This video makes me appreciate how important it is that a language teacher be not only fluent in the target language but also the instruction language as well. There are a lot of native speaker Chinese teachers on UA-cam that would not be able to recognize and articulate this.
I’m not lying when I say that I watched dozens of videos on YT talking about the Chinese tones just to see something new, something that’s not written in the textbooks. I always had a feeling (just by listening to native speakers) that the tones are not just about the rising and falling in sound or pitch, I felt it had something to do with timing and other things but I didn’t know what exactly, then I thought I must be a tone deaf for life, until I saw your video, the best video on YT ever explaining this scientifically, so thank you so much, and this vid is definitely going to be in my golden list.
I'm floored, thank you for your kind comment. I will make a follow-up video that hopefully adds a bit more clarity to your thoughts and feelings about tones, so please look forward to that as well :)
I WAS RIGHT!! Ugh I feel so vindicated. I thought I was going crazy for having my crazy "conspiracy theory" that 1st tone was just flat (not high) and that 3rd tone was just a low tone (no actual rise unless at the end of a word). Since I'm not a native speaker, I felt I had no authority to make that claim, so this was a much needed validation for me, and it puts me further at ease with the language. Thanks!
Maybe the reason for this might be when the Mandarin instruction material was created the tones were slightly different than today but the teaching material did not change to cover this?
To be honest I've seen a lot of teachers explain the 3rd time thing well so I think that one is well known. The 1st tone seems to go unquestioned. Which is funny because it comes from the ancient neutral tone.
Thanks so much. After so many years of studying Mandarin. This is by far the best explanation on tones. Please can you also make a video on how to improve use of tones while speaking full sentences for non native speakers. I always get stuck in conversations if i focus on getting the tones right..謝謝🙏🙏
One of the hardest things for me is to accept the fact, that fourth tone is kind of aggressive by nature. I still remember my former mother-in-law progressively increasing the force in her fourth tones in order for me to understand, until my ears felt like bleeding. The more she would try to point ouf the wrong tone to me, the more she would increase its natural duration and intensity properties... totally true. A great video!
As a native Mandarin speaker myself, I’d say listen to her advice, it's spot on! I always tell my language exchange partners that echoing and mimicking are the best ways to nail tones and get good pronunciation. Just focus on what you hear, not what you see. That’s how I learned Thai, another tonal language, and it did wonders for my pronunciation and tone accuracy.
Got to you because of the Metatron channel. Interesting content as I have always been interested in East Asian languages. I once had an intensive class Mandarin and yes, the tones were hard. The class maybe was too short really get the hang of it drilled into my mind long term. PS: the channel he reacted to your video is named "Metatron's Academy" and is about languages while his main channel is about history and especially about the rejection of any political rewriting of history
Saw this vid on Metratron's channel, and he recommended it. Pleased I have watched it. Korean is not my thing particularly, but I hope you will be broad-ranging.
I used to learn Chinese but dropped it because I didn't need it for work, and English was far more important. If I ever decide to renew my attempts, I'll definitely refer to your videos; I've saved this one in the 'Important' playlist. Thank you very much for your work!
This validates my approach of listening to native speakers say whole words and phrases, especially scripted dramas where they exaggerate it more, as opposed to computer voice recordings and a character by character approach. The mythology of Chinese as a "one character, one word" language where each word is inviolate needs to die. Not only does Mandarin love compounding, but words color each other just like in every language. Thank you for this video where you share your knowledge and I hope you will put out more.
OMG… Thank you so much for sharing this knowledge. I’ve learned Mandarin before and I’ve always thought the tones taught by the teacher are not the same with what I hear native mandarin speakers. Please post more videos on learning Mandarin ❤
Me too!!! Same with the half-third tone, I was subconsciously doing it right but thought I was doing it wrong and trying to force myself to do it according to the chart
I pronounce it as the first tone even there, which is weird because I didn’t learn from any sort of study but rather from speaking it at home. Maybe it’s my parents’ accents, they’re from Fujian
i love this video because i've been watching a lot of chinese dramas and all those videos i've watched on tones goes out the window when you hear the words normally. i try to just speak matching that and hope to god the context is clear when i finish my sentence. thank you for this video!
Holy crap I also noticed the length and stress features of the tones and wondered why NO ONE was addressing it!!! Thanks! To me the falling tone is almost like an accent because it's loud at the top and then falls off. If I listen for that "accent" I can identify it easily. Your video really helped me round out my understanding of the whole system. Subbed!
Very helpful video. Literally started Mandarin two weeks ago (I'm hoping to get a teaching job in the future, and don't want to be an ignorant laowai!) and this really connects. And wow, I never would've guessed English was your 2nd language. Hope your channel blows up, you deserve the views. I'm learning from Paul Noble's course and he teaches the first tone like "ahhh" at a doctors waiting room. Would you say that's accurate? I wouldn't associate "ahhh" with high, necessarily lol. He teaches the 2nd tone as if you're calling up the stairs to someone. Haven't got to 3 or 4 yet 💀
❤I had a feeling that there is something more behind the tones, and I thought of duration, but never found any explanation on duration in the books. And here we go! You told me about duration!🎉 I felt like someone saw the same ghost I could see 😂
Such a cool video! Native speaker here and the point about the phonological properties is something I've thought about but never known how to properly explain until now. Especially with the 3rd tone, I could always tell that its the hardest tone to enunciate/project, now I know the contour is the reason behind it
Intensity is really under-addressed in most teaching systems. Thanks for this video! It explains why when I have heard Chinese speakers say a second tone with an absolutely flat pitch (according to the tone graph), native speakers will still say it's clearly a second tone. Intensity matters!
