# How long does it take you to hear tones?



## Ghabi

I've got a question for our Chinese-learning friends: how long does it take you to train you ears to hear different tones? Do you still mis-hear them now? My experience is that to be able to hear a new phoneme in real,  connected speech is much, much more difficult than to learn to pronounce  it. Is it the same story for you? Did you learn how to pronounce them correctly long before you can perceive them in real speech?


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## Lamb67

If your learning experience seems to be easier than your real life one particularly in regard of hearing, then just because you are learning at a teachable speed of communication.
如果你学语调的时候觉得容易，那是因为你在一个‘课堂’环境。

The four different Chinese tones could be learned by trying the exagerated gesture of a conductor. But it won't take very long to learn. I would say 5,6 years kids can learn the job well, regarding the Pudonhua/Mandarin.

I start to realize that Cantonese could well be as alien as English to a native Mandarin.


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## strad

When I first started learning Chinese (Cantonese, to be exact), words had two parts: a sound and a tone.  Learning the sounds is pretty easy, but learning the tone part is obviously pretty difficult for native speakers of non-tonal languages (English in my case).  I very quickly learned that 日 was pronounced yat, and that 一 was pronounced the same just with a different tone.  I have to imagine for native Chinese speakers these are not two words with the same “sound” and different tones, they are simply two different sounds.  To me learning to pronounce the tones is not as hard as simply remembering which tone a word is :-/

Hearing tones for individual words is also not a difficult task, I think.  After a few months of drilling tone practices I could hear them all mostly correctly, but as you said real speech is a totally different thing.  I sometimes wonder if I will ever hear them correctly, and I have been studying the language for about 3 years.

But I think Cantonese is worse than Mandarin, although I have to admit I speak pretty basic Mandarin at this point.  Except for the neutral tone, the tones in Mandarin are pretty distinct to me as they are not simply different pitches, but different contours of pitch.  In Cantonese I struggle most with hearing the differences between the high (1) and middle (3) tones, and I struggle the most with pronouncing the difference between the high rising (2) and the low rising (5) and with the above mentioned high and middle tones.  In every day speech, pitch contours are simply more recognizable than pitch levels to me.


 I still have to verify any appointments on 星期一 to make sure I am not supposed to really be there on 星期日, so to answer your question succinctly, I would say it takes forever to learn the tones.


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## YangMuye

其实……“日”和“一”的区别要在語流中才看得出。不過相對音高和音質也會有提示作用。比如人的正常音高都差不多，感覺共振在頭部的多半是高調。

普通話的連續語調比較複雜，有時用軟件看，音高幾乎都是平的，但實際上又能聽出聲調的區別。接觸廣東話後，我才开始重新審視普通話的聲調，覚得要普通話的聲調想講的自然并不容易。
其實粵語也有類似的現象，只不過音高較普通話穩固。粵語陰平、陽平可以讀降調是大家都知道的。此外我感覺陰上、陽上音高也不太穩定。當然，我不知道說母語的人的感覺。

我們現在把聲調分成幾類，這只是母語者的感覺。教科書上講的“模範聲調”可能會误导你，讓你只關注音高，卻忽略了其它細節（人總是自作聽明地扔掉他認爲“沒用”的東西）。但實際發音時，同一類的聲調可能有多種發音方式，由它前後的調型決定。相對音高的變化速率可能會比音高更重要。

想要達到native speaker的水平，恐怕不在乎訓練的多少，沒有聽過相當數量的真實發音是不行的。先不管其聲調是什麼，簡單的重複錄音的語句，可能效果還要好點。

只是個人看法。


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## viajero_canjeado

Cool question, Ghabi.

I would say that my tone recognition skills reached the point of adequacy a couple months into my study. At that point whether or not I could identify new words I heard without error was sort of hit or miss. Now that I've been learning almost two years, I'd say my correctness of hearing tones is around 90%. For some reason I often mix up the fourth and first tones (I guess because they both feel like "strong" tones).

