Sinosplice has a new feature: Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills. Users who have found that website’s content useful in the past should probably give it a look.
A while back, Ken did a series of posts on pronunciation. It became clear that the CPod poddies wanted more help. Ever since, we have been paying more attention to pronunciation in our podcasts and in our lesson plans (premium content). We created the Pinyin Chart, and it will be followed by a full Pinyin Guide.
For me personally, though, it was the kick I needed to finally finish the project I began way back in 2003 and get it online. Please give it a try… it’s free!
Links:
Mate, you’re a bloody genius, and a mind reader too! Thanks for also including traditional characters, and for making it totally downloadable, very considerate of you.
I can’t really try it out for a couple of days (mother in the house) but here’s what I’ve done.
I’ve downloaded, unzipped, and copied everything to my Palm PDA. All of the subdirectories under Audio I’ve moved to under SDCard/Audio/ and then when I fire up pTunes it automagically finds all of the many convenient playlists (both kinds BTW, so they double up but that’s fine). When I selected one of those playlists it all happened like magic.
While that’s playing in the background I’m using PalmPDF to read the file, which is all very clear. I can’t wait to work through it all.
M-Learning rulez, wheeee!
Hi John, I’ve downloaded the tool and have started to practice the tones with it.
I find that, so far, for most of the native speakers I have heard speaking, when they say, 今天, which is recorded in Pinyin as jin1 tian1, what I hear is closter to jing1 tian1.
This is very noticable on the Elementary lessons when Jenny uses her native voice and Jon seems to be following the Pinyin.
Is this just a matter of Northern vs Southern speakers?
If so, would it be possible to have some Northern speakers on the lessons as well?
Very useful to listen in pairs and combinations. I think I was doing that intuitively anyways, but your drills have raised my awareness about this. Thanks a lot John!
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I’m glad you’re finding it useful. Feel free to e-mail me about any specific problems or suggestions.
Richard,
Yes, southern Chinese speakers are often guilty of not clearly distinguishing the “-n” and “-ng” sounds. It can be a little confusing at times, but it’s best not to over-emphasize the distinction in your mind, because the Chinese themselves don’t have such a huge problem with it. Still, I agree it’s best to go with the standard, and we do have plans to use more northern Chinese speakers in our various recordings.
Have you seen maxie’s review?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzgB__eagVM
John,
It seems that some of the sounds are cut too close to the bone, in the sense that the ‘b’ and ‘d’ initials are very hard to hear correctly. It might have been better to include 20ms of noise (or whatever) as a lead-in …
Also, while female voices are often pleasant to hear (:-) some male voices would be good.
John writes: “I agree it’s best to go with the standard, and we do have plans to use more northern Chinese speakers in our various recordings.”
When I started learning Mandarin, I purchased a series of audio lessons where the speakers used the “standard” Northern style. I then traveled through China (from the states), including a special trip to Beijing, not to climb the Great Wall or to eat the greasy duck, but to practice my 儿. I was well into my audio lessons, and I felt confident that I could 儿 with the best of them. Now was my chance to prove it. In Beijing, I discovered that the Beijingers actually seem to speak with marbles in their mouth. (I know of no better way to describe it.) Elsewhere in China, from Shanghai on down, I discovered that they sounded a lot more like Jenny. So which is really more standard? Is it the official “standard” or is it what you actually experience from the majority of native Chinese Mandarin speakers who you’re likely to meet?
If you make every effort to get the authentic Beijing “standard” down straight, you may sound like Lao Ganbu in this Youtube … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y1r6kdloFE
John,
Than you very, very much! Your “Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills” are going to put me several more rungs up the ladder. A big thanks also to maxiewawa for his video suggestion and to Bazza for providing the link. Like Ken always says…”Great stuff!”
Bazza,
Yes, I saw Max’s review, which is why I linked to it in the original blog entry.
Richard,
I paid careful attention to the audio editing to make sure that nothing was cut too closely. If some of the sounds sound strange, I’m afraid it’s probably due to the quality of the recording equipment here in my home. Not much I can do about that, unfortunately…
John,
I made a single playlist from the 4 “all” playlists that you supplied, and now I can listen and practice the whole thing while running around. It’s really great! The sound quality seems flawless, and the voices are easy on the ears (much nicer than my old communist comrade friend, Lao Ganbu). The pauses are just right, so there’s no distracting intervention needed on my part. This gets the Delta Tone Drill Award for a tool that enables you to practice on the run. Keep up the fabulous work!
John said:
I paid careful attention to the audio editing to make sure that nothing was cut too closely.
OK, I went back and played the sounds on my PC and I can definitely hear a small amount of lead-in on those ‘b’ and ‘d’ sounds that were causing problems on my MP3 player (which just yesterday packed it in), so it must have been my MP3 player eliminating silence at the beginning of tracks
Sorry for that. I even downloaed audacity to check it out but there is was no need.
John,
What I don’t get is if you go to the Chinesepod “Community” tab and click on “Chinesepod Blog” and then “Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills” this is what you get…
Error 404 - Not Found
Sorry, but you are looking for something that is not here.
Do you want to go Home?
John,
Thanks ! Looks like an extremely useful pronunciation tool.
But my media player cannot seem to open the M3U files.
Any advice ?
John said: “Yes, southern Chinese speakers are often guilty of not clearly distinguishing the “-n” and “-ng” sounds.”
Thanks for clearing that up. For quite awhile now, I have been learning pretty well everything by ear only. But this is the one distinction where I find myself looking up the pinyin spelling. I’ve also noticed that I hear it clearly with some speakers but not with others.
In particular, if I hear a sound combination such as “xinku” on a recording I am never sure if the pinyin spelling would be “xinku” or “xingku” I strongly suspect that most or all native speakers assimilate the /n/ sound into the /k/ sound, therefore losing the distinction. (This sort of thing happens in Spanish and many other languages) Still, it is never good to be too sure about these things. Native speakers have a way of noticing fine distinctions that we miss.
Richard Sharpe:
My “Blink” style language intuition tells me that a native speaker would by unlikely to pronounce “jintian” as “jingtian”. Here, the path of least resistance is for the /n/ to assimilate into the /t/. As always, I could be wrong. At any rate, with all the material I’ve used, its clearly “jintian” and not “jingtian”
Do you pronounce your /t/ sounds with your tongue touching your teeth? (Not touching the alveolar ridge as in English) Your tongue should be forward and high for both the /j/ sounds and the /t/ sounds. Your tongue hardly moves in saying the word.