I learning English right now.And I need more practice to Speaking and listening. My Mandarin is very good.If anyone want to practice Mandarin,let me know. It sounds like deal but we can help each other improve our language.(I'm not very sure my English grammar.)😊
Thanks for taking the time to make this video, I find it very useful and it helped a lot! One question I had was, if the full 3rd tone is pronounced with the lowest volume and longest sound, how is the non-full 3rd tone pronounced in comparison to the rest of the tones? For example in 我是 where 我 should not be a full 3rd tone
@@Peter-vd9fk good question! I will be making a part 2 to this video where I talk about this, but to answer you briefly, half tone 3 is similar to tone 4 in duration (it would be fast/quick).
@@julesytooshoes Thanks for quick reply! There is also few videos on youtube which claim that the start of 4th tone is always bit higher in pitch than 1st tone and the end of the 2nd tone is always bit lower in pitch than the first tone -- I wonder if that's always the case? As the first tip on your video suggest to pronounce the 1st tone in middle of vocal range thus meaning the end of the 2nd tone pitch should not go higher than middle of vocal range and start of the 4th tone pitch would go slightly higher than the middle of vocal range? Might be worth mentioning it in the upcoming video -- again thanks so much and looking forward to the part 2!
Thanks that explains a lot. Your English is perfect - you must either live in US or went to school there. Dui a? As a linguist do you know if there is breakthru point in language learning? For example after 1000 words or some other landmark? Thanks for the video.
Hello, yes I grew up mostly in the USA, after immigrating there when I was in elementary school. If you watch my videos about Korean learning, I started learning Korean as an adult (20) and I've been learning it for over 10 years now (you can guess my age haha), and to be honest, it's not a smooth progression where you just suddenly get "good." I'm very fluent in Korean now, but it also helps that I've been living in Korea for over a year and half now, and I speak *only* in Korean to everyone here. BUT if it helps, I became conversational (I could carry a 30-minute conversation only in Korean) after 5 months of intense study. I would say I studied vocab and grammar everyday for 3-5 hours during that time. Thanks for watching!
11:23 It's a natural thing in general: faster (higher-pitched) vibrations transfer more energy into the air. The same with a flute, for example. Also, the human body resonates less with lower notes, which is why bass vocals are relatively rare.
When two tones are joined together, the first tone changes according to the second tone, but the way you explained it, I got some insight into how the range of tones changes as the first tone changes. I am very thankful to you 😊
Namaste 🙏 from the blessed soil of the Indian subcontinent. I cannot thank you enough for your incredible videos-they are truly a gift of knowledge and inspiration. Your dedication to teaching is deeply appreciated by learners like me, and I am in awe of the effort you put into each video. I have been struggling a little with the third tone in Mandarin, especially when there are two, three, or even four third tones in a sentence. It feels a bit tricky to get it right. If it’s not too much trouble, could I kindly request you to create a video that explains the third tone in detail, especially for such cases? It would be a blessing for learners like me and a great help in our journey. Thank you so much for your kindness and generosity in sharing your knowledge. I will remain deeply grateful for your support. --
It was really cool to get a peek at the spectrograms in the section on the phonological properties of tones! Though I have a question about the third tone - you mention that it's the longest in duration when pronounced in its entirety, but what about the reduced third tone? Would it be shorter than other tones?
Hello. Super explanations and clearly you're an qualified expert in linguistics. A few things come to mind though, (1) tones change in practice for a reason I believe, that it's more natural when speaking fast, you didn't say why and stated them as "rules", so perhaps a bit more explanations would be more meaningful, (2) regional variances, China is a vast country, so it would be informative to touch on what's considered "standard", and again what we often encounter in daily conversations, and (3) the "standard textbooks" are wrong, maybe you can offer a guess as to why, perhaps authors are blindly copy things without any linguistic knowledge? Not sure if I absorbed or retained much though, it's a bit too academic and a tad lacking in practical sense. FWIW, I'm just a low-level language learner interested in Mandarin as my 6th and I find Mandarin tones to be somewhat tough to get right. In any case, great explanations and make a lot of sense, very informative, you make a good teacher.
Did you study canto tones too at all?, or study/read anything about speakers coming from different tonal languages like Vietnamese as their L1 to learn Mandarin? Or was your focus on Mandarin Speakers? This is so cool to hear this from someone who has this area of expertise and it's a native speaker too!
love me some scientific language learning content. What I imagine would be insanely helpful for learners of Mandarin (I'm not one of them), would be a range of exercises to make these concepts clear and to automate them through use. Maybe you know of any fellow didactics researchers or editors who would be interested in a collaboration to get your findings into textbooks?
So native speakers use 1.- Tone; 2.- Duration and 3.- Intensity to differentiate the words! 👍 Why this not said everywhere? Plus tone change next to other tones! Thank you. Cheers
Thank you for this video. Tones have been my stumbling block for awhile. Since I am a scientist, I've tried to analyze my tone characteristics using software called "Praat" (Dutch for speak). Can you please let me know what software you use to measure pitch, duration, and intensity? Again, thanks and I look forward to your future videos. Have subscribed!