As for learning to pronounce words before being able to recognize them in speech, yes that happens to me regularly. Words that I can understand when read will sometimes be lost on me when spoken - usually the more obscure ones. I find that in class if a teacher writes lots of the words he's saying (being aware of the fact that as a 外國人 I'm more likely to 聽不懂), similar to a movie with subtitles, then I come out of the lecture with a much better understanding than if he doesn't write at all. That's not merely due to tonality, however.. I'm afraid I got a bit of track.

As a final note, currently it makes a substantial impact on my ability to comprehend if a person enunciates clearly and with standard pronunciation. However I'm getting used to Taiwan's 台灣國語. It may be of interest that I have experienced a certain phenomenon:  it usually takes me a few conversations to "gain an ear" for a new acquaintance's manner of expression. That is to say, even if their pronunciation is standard, other factors such as diction can cause comprehension impediments until I learn that person's expressive idiosyncrasies.


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## Ghabi

Great input, thanks guys.



strad said:


> I have to imagine for native Chinese speakers these are not two words with the same “sound” and different tones, they are simply two different sounds.


 You're right ... It has never occured to me that 日 and 一 are even close!



> In Cantonese I struggle most with hearing the differences between the high (1) and middle (3) tones, and I struggle the most with pronouncing the difference between the high rising (2) and the low rising (5) and with the above mentioned high and middle tones.


 When I talk with my Mandarin-speaking friends and the topic comes to Cantonese, I often lure them to repeat the six tones after me, and I think they've the same problem as you have.



> I still have to verify any appointments on 星期一 to make sure I am not supposed to really be there on 星期日, so to answer your question succinctly, I would say it takes forever to learn the tones.


That bad, huh? You're modest.



viajero_canjeado said:


> Now that I've been learning almost two years, I'd say my correctness of hearing tones is around 90%. For some reason I often mix up the fourth and first tones (I guess because they both feel like "strong" tones).


You learnt it real fast, man. Yes, I think the 1st tone and the 4th tone are not _that different_ in rapid-fire speech.


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## Dragonseed

From my own experience in Mandarin: 

Even though I could always easily repeat the correct tone after our teacher in class, remembering those tones when I used the word did not happen that fast... I remember clearly that after living for 5 years in a Mandarin-speaking environment one day I realised that something I had just said was the wrong tone! So I suppose this is when my ear/brain started to assimilate the concept! Many of my friends confirm that this is when my prononciation started to improve.

The differenciation between second and third tones is still difficult, even after 15 years...

I agree with the advice about marking the tones with a gesture while you learn the word: it helps the memorisation. hold your hand high for the first tone, make your chin go down and up for the third, look at the ceiling for the second, slap the table for the fourth.
Or associate the tone with something related to the meaning of the word (like 下 xia4 is descending tone because it means "to go down"), or a silly rule / story of your own (like 上 shang4 is descending tone because it is the opposite of 下 which is a fourth tone!)


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## indigoduck

Ghabi said:


> I've got a question for our Chinese-learning friends: how long does it take you to train you ears to hear different tones? Do you still mis-hear them now? My experience is that to be able to hear a new phoneme in real, connected speech is much, much more difficult than to learn to pronounce it. Is it the same story for you? Did you learn how to pronounce them correctly long before you can perceive them in real speech?


 
I'm a mandarin speaker who has been learning cantonese all their life, and i'm still far from 100% fluent especially with words that are completely different between cantonese and mandarin (a great majority).

To hear a phoneme in real speech more difficult than to learn to pronounce it ?  

For the most part, because of limited exposure with the language and i'm not immersed in it unless i go to a chinese supermarket/plaza or something like that, i'll probably learn to pronounce the phoneme faster than i can hear that phoneme in speech, but _it depends on the particular phoneme_.

For the 一/日 example, since i knew 一/日 in mandarin and then someone pronounced 一/日 in cantonese for me, it was much easier to grasp these characters in speech (maybe because of context?) than it was for me to pronounce them since my mouth tends to pronounce these words in mandarin before i pronounce them in cantonese.

For words in Cantonese that have no equivalent expression or different or completely new from mandarin, then it depends on the phoneme.

Whether it's quicker for me to identify the phoneme in real speech or pronounce the phoneme, and vice versa... depends how well i know the phoneme and how well i learned the context for the use of that phoneme in speech, and further how many variations of tones there exist for that phoneme.

