# Learning tips: Are tones something that you can pick up later?



## el12345

Hello, sorry, I'm new to Chinese so this isn't a very advanced question. I've been trying desperately to learn Chinese for the last few months but the tones are causing me great difficulty. I'm aware that there are many words which have several meanings depending on what tone they are in (e.g. "ma"), and hence, I acknowledge it is important to get them right.

Basically, would you recommend that I need to get every tone right for every word before moving on, or should i just learn a word as best as I can and then pick up the tone later? Are tones something that you can pick up later? Also, is this the case with a lot of foreigners?

And how hard is it to understand someone who doesn't have a perfect knowledge of tones?
Thank you
Xiexie!


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## Lukero

I recommend that you first familiarize yourself with the tones. A simple exercise would be to go "a1 a2 a3 a4" where the numbers are the tones. Practice that everyday before you learn the words so when you learn the words themselves, you'll be quick to apply the tones. Learning the words and then picking up the tones later is not recommended. Do loads of reading exercises as well. ^^

I've heard quite a lot of foreigners speaking Chinese with tone inaccuracies but can understand them almost fully. A native or proficient Chinese speaker and/or listener are familiar with the word pairings etc. so a few inaccuracies are fine. However, if your entire sentence is inaccurate in terms of tones, it might be hard for people to understand you.


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## el12345

thank you very much!
xiexie!


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## palomnik

I agree with Lukero.  A lot of foreigners come to the Far East and learn some Chinese (or Thai or Vietnamese) and don't bother to internalize the tones.  While what they say is usually intelligible, whenever I hear foreigners talking like that - and some of them have been here for years - the only thing I can feel is that they have decided that they don't think its worth the effort to do a proper job learning the language.

To my mind it would almost be better if they didn't try to speak it at all.  Native speakers can accept and forgive foreigners making grammatical mistakes and even errors in politeness (admittedly, this latter is not as much a problem with Chinese), but total disregard of tones is almost a form of contempt.

Having said that, you will gradually learn that in Mandarin Chinese unstressed syllables tend to lose their tone, unless you're speaking slowly and precisely.  The same is generally not true of other dialects of Chinese.


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## DernierVirage

el12345 said:


> Hello, sorry, I'm new to Chinese so this isn't a very advanced question. I've been trying desperately to learn Chinese for the last few months but the tones are causing me great difficulty. I'm aware that there are many words which have several meanings depending on what tone they are in (e.g. "ma"), and hence, I acknowledge it is important to get them right.
> 
> Basically, would you recommend that I need to get every tone right for every word before moving on, or should i just learn a word as best as I can and then pick up the tone later? Are tones something that you can pick up later? Also, is this the case with a lot of foreigners?
> 
> And how hard is it to understand someone who doesn't have a perfect knowledge of tones?
> Thank you
> Xiexie!


 
For what it's worth, my advice is to learn the tones for every new word as you go along. If not you will sooner or later be faced, as I was , with having to go back and more or less relearn, which is a horrible task !! 

The problem is that when you are speaking with your teacher or in class, they are used to your pronunciation and also the subject matter is already defined, which eliminates a lot of confusion. However, once you start communicating in the "outside world", you don't have these advantages and so correct tones become crucial. 

What I began doing was to learn the tones at the same time as the new characters, I just noted the tone number beside it and forced myself to learn it.

I find that, for me, learning the tones is in fact harder than learning the characters and is also the least "interesting" aspect of the learning process, but I cannot advise you too strongly to try to learn the tones in parallel with your other work.

Bon courage !


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## jakke

I feel learning english is really hard.
A English words have many meanings sometimes and when I get a new meaning I just consider it as a new word.
I hope I do not make mistakes in the previous sentences.


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## wyq614

To listen, to practise. This is the key. You listen and you´ll soon get used to these tones and you practise, without fearing making mistakes. Don´t waste too much time to THINK why there must be 4 tones, or to UNDERSTAND, just to LISTEN and PRACTISE. Sometimes it is not easy to find a reason why of the language phenomena.


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## le petit chevalier

Understanding someone whose tones are not perfect is very rarely difficult. Though it's intelligible, it's still incorrect; in English, sentences like, "Me want eating" are intelligible, but still very wrong. Same with tones in Chinese.