@@julesytooshoes Thank you for your response. I have never before learned about how tone intensity also helps convey meaning! Another nuance to a highly developed language! 谢谢你！
Hey thanks for the great video, I was wondering since you do know the Manderain language form a linguistic perspective could you cover stress in Chinese? I have heard from a different youtube, Spongeflower, that different syllables in Chinese aren't stressed (e.g. the 国 in 中国). Could you please cover this in detail from the perspective of P.hD. Chinese Linguist as well as how you would go about figuring out if a specific word has that stress pattern? I understand that this might not be a well studied concept or only exist in some parts so maybe it isn't very "scientific" haha.
Good question. If by "stress" you mean volume or loudness, I think she already covered the dynamics. The details are a headache that depend on a lot of variables, so, unless there is a good reason to document all variables, the best path is to mimic a native Northern Mandarin speaker. The best I have heard are the tapes that accompany the old Yale textbook from WWII, Speak Mandarin. If you get a copy of Speak Mandarin tone interactions are explained in the back of the book.
I’m trying to practice my tones a lot cause I want good pronunciation, I’m going to try doing more full sentence shadowing now too I never thought of using that for tone practice
Wow, you are so logical, like if you're also really good at math. Is the Chinese education in social sciences that good, or do you just have many talents?
And I thought I was doing it all wrong when I started distinguishing tones 3 and 4 by duration 🥺 Still very hard and I'm in the very beginning, but I'll know to trust my ears more
In your description you said "一 changes to tone 4 (falling tone) when it’s in front of a tone 1, 2 or 3." This isn't quite right - it actually changes only before measure words. Consider 一生一死 or the 一...就... construction like 你一有问题就问我.
Maybe it depends on the speaker. Examples on Youglish have first tone for those and also 一开始, 一直, 一点点，一一, 一人一半, etc. But it does seem like some speakers on the sample videos on Youglish use a falling tone in those words. Are they all fourth tone for you as well?
Do you have a reference to what you said about how native Chinese speakers could detect tones from duration and intensity? I found that very interesting and would love to read more.
Hello, there are a few studies about this: - -pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1603839/ www.isca-archive.org/speechprosody_2024/zhang24_speechprosody.pdf (very recent study about Mandarin tones in singing)
I think the usual chart of mandarin comes from trying to model tones around classical Chinese(official tang dynasty pronunciation of the court). Wikipedia is a mess, but that's the impression I get from comparing their charts. Also, it seems the 3rd tone is low a creaky sound. Creaky voice is like some North American speakers tend to pronounce vowels at the end of phrases.
3:50 "tone 3 does not go up higher than the way it starts, that's totally incorrect" 4:55 bruh I think a more full analysis is: tone 3 is low and pretty flat in the context of a sentence, but when native speakers pronounce words individually, they do perform the low dip and rise commonly depicted in textbooks. One potential explanation is that words pronounced in isolation need more tonal information as to differentiate them from other tones. tbh I don't find this all that convincing...
I mentioned that tone 3 is produced with the dipping and rising at the end of a phrase or a sentence. It’s a bygone conclusion that it would be the same if it’s on its own (individually), because it would be both the first and last word of a phrase or sentence, but there are almost no natural situations in conversation when one character is the entire sentence. I can think of “好。” as a response to a question or suggestion. In this context, tone 3 would dip and rise. Or if someone asked you what number something very specific is, and the answer is nine, and you answer “九。” with the full tone 3. Other than that, tone 3 is usually in context, as most tones are, in conversation.
Well to me it's kinda obvious. I'm not taking those tones seriously, but more just listening to native speakers and trying to mimic them, thats all. When learning any language you have to listen a lot an repeat. No other way to sound like natives. When you said 很好，it was just the way i say it, but not because i look at the tones, but because i heard this hundreds of times already :) PS: Lol, you actually said this in the end, sry. Already wanted to write comment before finishing watching.
How does it work when you have multiple characters with a 3rd tone? Not just 2 but for example 4? Does all of the first 3 character have to change its tone?
Honestly, this is not a situation commonly seen in Mandarin, but I once did a tongue twister experiment where I had speakers read 4 words of tone 3 quickly. It depending on the person: some people read the first three words tone 2 with the last one tone 3, but some people read it in pairs: tone 2 + tone 3, and then tone 2 + tone 3. I have to stress this was a tongue twister exercise, so it’s not reflective of how speakers talk in everyday life. Usually people would take a break after two words, as most words in Chinese are disyllabic, but there are not official rules on this. Sorry this wasn’t as helpful as I would’ve liked!
I just did some reading on this and it seems that the tone changes depend on the internal structure of the word. If the disyllabic word is the first part of a 3-character compound, then the first 2 words get tone 2 or half tone 2. The examples given were based on 3-character compounds: 展览馆，洗脸水。I would read 展览馆 as zhan2 lan2 guan3 and xi2 lian2 shui3, but for a compound word like 纸老虎, I think it would be awkward to say “zhi2 lao2 hu3.” Most people would say “zhi3 lao2 hu3.” So the answer is still: depends on the word composition 😅
I think I would say, wo3(½) wu2(½) dian3(½) gei2(½) ni3. Because 我 is difficult to connect with the following words, and 五点 is one word, and 给你 is one phrase.
Tones put me off learning Mandarin (or any tonal language). I can never hear them properly no matter how much I practice listening. Interesting video though, I learnt a few things.
