You Need to Know Why You Don't Understand People
If I ask 10 people this question: Do you think why you don't understand when you are talking to Chinese people?It's a safe bet that I'll get one answer: It's the vocabulary. I need to learn more vocabulary.
Vocabulary certainly is a barrier, but it is one only for beginners. There are people who have learned Chinese for years, and accumulate vast amount of vocabulary. But when in real life, they still get lost quite quickly.
In fact you face three barriers:
1- vocabulary and sentence patterns
2- talking speed
3- accent
The first one is the easiest one to solve. You can employ many different methods. The end result is to remember certain words and sentence patterns. It's also the reason why learning reading and writing is easier than learning listening and speaking. When in reading and writing, your brain has time to recollect your memory, and if you have done your homework well you will find it easy to learn reading and writing. Although it's the easiest one to accomplish, memorizing large amount of vocab and grammar patterns can still be a daunting task.
The second one is not so easy to tackle. And most of the time, it's speaking speed that hinders your understanding. You have no time to reflect and it's already over. You need to have rigorous training on listening until a foreign sound becomes so familiar and you can call it your second nature. It's not so easy. It requires hours and hours of listening training.
The third one is the most difficult. When you are out of your classroom and your standard tape recording, you face people with different accents. There are so many different accents out there. And those accents can really lost you. The good news is if this is the only reason why you don't understand, you can adapt to it fairly quickly.
In the end, that's just why there's so much fun in learning Chinese!
posted by april zhang @ 1/24/2008 10:45:00 AM
6 Comments:
It seems to me that there are many barriers to learning a language like Chinese for English (or, indeed any European language) speakers.
However, these barriers are faced by those people from other language communities who are learning English.
The first of these is the phonology of the new language. People have a natural tendency to import the phonology of their mother tongue (母语）when using a new language, but this does not help. You must pay close attention to the pronunciation of native speakers and try to emulate that, otherwise you will always sound like a foreigner, and worse than that even, your atrocious accent gets in the way of communication because people you try to communicate often do not have the patience to deal with your accent. (Of course, language teachers tend to be much more patient than the general community.)
One example of this last problem is my wife, who has great difficulty with English speakers from India. Their accents make it very difficult for her to understand them.
However, I have seen Vietnamese people who have failed to learn that English phonology is different to Vietnamese. They simply do not understand that syllable endings are pronounced in English, and indeed, are emphasized. The same is true of some native Chinese speakers who do not realize that endings like 'n' and 'ng' (or 'p', 't', 'k' in Cantonese) are different in English than they are in Chinese, not to mention those who cannot pronounce 'm'. (Of course none of this is meant to imply that non-English speakers are the only ones who have problems or faults, or that there are no non-English speakers who ever learn to speak English with close to native command of the language. Nor is it meant to imply that English speakers are perfect, because I have seen many native English speakers who cannot handle the phonology of non-English languages [eg, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese: 天不怕，地不帕，只怕鬼佬讲广东话！])
When it comes to learning Mandarin, there are a number of issues.
Quite apart from the fact that only a smallish proportion of native speakers will ever learn a second language well (I suspect less than 20%) the following are some of the problems I see:
1. Pinyin is not actually a good vehicle for teaching Mandarin in my opinion. There are several reasons for this, including: a) some letters have multiple phonetic values, eg, /i/ and /u/, depending on the letters that come before them; b) perhaps worse than that, however, is that the pronunciation of some letter combinations are simply so different than they are in English that lots of people never get used to it. And example is /en/ where people want to pronounce it like pen in English. Indeed, I have seen Japanese speakers who have learned English who are unable to pronounce 很 correctly because of the interference of English.
In my opinion BoPoMoFo would be better for indicating the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
2. There is simply not enough emphasis on learning the phonology of Mandarin in any of the courses or PodCasts I have taken or used. They all assume that people will just get it, but without training, many people will not just get it.
For example, I know Cantonese speakers who are learning Mandarin and they still have not internalized the third-tone tone change rules, eg, with sentences starting with 我以为... where they try to pronounce 我 in third tone and follow it by another third tone syllable ...
However, this comment has become quite long already, so I will end here and continue on to some of the issues you raise in the next comment.
You say:
The second one is not so easy to tackle. And most of the time, it's speaking speed that hinders your understanding. You have no time to reflect and it's already over.
There is a skill that is needed here, though, and it is the skill of being able to skip over the pieces you did not understand and trying to get the gist of the whole sentence.
Of course, in the early days of learning a new language, this is not possible, but after a while you can begin to do it, and it also helps to bootstrap your vocabulary, as you fill in the meanings of the pieces you did not understand.
In the end, that's just why there's so much fun in learning Chinese!
I am not sure that I agree with your sentiment here.
The reasons that it is so much fun to learn Chinese, or indeed any other language, are, in my opinion:
1. The sense of accomplishment
2. The sheer joy in being able to communicate with people from a vastly different language community.
3. 我很喜欢听别人谈他们的生活。
So, I'm back with more observations.
Native English speakers (and even one who learned Chinese in Taiwan) have problems with hearing and reproducing the difference between 出 (chu1) and 区(qu1). The same problems exist for ju and zhu and so forth.
The retroflex sounds are not used at all in English, so you have to get people to make the /zh/, /ch/, and /sh/ sounds first and then to be able to hear when qu1 is being said vs chu1.
Another problem area I notice all the time is half third tone.
For some reason it takes people a long time to get used to the idea that third tone before any other tone than third simply stays low.
Personally, I think the way to deal with this is to give people lots of two syllable and three syllable words and phrases which include different tones and get them to simply say them again and again and again. However, it should also be pointed out, at some point, what is happening, tone-wise, in these combinations.
very interesting indeed.
Some more observations.
Chinese and English have differences even in how finals are pronounced. For example, it seems to me that, compared with English, Mandarin and Cantonese finals are clipped. Or, perhaps it is that Mandarin and Cantonese syllables are allotted relatively precise amounts of time for their pronunciation.
In any event, the pronunciation of /n/ and /ng/ finals in English is very different than what it is in Mandarin and Cantonese. Many native Mandarin speakers do not say the name John correctly as far as the ears of an English speaker are concerned. This is because we hold onto the finals and emphasize them strongly, although, this does depend a little on the English language community you are from. To our ears, many Chinese speakers are saying a name that is half way between John and Jong when they try to say John.
There are other issues here as well, although they mainly relate to Cantonese, since Mandarin does not have /p/,/t/, or /k/ finals, while Cantonese does, but they are not pronounced the same way as they are in Received (BBC standard) English or Australian English (or New England US English). In these versions of English these finals are strongly aspirated, while in Cantonese they seem like glottal stops and sound more like, say /t/ pronounced in the word "rotten" by some more rural British speakers, or the word "yep" where the /p/ is stopped rather than aspirated.
However, this also points out that native English speakers are generally not going to pronounce Mandarin correctly without a lot of effort, because they are simply unaware of the differences between the way they speak and the actual phonology of the target language.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home