So to summarize:

the more tone variations there exist for that phoneme (easier to pronounce than to identify in speech)
the more meanings that exist for that phoneme (easier to pronounce than to identify in speech)
the more frequently used phonemes in speech (easier to identify than to pronounce them) （ie: 我，你, 唔, 係)
the phonemes that i learned via it's placement in an expresion (easier to pronounce than to identify in speech)... for example if someone said that phoneme by itself then i probably wouldn't be able to recognize it unless i knew the context ...


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## indigoduck

Dragonseed said:


> From my own experience in Mandarin:
> 
> The differenciation between second and third tones is still difficult, even after 15 years...


 
Even though i'm a "mandarin speaker", in general, i find the difference between first and second tone to be the most difficult.  For the third tone, i try to identify the curve in tone.  With the fourth being the easiest since it falls down.


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## viajero_canjeado

Dragonseed said:


> The differenciation between second and third tones is still difficult, even after 15 years.



I gotta be honest, I mix those two up fairly often too - not when speaking usually, but listening. I thought about mentioning it earlier, but didn't want to sound too incapable..if I can't get first and fourth or second and third tones then I'm pretty much done for!

This thread has made me take a more reflective approach to gauging my tone recognition ability, and I realized I initially overestimated myself at 90%. After more observation: If someone says a word I don't recognize (either because I haven't learned it or did but forgot it) then when I repeat what they said, emphasizing the tones, I'm probably correct closer to 65-70% of the time.


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## Ghabi

Thanks Dragonseed and ID for your interesting sharing and VC for your confession. So do you guys think not hearing the right tones seriously impair your understanding? My observation is that a native speaker can usually understand his non-native interlocutor without much difficulty, even though the latter says his words in wrong tones. Obviously it's because a native speaker is familiar enough with his language so he can always guess right.

Therefore, I imagine that not hearing the right tones doesn't matter that much, since the context and your own knowledge of the language can help you to disambiguate what you hear. And I think what Strad mentions above (星期一 vs 星期日 in Cantonese) is one of the few cases where one would be at a loss when he doesn't hear the tone right. What is your experience? Do you have some _real_ anecdotes where you find yourself in a tight spot just because you can't hear the tone right?


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## Lamb67

My Japanese colleague told one story at Beijing when I was working there. He can speak Chinese very well but still finds it hard to distinguish between 肚子饱了 and 兔子跑了 in Mandarin. Have a go?


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## Ghabi

Lamb67 said:


> My Japanese colleague told one story at Beijing  when I was working there. He can speak Chinese very well but still finds  it hard to distinguish between 肚子饱了 and 兔子跑了 in Mandarin.


Thanks,  but I'm looking for examples concerning tones, not consonants ... and  examples that cause real communication problems (like the 星期一 vs 星期日  case).


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## clevermizo

Here I can only speak about Mandarin tones. I used to work for a Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese family when I was in high school which is where I started learning.

It took me 1-2 months to fully reproduce and accurately hear tones. I used to sing the contours to myself slowly all the time.

I continued to take Chinese a number of years in university. My Chinese is a little rusty because I started focusing on Arabic, but I have a number of colleagues here at work with whom I can converse. Since my initial attempt to learn, I have no problems hearing tones accurately and reproducing them accurately. I do occasionally have problems accurately producing the elusive "5th" or unstressed tone, which sometimes comes out as a short low tone or abbreviated 3rd tone.

I will say that once I learned to hear and reproduce tone, I also have no problem hearing different tones in other tonal languages, even though often there are more tones or at different pitch registers, however before I learned to recognize tone at all I couldn't tell the difference between any of it.  I can't speak for 星期一 vs 星期日in Cantonese because I don't know how those sound, although they sound substantially different in Mandarin. Reproducing tones in other tonal languages is different and I had quite a hard time trying to do so in Taiwanese when I started to learn a little bit in university. If you ask me to recite all the tones in a line-up, I can do it, but I made many mistakes in actual sentences. Plus the tone sandhi rules are quite complicated.


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## viajero_canjeado

Ghabi, to clarify my confession: I reckon if you take into account all the words I recognize right off the bat, 90% is a reasonable estimate; but my accuracy of assigning tones to the words I *don't* know, which is what I later figured you were talking about, is still a bit lower.



