Foreigners coming to China, if you wish to impress the locals with some simple Chinese words and phrases, the most important factor, I would recommend is to get a basic understanding of the tones!
In my experience of meeting foreigners
in China and through my process of learning Mandarin Chinese, I have commonly
come across many who have a fantastic grasp of the language. Their grammar,
sentence structures, all sound fantastic, but their tones and pronunciation is
the only factor that prevents them effectively sounding like a native speaker.
It is a factor in my view that is very
much underestimated, after working so hard to get to that level; it is sadly a little
bit like painting a beautiful photo, and spending hours on every stroke, only
to then choose an ugly frame to put it in. In fact, Asian languages in general
are largely dependent on tones to be understood correctly, it is a fundamental
part of the language, and by omitting this it is a failure to comprehend what
the language is all about.
However, it is understandable why many
foreigners fall into this trap unconsciously, European languages in particular
do not make such strong use of tones, they have more words and more syllables
than Chinese and therefore can be understood more easily in this regard, even
if some words are not pronounced quite correctly. However, Mandarin Chinese has
a limited number of sounds, and words are comprised in pinyin of no more than
three or four letters. It actually does not take too long (roughly a year of
hard study, to be able to pronounce almost all the syllables in Chinese), and
therefore it actually makes the process of learning Chinese in some ways easier
than European languages where we have words that can span up to 25 letters (for
some of the unusual and seldom used ones).
The truth is that pronouncing the tones
takes time, and it is a slow process at the beginning, as well as the fact it
sounds completely alien to foreigners from the west. Mandarin Chinese consists of
four tones as well as a fifth tone which is short and lacks the strength in sound
of the other four tones.
l 1st
Tone: flat first tone
l 2nd
Tone: a rising low to high second tone (like when one asks a question),
l 3rd
Tone: that starts high, drops low and rises again (definitely the strangest
tonal sound to westerners)
l 4th
Tone: which starts high and drops abruptly (like when you command a child to
STOP misbehaving)
But as well as this, there are tones
that change depending on the tone that precedes it. The common ones are two
fourth tone words like 不在（buzai）or 不是
(bushi) where 不(bu)
changes in both words to a second tone sound. Learning a little bit of
knowledge like this at the start will take time and perhaps create an uneasy
feeling, but will speed your learning up in the long term and make it easier to
understand native speakers as well. All these tones are largely neglected by
foreign students of Chinese.
At the start, I felt strange to be
emphasising all these tones in my sentences, it was purely noise, nothing more
and I felt quite uncomfortable. Only after spending time in China speaking and
listening intensely that I lost that uncomfortable feeling, and began to
understand that the tones were less of a noise and actually a tool for
communication in my second language. Now I can unconsciously use tones in
Chinese without thinking of them in an English way with embarrassment. Just like some things we follow subconsciously,
it is necessary sometimes to fight against it.
Five years of learning Mandarin has gone
by already, and now my basic understanding and communicating with native
speaking Chinese people is completely fine and I believe a lot of that has come
from my work on my tones and pronunciation, and I believe other foreigners who
use this will equally make progression towards as close to a native level (or
however close you want to get to it) a more seamless process than without it.
Adam Horton 31/05/2014