I can empathize with what you’re saying. I tried to learn Cantonese as an adult and even though it’s a Chinese language, there are more tones, and there are high, medium AND low tones, that I could never learn it properly. Thanks for watching!
@@julesytooshoes Mandarin is easier than Cantonese from what I've heard. But both are really hard for Native English speakers. (Apparently Thai and Vietnamese speakers find Mandarin relatively easy by comparison.)
I noticed recently after listening and repeating for a while that tone 1 is as you say NOT high just mid and slightly sustained over time. I also noticed properties of the others such as 3 basically just being vocal fry. Why do they teach such a bs version of the tone system??
Listing your PhD in linguistics in the title of your channel would help viewers who wonder if you really know what your talking about, which you obviously do, but there a lot of snarky viewers who might not be so sure. Just a thought. Thanks for explaining.
Hello, my goal wasn’t to try to wave my PhD degree too high, trying to be more low key, but we’ll see, if I get enough complains, I might put it in my username 🙃
Yeah, it's a bit confusing for someone trying to learn the language. People explain one thing, and show you a different one, lol, and you have to try and make sense of how they connect. Anther thing that's taught in confusing or not very helpful ways is the neutral tone. The only explanation that made sense to me so far, is the one in the FSI (iirc) manual, in which they teach it as basically two pseudo-tones that depend on what comes before. It can be lower after a high tone, or higher after a low tone.
@@julesytooshoes There is an old pre-World War II Chinese language textbook written by 50 linguists at Yale to train the Flying Tigers and the back of the textbook lays out a lot of rules for interdependent tone changes. Really helped me get the big picture on tones.
Oh, I think you may be right on that one! I was thinking of simple examples of showing the tone 2 sandhi, and 个 came to mind because there’s no reason why 一 would be tone 2 in front of it if it’s not a tone 4. Technically 个 is usually tone 4, but I think it gets softened in the context (for some unknown reason). Thanks for pointing it out!
@@iopqu hello, I put a correction in the description about this. There are many different situations in which 一 changes tone, and I wasn’t able to cover most of them in the video, sorry 🙏
Maybe there is a conspiracy but also maybe it’s simply that Beijingren pronounce the first tone higher than normal people while they are also the ones who write the textbooks 😸
This video makes me appreciate how important it is that a language teacher be not only fluent in the target language but also the instruction language as well. There are a lot of native speaker Chinese teachers on UA-cam that would not be able to recognize and articulate this.
I’m not lying when I say that I watched dozens of videos on YT talking about the Chinese tones just to see something new, something that’s not written in the textbooks.
I always had a feeling (just by listening to native speakers) that the tones are not just about the rising and falling in sound or pitch, I felt it had something to do with timing and other things but I didn’t know what exactly, then I thought I must be a tone deaf for life, until I saw your video, the best video on YT ever explaining this scientifically, so thank you so much, and this vid is definitely going to be in my golden list.
I'm floored, thank you for your kind comment. I will make a follow-up video that hopefully adds a bit more clarity to your thoughts and feelings about tones, so please look forward to that as well :)
I WAS RIGHT!!
Ugh I feel so vindicated. I thought I was going crazy for having my crazy "conspiracy theory" that 1st tone was just flat (not high) and that 3rd tone was just a low tone (no actual rise unless at the end of a word). Since I'm not a native speaker, I felt I had no authority to make that claim, so this was a much needed validation for me, and it puts me further at ease with the language. Thanks!
OMG thank you for your comment! No need to listen to textbooks or "experts" if they don't reflect what you hear in the language. Let's goooo~!
Omg me too
100%!
Maybe the reason for this might be when the Mandarin instruction material was created the tones were slightly different than today but the teaching material did not change to cover this?
To be honest I've seen a lot of teachers explain the 3rd time thing well so I think that one is well known. The 1st tone seems to go unquestioned. Which is funny because it comes from the ancient neutral tone.
Thanks so much. After so many years of studying Mandarin. This is by far the best explanation on tones.
Please can you also make a video on how to improve use of tones while speaking full sentences for non native speakers. I always get stuck in conversations if i focus on getting the tones right..謝謝🙏🙏
ive watched so many videos about tones but this one finally explained everything. Thank you from the Russian student surviving in Guangzhou ❤
你好！Metatron sent me here. Great video!
One of the hardest things for me is to accept the fact, that fourth tone is kind of aggressive by nature. I still remember my former mother-in-law progressively increasing the force in her fourth tones in order for me to understand, until my ears felt like bleeding. The more she would try to point ouf the wrong tone to me, the more she would increase its natural duration and intensity properties... totally true. A great video!
Yeah, saying 爱 with a 4th tone feels so wrong, I a always need to imagine an exclamation mark to get it right.
This really is the best explanation of Mandarin tones I have ever heard in my many years of learning this language!
Came from the Metatron reaction and enjoyed). Thank you!