Ghabi said:


> Thanks,  but I'm looking for examples concerning tones, not consonants ... and  examples that cause real communication problems (like the 星期一 vs 星期日  case).



I decided to take notes in class and see if any such cases came up, and I'll give you just the highlights:

同事 and 同時 (in that sentence the ㄕ sounded unstressed)
高/告政府
契約/企業 (you may be aware that ㄧ and ㄩ can sound 差不多, especially among 老人家)
變通/同
行/性質
遲/吃到了
氣養/洋
宅男/災難
扶養權/付養錢
三方/房
知道/直到
編號/變好
水域/魚
好像是/屎 (haha, this wasn't in class, but was an answer to the question "is that poop?" during a walk)
有急/機
對皮/批
資源/自願
共產/工廠
灰/迴避
悲哀/被愛

Some of these I figured out soon after on my own or with a dictionary, but a few I'm still puzzled about and probably didn't come up with the right characters. That's how some of my classes are, so oftentimes I've no choice but to 發呆一下! 嘻.

The best tonal mispronunciation blooper I know of was related to me by a fellow 外國人 who, during an English class, informed his students that 他很喜歡集集, except he pronounced both ㄐㄧ as the first tone, giving the entire class quite a laugh.

As for being able to understand when other people mispronounce tones, I don't often hear non-natives speak, so I'm used to correct pronunciation (at least with tones - somehow even when Taiwanese mangle the consonants, they still manage to get the tones right), but when I do listen to foreigners and they mispronounce the tones I'm usually at a loss. For example the other day an American said to me 很冷 but said it in 3rd-2nd tone sequence rather than 2nd-3rd - probably because he wanted to emphasize the interrogatory nature of the utterance, which in English is done through raising the last syllable similar to a second tone, as you surely are aware. Anyway, I had no idea what he was saying at first and he had to repeat it several times, which I don't think would've happened with a native speaker.


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## indigoduck

viajero_canjeado said:


> Ghabi, to clarify my confession: I reckon if you take into account all the words I recognize right off the bat, 90% is a reasonable estimate; but my accuracy of assigning tones to the words I *don't* know, which is what I later figured you were talking about, is still a bit lower.
> 
> I decided to take notes in class and see if any such cases came up, and I'll give you just the highlights:
> 
> 同事 and 同時 (in that sentence the ㄕ sounded unstressed)
> 高/告政府
> 契約/企業 (you may be aware that ㄧ and ㄩ can sound 差不多, especially among 老人家)
> 變通/同
> 行/性質
> 遲/吃到了
> 氣養/洋
> 宅男/災難
> 扶養權/付養錢
> 三方/房
> 知道/直到
> 編號/變好
> 水域/魚
> 好像是/屎 (haha, this wasn't in class, but was an answer to the question "is that poop?" during a walk)
> 有急/機
> 對皮/批
> 資源/自願
> 共產/工廠
> 灰/迴避
> 悲哀/被愛


 
Even though my mainstream tongue is mandarin, i wouldn't be able to guess what word is being said without context.

Don't even bother testing me in Cantonese.  But i'll show some examples in Cantonese that would confuse me only because i have access to such a book.

出生 - 出身
外向 - 內向/外地 - 內地
凍死 - 痛死
最佳 - 醉雞
買酒 - 咪走
行山 - 恆生
發現 - 忽然
爭錢 - 賺錢
順便 - 上便
青年 - 千年
北便 - 不變



viajero_canjeado said:


> The best tonal mispronunciation blooper I know of was related to me by a fellow 外國人 who, during an English class, informed his students that 他很喜歡集集, except he pronounced both ㄐㄧ as the first tone, giving the entire class quite a laugh.


 
Nice!  But what did he really mean to say ?



viajero_canjeado said:


> As for being able to understand when other people mispronounce tones, I don't often hear non-natives speak, so I'm used to correct pronunciation (at least with tones - somehow even when Taiwanese mangle the consonants, they still manage to get the tones right), but when I do listen to foreigners and they mispronounce the tones I'm usually at a loss. For example the other day an American said to me 很冷 but said it in 3rd-2nd tone sequence rather than 2nd-3rd - probably because he wanted to emphasize the interrogatory nature of the utterance, which in English is done through raising the last syllable similar to a second tone, as you surely are aware. Anyway, I had no idea what he was saying at first and he had to repeat it several times, which I don't think would've happened with a native speaker.


