you know tones, right? the way we rise our voice in the end of a question, for instance? that’s a rising tone. mandarin has tones too, 4 of them plus a neutral one. and they use them in every single syllable!
it might be hard to understand what i mean. so here’s an example:
* bīng (spoken with a flat and slightly long ‘i’) means frozen
* bǐng (where your voice ‘i’ starts in the middle of the tone, takes a dive and then rises) means cake.
* bìng (spoken with a sharp falling ‘i’) means sick.
the consequences? a foolproof recipe to (a funny kind of) frustration. you want to say chicken and you say “how many” (jī and jǐ). you want to say country and you say fruit (guó and guǒ). you want to say fish and you say rain (yú and yǔ). *sigh*
speaking chinese is like playing a memory game. is this the word i want? did i remember the right tone? naturally, they don’t understand you if you don’t pronounce words correctly (except in specific contexts). i mean, why should they – to them it’s a different word!
we have a little game going on: saying our street name so perfectly that the taxi driver understands without us having to repeat it. which is a hard task, even after hundreds of taxi rides. this is the tipical scenario when we enter a taxi (dialogue without tones, too much work!):
us: nihao! (hi!)
taxi driver says: nihao! qu nali? (hi! where to?)
us: dong xin lu, wu ning lu. (dongxin road, wuning road)
taxi driver confused: wuning lu… shema lu?* (wuning road… what road?)
us: dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu… (dongxin road! dongxin road, dongxin road… – all spoken with minimal tone variations, each time slowlier…)
taxi driver: ah! dongxin lu!
us: dui! (yes! with a very happy face)
and off we go, feeling more or less proud according to the number of times we had to repeat it. one day we’ll be as good as dashan, just wait and see!
* wuning road is very big and easily recognizable. dongxin road is not.
5 replies on “ting bu dong! (i hear you, but i don’t understand!)”
Did you know musicians have better verbal memory for chinese than people who’ve never studied music?
It has to do with all these tone variations :)
Nice, isn’t it?
ni hui shuo yidianer zhongwen
你会说一点二中文
não há ‘espaço’ para sotaques, então…
well, just a tip for you, most of time you can use multiple syllables to make up a word or a phrase, which reduce the possibility of miss-understanding caused by tone variations. for instance, you wanna say ‘fruit’, you say ‘guo’ in chinese, if it’s not been caught clearly, you say ‘shui guo’ would do it much better.
hope it helps :)
Late reply..i know however: haha, that is so recognizable.. when i used to live in Shanghai i always had the same problem. But you know they have that ‘magic number’ (that’s what we called it..) if the cabdriver just really does not know the street and needs directions you call it and problems solved :D i hope you got better at it by now though.