@@ArtemDowgaluk-Kowalski hello, do you have a link to this? I can’t find it 🫣
@@julesytooshoes ua-cam.com/video/5oB6mLi4cuE/v-deo.html
@@julesytooshoesua-cam.com/video/5oB6mLi4cuE/v-deo.htmlsi=kDHmXBKjOKQqFeFu
@@julesytooshoes ua-cam.com/video/5oB6mLi4cuE/v-deo.html (Metatron's Academy)
ua-cam.com/video/5oB6mLi4cuE/v-deo.htmlsi=b2eM5v-MHFG0BVeH@@julesytooshoes
As a native Mandarin speaker myself, I’d say listen to her advice, it's spot on! I always tell my language exchange partners that echoing and mimicking are the best ways to nail tones and get good pronunciation. Just focus on what you hear, not what you see. That’s how I learned Thai, another tonal language, and it did wonders for my pronunciation and tone accuracy.
I never heard the explanation of the half second tone, but it makes perfect sense. I also enjoyed your video on Korean vowels. Subscribed!
Glad it was useful!
Got to you because of the Metatron channel. Interesting content as I have always been interested in East Asian languages. I once had an intensive class Mandarin and yes, the tones were hard. The class maybe was too short really get the hang of it drilled into my mind long term.
PS: the channel he reacted to your video is named "Metatron's Academy" and is about languages while his main channel is about history and especially about the rejection of any political rewriting of history
Saw this vid on Metratron's channel, and he recommended it. Pleased I have watched it. Korean is not my thing particularly, but I hope you will be broad-ranging.
I used to learn Chinese but dropped it because I didn't need it for work, and English was far more important. If I ever decide to renew my attempts, I'll definitely refer to your videos; I've saved this one in the 'Important' playlist. Thank you very much for your work!
This validates my approach of listening to native speakers say whole words and phrases, especially scripted dramas where they exaggerate it more, as opposed to computer voice recordings and a character by character approach.
The mythology of Chinese as a "one character, one word" language where each word is inviolate needs to die. Not only does Mandarin love compounding, but words color each other just like in every language.
Thank you for this video where you share your knowledge and I hope you will put out more.
The third part was very interesting. I had never heard about that, and I will think about it in the future.
OMG… Thank you so much for sharing this knowledge. I’ve learned Mandarin before and I’ve always thought the tones taught by the teacher are not the same with what I hear native mandarin speakers. Please post more videos on learning Mandarin ❤
Funniest thing is, I pronounced 一 as yi2 in words like 一下，一个, etc, but i always thought i was wrong and i literally forced myself to make it tone one
Me too!!! Same with the half-third tone, I was subconsciously doing it right but thought I was doing it wrong and trying to force myself to do it according to the chart
I pronounce it as the first tone even there, which is weird because I didn’t learn from any sort of study but rather from speaking it at home.
Maybe it’s my parents’ accents, they’re from Fujian
@@tonydai782 Might be. I'm more familiar with Wuhan accent cuz my friends are mostly from around there
i love this video because i've been watching a lot of chinese dramas and all those videos i've watched on tones goes out the window when you hear the words normally. i try to just speak matching that and hope to god the context is clear when i finish my sentence. thank you for this video!
No problem, glad it was helpful! Which dramas have you been watching, just out of curiosity? ☺️
@@julesytooshoes Find yourself (it's long but still cute) and Fake it till you make it (14 episodes which is short for a cdrama but it's so so good!)
Holy crap I also noticed the length and stress features of the tones and wondered why NO ONE was addressing it!!! Thanks! To me the falling tone is almost like an accent because it's loud at the top and then falls off. If I listen for that "accent" I can identify it easily. Your video really helped me round out my understanding of the whole system. Subbed!
Such a great video. The explanation is very clear. Don't know why I need it, I don't study Chinese.... But now I guess I have to consider it 😅
Metatron sent me here. Great video btw
Very helpful video. Literally started Mandarin two weeks ago (I'm hoping to get a teaching job in the future, and don't want to be an ignorant laowai!) and this really connects. And wow, I never would've guessed English was your 2nd language. Hope your channel blows up, you deserve the views.
I'm learning from Paul Noble's course and he teaches the first tone like "ahhh" at a doctors waiting room. Would you say that's accurate? I wouldn't associate "ahhh" with high, necessarily lol. He teaches the 2nd tone as if you're calling up the stairs to someone. Haven't got to 3 or 4 yet 💀
This makes so much sense. Thank you very much!!
❤I had a feeling that there is something more behind the tones, and I thought of duration, but never found any explanation on duration in the books.
And here we go!
You told me about duration!🎉
I felt like someone saw the same ghost I could see 😂
Such a cool video! Native speaker here and the point about the phonological properties is something I've thought about but never known how to properly explain until now. Especially with the 3rd tone, I could always tell that its the hardest tone to enunciate/project, now I know the contour is the reason behind it
Thank you very much... this is really eye (or tone) opening!! Finally I understand why the sound different than I learned....
I was so confused why the tones never sounded like they were supposed to sound when I heard native speakers talk
Also got sent here by Metatron. I know only 2 Chinese words, I can great and thank. But as a singer the concept of tones is very interesting to me.
Intensity is really under-addressed in most teaching systems. Thanks for this video! It explains why when I have heard Chinese speakers say a second tone with an absolutely flat pitch (according to the tone graph), native speakers will still say it's clearly a second tone. Intensity matters!
Fantastic video. I've subscribed on the strength of it ❤
Thank you so much, I’ll try to keep making good videos 😊🙏
Excellent breakdown! I learned basic chinese in high school and college and I never received such a comprehensive explanation.