 
Without context, i believe a native speaker would have just as much trouble as well.


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## Ghabi

clevermizo said:


> ... I had quite a hard time trying to do so in Taiwanese when I started to learn a little bit in university. If you ask me to recite all the tones in a line-up, I can do it, but I made many mistakes in actual sentences. Plus the tone sandhi rules are quite complicated.


So you even made a stab at the Min dialects! My hat is off to you. As you may know, the Min dialects are often described as 雙調語言 "double-tonal language", where each morpheme has two different tones depending on whether it is at the pausal or non-pausal position of an utterance. It sounds so difficult that I don't even dare to make an attempt!



viajero_canjeado said:


> I decided to take notes in class and see if any such cases came up, and I'll give you just the highlights ...


Thanks for your efforts VC! But these examples won't cause misunderstanding in real life, will they? For example, when someone says 我的同事病了, you won't take it as 我的同*時病了, which doesn't make sense.



indigoduck said:


> But i'll show some examples in Cantonese that would confuse me only because i have access to such a book ...


 Most of your examples concern consonants and vowels, not tones, and like VC's examples, they won't really cause misunderstanding in real life, I suppose.



> Without context, i believe a native speaker would have just as much trouble as well.


But there's always context in real life!

I think we've all heard "funny anecdotes" about how wrongly pronounced words cause embarrassment, but obviously most of them are apocryphal (anyone can invent a dozen of them if he wants to), no? I think we need to distinguish between mispronunciations and misunderstanding, as the former doesn't necessarily lead to the latter. When someone says "I wrote it on a *shit of paper", people may laugh but I don't think anyone would misunderstand him.


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## strad

Ghabi said:


> And I think what Strad mentions above (星期一 vs 星期日 in Cantonese) is one of the few cases where one would be at a loss when he doesn't hear the tone right. What is your experience? Do you have some _real_ anecdotes where you find yourself in a tight spot just because you can't hear the tone right?



Here are some extra examples.  All of these are Cantonese, and I do not know if these sounds would be confusing in other Chinese languages.  The differences in pronunciation are only tonal or vowel length, two things that are pretty difficult for westerners.

靚仔 (leng3jai2) vs. o靚仔 (leng1jai2).  If you speak slow, they are pretty clear,  but in normal speech, these two are pretty much impossible for me to hear the difference between, and the context usually doesn't help so much either.  

飛仔(fei1jai2) vs. 肥仔(fei4jai2).  granted 飛仔 is pretty rare these days.

We were trying to decide where to go eat lunch and everybody kept saying 攪掂(gaau2dim6) and I was wondering why everyone was talking about 9 o'clock (九點 gau2dim2) when it was already past noon.  At this point I was unfamiliar with the word 攪掂 so my brain was was substituting something I did know (九點) to try and make sense of the conversation.

At the market, I was trying to tell my aunt 我鍾意棃 and she responded "I like you too".  This one is probably only a problem because of the lazy pronunciation of 'n' sounds as 'l' sounds (你 lei5 vs. 棃 lei4).

Usually the context is enough to determine, but I heard some people arguing  on some TVB drama and one of them said 寫畀你睇 and I thought "that guy is being overdramatic" (I heard 死畀你睇).  寫se2 vs. 死sei2

火車 (fo2 che1) and 貨車 (fo3 che1) are pretty hard to determine from spoken context.  Visual context, obviously helps 

For numbers 八 (baat3) and 百 (baak3) can be confusing.  The context usually makes this clear since nobody would say 百蚊 for example, they would say 一百蚊, but if someone did say just 百蚊 I am pretty sure my brain would hear 八蚊, and when people say 八百蚊, I usually just hear baa baa man, since the ending t and k sounds are very light.

I have had numerous personal examples of confusing words based only on tone, but unfortunately I am having a bit of trouble remembering them all right now (I should write this stuff down .  I'm sure I will come up with more later.


