Hello everyone.
你们好！
This is ChineseFor.Us Perfect Pronunciation – Tone Drills!
I’m Lili.
你们好, 我是Chuck.
Thanks for joining us!
Starting from today we’ll be practicing the 4 Chinese Tones, individually, and also
in pairs and groups.
We’ll learn their pronunciation, and their modification rules.
There will be 16 lessons in total and by the time we finish, you’ll see a huge improvement
in both your pronunciation and listening skills.
Each lesson is full of pronunciation practice, and at the end of each video, there will be
a quick listening practice quiz to help improve your skills.
And for further practice, we’ve also prepared a homework quiz for you to do.
There are 2 questions types, Multiple choice and fill-in the blanks.
When practicing with our videos, you can also try recording yourself because when you listen
to yourself recorded, you’ll be able to hear it from a more objective point of view
and make the necessary adjustments in order to improve.
And also this course is designed to be practiced more than one time.
So you can always go back, review and practice more.
So in this introduction we’ll start with getting a general idea of the 4 Chinese Tones.
Let’s get started!
Chinese is a tonal language, while English, Russian, German, Arabic and a lot of other
languages around the world are non-tonal.
A lot of people say that Chinese Tones are extremely difficult, but realistically, just
pronouncing the Tones individually, is not hard at all.
You can probably get them perfect in less than one minute.
There are two reasons why Tones are difficult.
The first is that there are a lot of characters and you have to remember the Tone for each
one.
The 2nd is that there are so many possible tone combinations in a sentence and you have
to switch between them quickly.
BUT, nothing is too hard, as long as you TRY hard enough.
And this course will provide you the practice needed to become comfortable and natural when
pronouncing Tones.
Because just like writing, pronunciation requires muscle memory.
Understanding is simple, but to do it we need repetition and practice.
And one thing you need to be careful with is that whenever you learn a new word, you
have to keep practicing its pronunciation, especially the Tones until you can get it
right without even thinking about it.
So try getting the pronunciation right at the very beginning, and one word at a time,
instead of trying to go back and correct them after you’ve already learned so many new
words.
So Tones in Chinese is 声调 (shēng diào).
For non-native speakers, Tones may sound unfamiliar, but basically, different Tones are just different
pitches of our voice.
Some higher, and some lower.
So Tones aren’t really a new thing.
The only difference is that, pitch, in a non-tonal language is used to express emotions or attitudes,
while Tones in Chinese are used express different meanings.
In Chinese, there are 4 Tones, the 1st Tone 一声(yī shēng), the 2nd Tone 二声(èr
shēng), the 3rd Tone 三声(sān shēng) and the 4th Tone 四声(sì shēng).
That means, the same syllable could have 4 different pronunciations.
1st let’s try the 4 Tones with the simplest syllable—“a”.
Here’s how it sounds with 4 different Tones: The 1st Tone, ā, high and flat, ā.
The 2nd Tone, á, it goes up, like up, á.
The 3rd Tone, ǎ, it goes down and then up again.
ǎ.
The 4th Tone, à, it goes straight down, like down.
à.
Let’s practice them again.
Listen carefully and repeat.
ā, á, ǎ, à.
Again.
ā, á, ǎ, à.
Don’t worry, we’ll discuss all of the pronunciation tips in the next few lessons.
Here, let’s see how another syllable “yī” sounds like with 4 different Tones:
yī yí yǐ yì.
All 4 of them share the same spelling but have different meanings because of the Tones.
And with 2-syllable words, it’s the same thing.
For example we have 一直and 已知.
一直 means “always”, while 已知 means “already known”.
Also, 上海 and 伤害.
上海 is the city of Shanghai, while 伤害 means to hurt or to damage.
That’s why being able to pronounce the tones correctly is very important when learning
Chinese.
Because native Chinese speakers are so used to hearing Tones that if the Tone is off,
they find it hard to understand.
But luckily, there are only 4 Tones, so if you practice them individually along with
Tone Pairs and Tone Groups, you’ll be able to tackle all the Tone pronunciations!
And that’s what we’ll do in this course.
Practice the 4 tones, But you’ve also heard of the Neutral Tone, right?
Yes, there is a Neutral Tone.
But it’s not a real Tone.
There are 2 reasons for that and we’ll discuss them in detail in Lesson 11.
So for right now let’s try pronouncing some syllables with Neutral Tones.
For Neutral Tones, they don’t have any Tonal Marker above the vowel and are very light,
vague and short.
Please pay attention to their pronunciation.
Okay, please read after me, 请跟我读, bàba, māma, gēge, jiějie, dìdi, mèimei.
So basically, to pronounce the Neutral Tone, we try to pronounce
the syllable very light, very vague and very short.
So now we know that in order for us to speak Chinese, we need to try our best to pronounce
the 4 Tones correctly so that people can understand us, and we also need to be able to tell the
Tones apart so that we can understand what people are saying.
So I hope this video gives you a general idea of Chinese Tones, and starting from our next
lesson we’ll talk about the techniques used to pronounce them.
So thanks for joining us today.
We’ll see you next time!
谢谢, 再见!