I learning English right now.And I need more practice to Speaking and listening. My Mandarin is very good.If anyone want to practice Mandarin,let me know. It sounds like deal but we can help each other improve our language.(I'm not very sure my English grammar.)😊
哇！你的英语那么好，我以为你是ABC！你的声调视频非常有用，谢谢你！
哈哈，我不是ABC，但是我的确从小就一直在美国生活。谢谢观看！
Fascinating! I'd love to see more Chinese videos aimed at natural speaking and pronunciation.
Thanks for taking the time to make this video, I find it very useful and it helped a lot! One question I had was, if the full 3rd tone is pronounced with the lowest volume and longest sound, how is the non-full 3rd tone pronounced in comparison to the rest of the tones? For example in 我是 where 我 should not be a full 3rd tone
@@Peter-vd9fk good question! I will be making a part 2 to this video where I talk about this, but to answer you briefly, half tone 3 is similar to tone 4 in duration (it would be fast/quick).
@@julesytooshoes Thanks for quick reply! There is also few videos on youtube which claim that the start of 4th tone is always bit higher in pitch than 1st tone and the end of the 2nd tone is always bit lower in pitch than the first tone -- I wonder if that's always the case? As the first tip on your video suggest to pronounce the 1st tone in middle of vocal range thus meaning the end of the 2nd tone pitch should not go higher than middle of vocal range and start of the 4th tone pitch would go slightly higher than the middle of vocal range? Might be worth mentioning it in the upcoming video -- again thanks so much and looking forward to the part 2!
Very useful, thanks! I read somewhere that the neutral tone is relatively short and found that helpful, too.
Thanks that explains a lot. Your English is perfect - you must either live in US or went to school there. Dui a? As a linguist do you know if there is breakthru point in language learning? For example after 1000 words or some other landmark? Thanks for the video.
Hello, yes I grew up mostly in the USA, after immigrating there when I was in elementary school. If you watch my videos about Korean learning, I started learning Korean as an adult (20) and I've been learning it for over 10 years now (you can guess my age haha), and to be honest, it's not a smooth progression where you just suddenly get "good." I'm very fluent in Korean now, but it also helps that I've been living in Korea for over a year and half now, and I speak *only* in Korean to everyone here. BUT if it helps, I became conversational (I could carry a 30-minute conversation only in Korean) after 5 months of intense study. I would say I studied vocab and grammar everyday for 3-5 hours during that time. Thanks for watching!
11:23 It's a natural thing in general: faster (higher-pitched) vibrations transfer more energy into the air. The same with a flute, for example. Also, the human body resonates less with lower notes, which is why bass vocals are relatively rare.
Here supporting after Metatron =)
When two tones are joined together, the first tone changes according to the second tone, but the way you explained it, I got some insight into how the range of tones changes as the first tone changes. I am very thankful to you 😊
Very helpful video. 非常好!
Namaste 🙏 from the blessed soil of the Indian subcontinent.
I cannot thank you enough for your incredible videos-they are truly a gift of knowledge and inspiration. Your dedication to teaching is deeply appreciated by learners like me, and I am in awe of the effort you put into each video.
I have been struggling a little with the third tone in Mandarin, especially when there are two, three, or even four third tones in a sentence. It feels a bit tricky to get it right. If it’s not too much trouble, could I kindly request you to create a video that explains the third tone in detail, especially for such cases? It would be a blessing for learners like me and a great help in our journey.
Thank you so much for your kindness and generosity in sharing your knowledge. I will remain deeply grateful for your support.
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It was really cool to get a peek at the spectrograms in the section on the phonological properties of tones! Though I have a question about the third tone - you mention that it's the longest in duration when pronounced in its entirety, but what about the reduced third tone? Would it be shorter than other tones?
Thanks
You are the best ❤❤
Very helpful , thank you.
Hello. Super explanations and clearly you're an qualified expert in linguistics. A few things come to mind though, (1) tones change in practice for a reason I believe, that it's more natural when speaking fast, you didn't say why and stated them as "rules", so perhaps a bit more explanations would be more meaningful, (2) regional variances, China is a vast country, so it would be informative to touch on what's considered "standard", and again what we often encounter in daily conversations, and (3) the "standard textbooks" are wrong, maybe you can offer a guess as to why, perhaps authors are blindly copy things without any linguistic knowledge? Not sure if I absorbed or retained much though, it's a bit too academic and a tad lacking in practical sense. FWIW, I'm just a low-level language learner interested in Mandarin as my 6th and I find Mandarin tones to be somewhat tough to get right. In any case, great explanations and make a lot of sense, very informative, you make a good teacher.
So happy i can add emotion to my sentences without extra work!
Thank you so much!
Thank you so much
Did you study canto tones too at all?, or study/read anything about speakers coming from different tonal languages like Vietnamese as their L1 to learn Mandarin? Or was your focus on Mandarin Speakers? This is so cool to hear this from someone who has this area of expertise and it's a native speaker too!
Stuart Jay Raj sent me here, so i need help, thanks. I Subbed as well😁🙏🙏🙏🤟
love me some scientific language learning content. What I imagine would be insanely helpful for learners of Mandarin (I'm not one of them), would be a range of exercises to make these concepts clear and to automate them through use. Maybe you know of any fellow didactics researchers or editors who would be interested in a collaboration to get your findings into textbooks?
