0.1 How Chinese Sounds Work — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what a Mandarin syllable is made of — an initial , a final and a tone — and name the three parts in a syllable you are shown. Understand that pinyin is a spelling system for Mandarin, not a way of writing Mandarin in English letters, and stop reading it as English. Hear the difference between 妈 mā, 麻 má, 马 mǎ and 骂 mà, and say which one you heard. Write the four tone marks by hand, over the right letter. Prerequisites : none. This is the first lesson of the course. This course begins with sound, and it begins there for a reason that has nothing to do with tradition. In Mandarin the pitch of a syllable is part of the word, in the same way that the vowel is part of the word. Change the pitch and you have said something else — not the same thing with a different feeling, but a different word. Nothing in English prepares you for that, so eight lessons go to it before we turn to the writing system or to grammar. A syllable has three parts Take the syllable written hǎo . It splits into three things that can be varied independently: an initial — the consonant at the front, here h . A syllable can have none at all. a final — everything from the first vowel onwards, here ao . Every syllable has one. a tone — the pitch shape laid over the final, here the third tone, marked ǎ . There are twenty-one initials, about thirty-five finals, and four tones plus a toneless option. That is a small inventory, and it is closed: Mandarin has roughly four hundred distinct syllables ignoring tone, and about thirteen hundred counting tone. English, by contrast, has tens of thousands of possible syllables. This has two consequences you will feel immediately. The good one is that every possible Mandarin syllable fits on a single printed table, so learning to read them all is a finite job; lesson 0.8 lays that table out. The hard one is that with so few syllables to go round, an enormous number of words sound alike, and the tone is doing a great deal of the work of keeping them apart. Count the parts in these and say them out loud as you go: mā has initial m , final a , tone 1. hǎo has initial h , final ao , tone 3. ài has no initial, final ai , tone 4. zhōng has initial zh , final ong , tone 1. The sounds in a table Here is the syllable ma with each of the four tones. Every row is a real word with a real character behind it. Read down the first column and let your voice do what the mark says: level and high, rising, dipping, falling. Pinyin Character Meaning · what your voice does mā 妈 mother — start high, stay there, do not let it drop má 麻 hemp; numb — start in the middle and climb mǎ 马 horse — fall low, stop, then rise a little mà 骂 to scold — start high and drop sharply, like a command The four are as different to a Mandarin ear as bat , bet , bit and but are to yours. You would never confuse those four English words, and you do not think of yourself as performing anything difficult when you keep them apart; you simply have the vowels. Tones will become that, and this volume is the process of getting there. A warning about the third tone, because it is the one that misleads beginners. Said slowly on its own it dips and then rises, which is why it is often drawn as a tick. In ordinary speech the rise usually disappears and what is left is a syllable that sits low and a little creaky. Aim for low rather than for a shape, and lesson 0.3 will come back to it. How This Differs from English English uses pitch constantly, so the objection "but English has no tones" needs unpicking. English pitch belongs to the sentence . It carries whether you are asking or telling, which word you are contrasting, whether you have finished, whether you are being sarcastic. Say really flat and it is a bored acknowledgement; say it with a rise and it is a question; say it with a fall and it is agreement. In every case the word is still really . The pitch changed your attitude, not your vocabulary. Mandarin pitch belongs to the word . 妈 mā and 马 mǎ are different entries in the dictionary, spelled with different characters, as unrelated as mother and horse are in English. Mandarin still has sentence pitch as well — a question can rise, a speaker can sound surprised — but it works on top of the word tones, bending them rather than replacing them. Two habits of yours will fight this, and it is worth naming them now so that you can catch yourself. The first is English stress. You are used to promoting one syllable inside a word and reducing the others towards a neutral vowel; in Mandarin most syllables keep their own tone, and even a toneless one such as the second syllable of 妈妈 māma (lesson 0.5) keeps its own vowel, so the word is not MAH-mə . The second is question intonation. English lifts the end of a yes-no question, and you will want to lift the end of a Mandarin one, which can bend the tone of the last word out of shape. Mandarin usually marks a yes-no question with a particle instead, and you will meet it in lesson 2.5. Writing the tone marks The marks are written over a vowel letter: ˉ for the first tone, ˊ for the second, ˇ for the third, ˋ for the fourth. A fifth possibility, the neutral tone, is written with no mark at all, and lesson 0.5 deals with it. When the final has more than one vowel letter, the mark goes on the one your mouth opens widest for. The working rule is this: if there is an a , mark the a ; otherwise if there is an o , mark the o ; otherwise if there is an e , mark the e ; otherwise mark the last vowel letter. So hǎo , not haǒ ; xiào , not xiaò ; duì , not dùi ; liù , not lìu . Notice that iu and ui both follow the last part of the rule, so the mark lands on the u in liù and on the i in duì . Write each of those four syllables out by hand twice; the marks stop being decoration once your own pen has put them in the right place. You will also see tones written as numbers, ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4 , in dictionaries and in typed chat. That is the same information in a form that is easy to key