Junjie’s China blog

Learn to hear and speak tones

When You are starting out with Chinese, tones are quite a difficult task. You can listen to a native and feel like, that person doesn’t use tones at all. But this is only half of the truth. Natives actually do use tones. They just don’t overdo it like Your teacher does.

At the same time You might wonder how to remember the tones. Learning which tone applies to which word is the wrong way. You rather should get them naturally. Here’s how You do it:

Read Chinese text loud. Take Your Chinese learning book and read the text loud. Repeat each sentence until You have the tones correct. This exercise will improve Your tone consciouness dramatically. You should spend at least 15 minutes on loud reading every day. By doing this You hear the tones in a correct way and they stick in Your brain.

You can also read single words from Your vocabulary list aloud. Especially the hard ones with two second tones in a row like 韩国 hán guó - South Korea. Another hard combination is the third - second tone combination.
Listen to native Chinese speakers. Just switch on the TV or the radio and listen to Chinese news or movie. You can even do something else in the meantime. It’s absolutely no problem if You don’t understand the words and meaning at the moment. What is important is to get used to the speed of native Chinese speech.

Listening to music is also possible, however not so good, because the tones are very unclear in music. The singers often change the tones in music to the melody of a song. You might pick up something wrong here.

Talk to Chinese persons. During the conversation You will recognize they are using tones after a while. It’s just hard in the beginning. This is a great way to remember the tones, because the Chinese person will correct Your worst mistakes and You can easily remember them later.

Look up tones if necessary. If You are saying something and You don’t have the tone for a word, ask the other person immediately. Or look it up in the dictionary at once. If You said a word with the wrong tone, repeat it twice with the correct tone. So the correct version remains in Your brain.

Overemphasize tone. As a beginning Chinese learner You should rather overemphasize tones when reading and speaking. Later You can still reduce the emphasis if it’s too strong. However starting out with to few emphasis or no tones at all will lead You nowhere.

Tones are hard, but not impossible. You will get them down in a few months with the methods described above. When I started to hear tones it was like pure enlightenment. A great feeling. This reminds me that talking and using new learned words is one of the most effective language learning methods.

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