Very good video!! Thank you :)
So native speakers use 1.- Tone; 2.- Duration and 3.- Intensity to differentiate the words! 👍 Why this not said everywhere? Plus tone change next to other tones! Thank you. Cheers
Would you mind sharing your dissertation topic? :D
Helpful. It's really frustrating when you repeat stuff, try to make changes, and just get told no.
This is great or should i say hen2(half)hao3. Thank you.
Thank you for this video. Tones have been my stumbling block for awhile. Since I am a scientist, I've tried to analyze my tone characteristics using software called "Praat" (Dutch for speak). Can you please let me know what software you use to measure pitch, duration, and intensity?
Again, thanks and I look forward to your future videos. Have subscribed!
@@fredsnyder3002 yes I use Praat, it is very basic for linguists to use it :). All three of those things can be seen using Praat!
@@julesytooshoes Thank you for your response. I have never before learned about how tone intensity also helps convey meaning! Another nuance to a highly developed language! 谢谢你！
Hey thanks for the great video, I was wondering since you do know the Manderain language form a linguistic perspective could you cover stress in Chinese? I have heard from a different youtube, Spongeflower, that different syllables in Chinese aren't stressed (e.g. the 国 in 中国). Could you please cover this in detail from the perspective of P.hD. Chinese Linguist as well as how you would go about figuring out if a specific word has that stress pattern? I understand that this might not be a well studied concept or only exist in some parts so maybe it isn't very "scientific" haha.
Good question. If by "stress" you mean volume or loudness, I think she already covered the dynamics. The details are a headache that depend on a lot of variables, so, unless there is a good reason to document all variables, the best path is to mimic a native Northern Mandarin speaker. The best I have heard are the tapes that accompany the old Yale textbook from WWII, Speak Mandarin. If you get a copy of Speak Mandarin tone interactions are explained in the back of the book.
I’m trying to practice my tones a lot cause I want good pronunciation, I’m going to try doing more full sentence shadowing now too I never thought of using that for tone practice
She has an interesting way of saying hen, which sounds more like hen in English. I've never heard anybody pronounce it like that.
I noticed that too. But maybe it's just a regional accent.
Do you have a link to your dissertation? (As a fellow linguist and Chinese learner!)
Wow, you are so logical, like if you're also really good at math. Is the Chinese education in social sciences that good, or do you just have many talents?
your -en vowel is interesting, it's like the English one rather than what I learned
Thank you. What do you do when there are three 3rd tones together. How do you pronounce that?
glad to found this
Thank you! Hope it’s helpful :)
And I thought I was doing it all wrong when I started distinguishing tones 3 and 4 by duration 🥺
Still very hard and I'm in the very beginning, but I'll know to trust my ears more
In your description you said "一 changes to tone 4 (falling tone) when it’s in front of a tone 1, 2 or 3." This isn't quite right - it actually changes only before measure words. Consider 一生一死 or the 一...就... construction like 你一有问题就问我.
There are a lot of rule changes or lack of changes for 一， I’m going to make a second video about this. Thanks for the reminder!
But where in those examples you gave is it not correct? All of those 一’s you gave are tone 4 in context.
Maybe it depends on the speaker. Examples on Youglish have first tone for those and also 一开始, 一直, 一点点，一一, 一人一半, etc. But it does seem like some speakers on the sample videos on Youglish use a falling tone in those words. Are they all fourth tone for you as well?
All of the examples you gave are tone 4 except 一一, that is an exception and I will talk more about that in the second video.
一人一半：yi4 ren2 yi2 ban4 (last 一 follows the “in front of T4, T2 rule)
Do you have a reference to what you said about how native Chinese speakers could detect tones from duration and intensity? I found that very interesting and would love to read more.
Hello, there are a few studies about this: - -pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1603839/
www.isca-archive.org/speechprosody_2024/zhang24_speechprosody.pdf (very recent study about Mandarin tones in singing)
I think the usual chart of mandarin comes from trying to model tones around classical Chinese(official tang dynasty pronunciation of the court). Wikipedia is a mess, but that's the impression I get from comparing their charts. Also, it seems the 3rd tone is low a creaky sound. Creaky voice is like some North American speakers tend to pronounce vowels at the end of phrases.
❤
Incredible. This is the first time I have seen a native Chinese speaker with very good English. how come you speak English so well?
Are your MA thesis and PhD dissertation available somewhere on the web?
Do you also produce tone 3 with creaky voice, just as you naturally use creaky voice with low pitch in English?
3:50 "tone 3 does not go up higher than the way it starts, that's totally incorrect"
4:55 bruh
I think a more full analysis is: tone 3 is low and pretty flat in the context of a sentence, but when native speakers pronounce words individually, they do perform the low dip and rise commonly depicted in textbooks. One potential explanation is that words pronounced in isolation need more tonal information as to differentiate them from other tones. tbh I don't find this all that convincing...
I mentioned that tone 3 is produced with the dipping and rising at the end of a phrase or a sentence. It’s a bygone conclusion that it would be the same if it’s on its own (individually), because it would be both the first and last word of a phrase or sentence, but there are almost no natural situations in conversation when one character is the entire sentence. I can think of “好。” as a response to a question or suggestion. In this context, tone 3 would dip and rise. Or if someone asked you what number something very specific is, and the answer is nine, and you answer “九。” with the full tone 3. Other than that, tone 3 is usually in context, as most tones are, in conversation.
