One of the biggest differences between asian and european languages
is the tones used to pronounce words.
In english, tones denote whether something is a
question, a command, or a general statement. English tones can be
used anywhere in the sentence, without changing the meaning of the
sentence too much, though it may freak out the listener a little.
In mandarin, each word has a tone. If you do not use the right tone
with a word in mandarin, it changes the meaning of the word.
A tone is applied separately to each syllable in a word
while prounouncing it. It is a little bit like singing the word.
Researchers have found that in addition to
using the speech center of the brain, mandarin speakers also use the part of the brain
normally active while listening to music. For more information, see
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002864.html.
There is a tone to every Chinese syllable
There are four tones in Mandarin, and a fifth neutral tone.
These tones
dictate how the pitch of the voice is sounded by the speaker.
In the first tone, the pitch of your voice remains constant and slightly high through the syllable.
(listen to <% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "ma1"); %>)
In the second tone, the pitch of your voice raises slightly while pronouncing the syllable.
(listen to <% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "ma2"); %>)
In the third tone, the pitch of your voice goes down, and then goes back up in the same syllable.
(listen to <% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "ma3"); %>)
In the forth tone, the pitch of your voice goes down sharply during the syllable.
(listen to <% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "ma4"); %>)
In the neutral tone, the pitch of your voice depends upon the word you are saying,
but is normally said more breifly and softly than the other syllables. It kind of takes on a
middle-pitch, similar to the first tone, but lower in pitch and shorter in duration.
(listen to <% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "ma5"); %>)
The diagram below
shows how the four written tones look, with time going from left to right and
pitch going higher from bottom to top.
Tone Sandhi
There is an exception to written tones:
If two third-tone (ˇ) syllables are spoken in succession, then the first tone becomes the second-tone (ˊ).
This is because having two third-tone (ˇ) syllables right next to each other just sounds a little silly.
This tone change is called tone sandhi in linguistics.
For example, using the tone sandhi exception on
<% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "hen3 hao3"); %> (which means "very good"),
will become spoken as <% Page.writePinyinWithSound(out, "hen2 hao3"); %>.
The sounds of Mandarin (phonemes)
Chinese-speakers have a different set of sounds than English-speakers. In Chinese, there
are more than 1000 monosyllabic phonemes, whereas in English, there are just over 40.
This is slightly misleading however, because in Chinese, every possible syllable in the entire
language is counted as a phoneme. And this is including the tones of each syllable, so without the tones
(divide by 4), there are counted a little over 400 syllables in chinese.
The bopomofo
represents the sounds of the Chinese language very well. You could say that each bopomofo symbol
was a phoneme, as phonemes are defined in English.
Bopomofo Spelling for Chinese Characters - you can click on each symbol and
listen to the bopomofo pronunciation. The "sh", "ch", "jh" and "zh" sounds are the ones that get confusing.
Pinyin maps directly to the monosyllabic words of Chinese, so there are slightly more than 1000 pinyin spellings
with tones. Please read more about pinyin here:
Both the bopomofo and pinyin explicitly show tones. Tones may be
denoted by number or by accent characters. Sometimes, these tones are
written immediately after the syllable, and sometimes they are written
over the syllable.
