Here for example is dialog 1 from lesson 21.
A: wo yi4shuo1 qi kao3shi4 lai jiu zhao1ji2, wo yi4zhao1i2 jiu shui4buzhao2 jiao4. etc.

I just listened to associated audio of this and the pinyin and indicated tones or lack thereof is
pretty accurate although there is always room to quibble.

I am not sure, but I think what they did was have native speakers, who were also trained
linguists, transcribe tapes of other native speakers “acting” the dialogs, and then had them
figure out where the neutral tones were in natural native speech. Keep in mind these texts were
produced before desktop computers of any kind. Might have had a Wang, but probably an IBM
Selectric.

anyway, my 2 cents, recognizing that what works for me, almost certainly doesn’t work for
everyone

kudra
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