Well to me it's kinda obvious. I'm not taking those tones seriously, but more just listening to native speakers and trying to mimic them, thats all. When learning any language you have to listen a lot an repeat. No other way to sound like natives. When you said 很好，it was just the way i say it, but not because i look at the tones, but because i heard this hundreds of times already :)
PS: Lol, you actually said this in the end, sry. Already wanted to write comment before finishing watching.
Metatron sent me!
How does it work when you have multiple characters with a 3rd tone? Not just 2 but for example 4? Does all of the first 3 character have to change its tone?
Honestly, this is not a situation commonly seen in Mandarin, but I once did a tongue twister experiment where I had speakers read 4 words of tone 3 quickly. It depending on the person: some people read the first three words tone 2 with the last one tone 3, but some people read it in pairs: tone 2 + tone 3, and then tone 2 + tone 3. I have to stress this was a tongue twister exercise, so it’s not reflective of how speakers talk in everyday life. Usually people would take a break after two words, as most words in Chinese are disyllabic, but there are not official rules on this. Sorry this wasn’t as helpful as I would’ve liked!
I just did some reading on this and it seems that the tone changes depend on the internal structure of the word. If the disyllabic word is the first part of a 3-character compound, then the first 2 words get tone 2 or half tone 2. The examples given were based on 3-character compounds: 展览馆，洗脸水。I would read 展览馆 as zhan2 lan2 guan3 and xi2 lian2 shui3, but for a compound word like 纸老虎, I think it would be awkward to say “zhi2 lao2 hu3.” Most people would say “zhi3 lao2 hu3.” So the answer is still: depends on the word composition 😅
@@julesytooshoes how would you say something like 我五點給你? 😅
I think I would say, wo3(½) wu2(½) dian3(½) gei2(½) ni3. Because 我 is difficult to connect with the following words, and 五点 is one word, and 给你 is one phrase.
@@julesytooshoesoh that does make sense, thank you 😊
老師。謝謝你的幫助。。很有用
Tones put me off learning Mandarin (or any tonal language). I can never hear them properly no matter how much I practice listening. Interesting video though, I learnt a few things.
I can empathize with what you’re saying. I tried to learn Cantonese as an adult and even though it’s a Chinese language, there are more tones, and there are high, medium AND low tones, that I could never learn it properly. Thanks for watching!
@@julesytooshoes Mandarin is easier than Cantonese from what I've heard. But both are really hard for Native English speakers. (Apparently Thai and Vietnamese speakers find Mandarin relatively easy by comparison.)
0:09 "number one: ♫"
I've been practicing ♫ all week, but my tones aren't getting any better 😩
Wow! Are there more non-tonal qualities to the 4 tones?
Cheers from @Metatron.
I have noticed that when three first tone words are said together, they are not all at the same level.
I noticed recently after listening and repeating for a while that tone 1 is as you say NOT high just mid and slightly sustained over time. I also noticed properties of the others such as 3 basically just being vocal fry. Why do they teach such a bs version of the tone system??
Stu sent me here 😂🎉
Listing your PhD in linguistics in the title of your channel would help viewers who wonder if you really know what your talking about, which you obviously do, but there a lot of snarky viewers who might not be so sure. Just a thought. Thanks for explaining.
Hello, my goal wasn’t to try to wave my PhD degree too high, trying to be more low key, but we’ll see, if I get enough complains, I might put it in my username 🙃
You must have studied Thai, too. That chart at 8:50 was Thai tones.
Yeah, it's a bit confusing for someone trying to learn the language. People explain one thing, and show you a different one, lol, and you have to try and make sense of how they connect.
Anther thing that's taught in confusing or not very helpful ways is the neutral tone.
The only explanation that made sense to me so far, is the one in the FSI (iirc) manual, in which they teach it as basically two pseudo-tones that depend on what comes before. It can be lower after a high tone, or higher after a low tone.
Very good points! I'm going to make a follow-up video to this, in which I will take about the neutral tone.
@@julesytooshoes wow, that's awesome! can't wait :)
@@julesytooshoes There is an old pre-World War II Chinese language textbook written by 50 linguists at Yale to train the Flying Tigers and the back of the textbook lays out a lot of rules for interdependent tone changes. Really helped me get the big picture on tones.
Ok, I'm already in love with this channel
Wait until three tone-3 come one after the other.
The sound effects are MUCH louder than the speech. If I can hear the speech, the sound effect startles me and I forget what the speaker just said.
Sorry, I’ll try to work on that for next time!
太好了ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
Pretty sure 個 in 一個 is tone 5 rather than tone 4. Maybe it's different depending on your accent.
Oh, I think you may be right on that one! I was thinking of simple examples of showing the tone 2 sandhi, and 个 came to mind because there’s no reason why 一 would be tone 2 in front of it if it’s not a tone 4. Technically 个 is usually tone 4, but I think it gets softened in the context (for some unknown reason). Thanks for pointing it out!
Isn't 一天 yi4tian1? You should say it's always tone 4
@@iopqu hello, I put a correction in the description about this. There are many different situations in which 一 changes tone, and I wasn’t able to cover most of them in the video, sorry 🙏
长春人嘛，你是长春外国语学校的吗？
Maybe there is a conspiracy but also maybe it’s simply that Beijingren pronounce the first tone higher than normal people while they are also the ones who write the textbooks 😸
👍✌️🫶🙌🇧🇷
If the tones in the Chinese language were only about the pitch contour, then Chinese people would not be able to speak in whispers.