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## xiaolijie

> I've got a question for our Chinese-learning friends: how long does it take you to train you ears to hear different tones?


Not all "Chinese-learning friends" are equal . If your mother tongue happens to have tones, you may have less problems with learning new tones and so it'd take you less time to acquire the new tone system.


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## viajero_canjeado

Ghabi said:


> But these examples won't cause misunderstanding in real life, will they?



For those who clearly grasp every spoken word within a given context, probably not (but if that were the case, then there would have been no misperception of tone in the first place and none of this thread would apply to them); however, you may overestimate us Chinese learning friends! Or me, at least. I'm afraid cases like that 在我身上 do give rise to misunderstandings. Words like 同事 and 同時 both fall into the category of 日常用的字 so there are lots of situations where either one might fit, if the listener only has sort of the gist of what's being discussed, which is often the position I find myself in. 有急/機, just imagine an account of a local organic farmer being rushed to the hospital. For someone going to a dinner party, he might arrive to find that he had either 遲到了 or that the food had been 吃到了. No need to justify each example, just suffice to emphatically say that yes, this sort of thing impedes my understanding in real life on a daily basis.


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## viajero_canjeado

Ghabi said:


> examples concerning tones...that cause real communication problems



A couple other ones that seemed to fit your description (I'm afraid this could become a never-ending list):

A: So what're you gonna write your paper on?
B: 新加坡憲法對bianxing的立場。

Of course, for someone whose mind isn't in the gutter, 變性 probably would never have occurred to them.. perhaps I've just heard it more often than 鞭刑 though..

Another one that came up was "liyi". 譬如說，一個社會很看重liyi. Is it 利益 or 禮儀? You be the judge!


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## Tate_Harmann

This is a question I wanted to ask too.  I'm just starting to learn some Mandarin and the tone concept makes sense to me.  I can even pronounce tones in practice and hear them when a native speaker says them one word at a time.  The issue is distinguishing them in whole sentences.

For example:

tā - high tone...and easy to pronounce in my mind.
shì - descending tone and fairly easy.
wǒ - this tone is kind of a weird one for me but when said alone it's easy enough to distinguish.

The issue is trying to make sense of a whole sentence where tones sort of run together:

tā shì wǒ de tài tai (Sample sentence from lesson 1 of the book I'm reading)

When I hear that I don't hear any tones...is that normal?  Maybe they are just very much more subtle when spoken rapidly?


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## xiaolijie

> When I hear that I don't hear any tones...is that normal?


Yes, it's normal, because of two essentially opposite reasons:
-You haven't yet reached the stage where you're able to hear the differences in connected speech. In this case, even if a tone is wrongly said, you'd still not notice it.
-You are so good at the language that the differences between tones sink into your subconscious perception. You notice the difference only when a tone is worngly said, and not when it's correctly said.


> Maybe they are just very much more subtle when spoken rapidly?


Yes, this is correct, because less energy / deliberation is put into it. This is also true with the pronounciation in general; and that is why as learners, we tend to prefer listening to slow talkers and fast speakers.


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## Tate_Harmann

Thanks Xiolijie!


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## Youngfun

For us, Chinese born overseas, tones are what teachers teach us at the first lesson, before teaching pinyin.

I remember we children repeating a lot of times ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4
and when altogether we exercise to pronounce them, we were very amused by the 4th tone, and say very loudly laughing 

But I would also say that in casual speech tones are more aproximative, may vary, has many sandhi, and the 5th tone, and it also depends on the area and on the mother-tongue dialect


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## Dragonseed

No durable misunderstanding, I think, but possibly a few embarassing minutes of silence. 
As when, many years ago, I wanted to ask one of my (female) colleagues "May I ask you something?" ("我想問妳一下..."), and it sounded very much like "I'd like to smell your armpits"...


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## viajero_canjeado

Dragonseed said:


> No durable misunderstanding, I think, but possibly a few embarassing minutes of silence.
> As when, many years ago, I wanted to ask one of my (female) colleagues "May I ask you something?" ("我想問妳一下..."), and it sounded very much like "I'd like to smell your armpits"...



 Ha! I don't know which foul-up is worse there, 聞 or 吻！


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