Mastering conversational tones is such a job for an outsider to tonal languages that you don't need to completely master them before you learn to make sentences and speak to people. However, you do eventually need to master them in order to be proficient.

If you don't know the tones, it may be difficult to express a few things: names, for example, or two common words with the same pronunciation and different tones (like 吻 wěn, to kiss, and 问   wèn, to ask).


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## Dragonseed

Hello el12345!

At this point, you may have understood that tones are important but that you may be able to convey basic communication even with the wrong tones...

A little bit of my own experience, and some advice, hoping this will help you.

I have started to seriously learn Chinese 15 years ago when I arrived in Taiwan. I did it quite intensively at first (10 hours a week for 1.5 year), and after that I have been spending the remaining 13 years using and improving! 

Like all foreigners in that situation, I believe my tones were just completely random to start with. It is one thing to be able to produce the right tone when you know what it is, e.g. in the controled environment of a classroom, but a complete different matter to memorise them, and yet another one to recognise and memorise the tone of a new word you pick-up during a conversation (a lot of my vocabulary was aquired like this, so I can often understand and use Chinese words even if I am not sure how to translate them in English or in French).

I remember very well the first time I was able to tell that I had just used the wrong tone, i.e. the first time I could use my "audio-memory": that was 5 years after I arrived in Taiwan...

So my advise would be: if you are learning in "immersion" (i.e. in a Chinese speaking country), don't worry to much, go out and speak as much as you can, it will eventually come naturally. But if you are learning in a more formal environment, and not using the language everyday, it is probably worth the extra effort to memorise carefuly each word with its tone, however painful this is.

A little cheating may help by trying to find a logical link between the meaning of the word and the tone (there is no such link in reality, but telling yourself a story helps memorising): like "下 = xia4 = down" is "obviously" a falling tone (that's the easiest one!); and "上 = shang4 = up" is also a falling tone because "it goes with 下", etc.

Last piece of advice that many have found useful. When learning a new word, try this: hold your hand above your head for a 1st tone, slap the table with your palm for a fourth tone, and "draw" the tone symbole (the inverted '^') with your chin for a third tone: it really help to actually pronounce them properly (because we often don't dare doing them all the way), and will help you to memorise them.
_(btw, I'd be grateful for someone to suggest an appropriate gesture for the 2nd tone that is still my weak point...)_


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## DernierVirage

Dragonseed said:


> Hello el12345!
> 
> _btw, I'd be grateful for someone to suggest an appropriate gesture for the 2nd tone that is still my weak point...)_


 
I imagine that I am trying to look over a wall into a neighbour's garden, that gets my head moving the right way and the voice will follow . 

As it happens, the 2nd tone is always the hardest for me, especially when speaking quickly. It is also the hardest for me to distinguish in conversation.

BTW, the advice you give in your post is very good. Another way I use to remember the tones is to have in mind someone actually saying the phrase in a real context, so that the words become linked to the sound (rather than just to the tone mark) in your mind. But it is still, for me, the hardest part of learning the language.


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## kirsitn

palomnik said:


> To my mind it would almost be better if they didn't try to speak it at all.  Native speakers can accept and forgive foreigners making grammatical mistakes and even errors in politeness (admittedly, this latter is not as much a problem with Chinese), but total disregard of tones is almost a form of contempt.



Not necessarily. It might just be that they are tone deaf and simply don't hear any difference between the tones. (Apparently it's more common to have perfect pitch among people who speak tonal languages than among people who speak "toneless" languages.) 

I try to learn the tones along with the pronunciation, but I find it much harder to remember the tone than the other part of the pronunciation. So when I speak with the wrong tone it's not out of disrespect, but simply because my brain has trouble with remembering tones, just like some Chinese have trouble with distinguishing between l and r.


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## Dragonseed

DernierVirage said:


> Another way I use to remember the tones is to have in mind someone actually saying the phrase in a real context, so that the words become linked to the sound (rather than just to the tone mark) in your mind. But it is still, for me, the hardest part of learning the language.


 
This is when your "audio memory" starts to work with tones, and this is the part that took me 5 years: the ability to "re-play in your head" the word / sentence with the correct tone. Because neither French, my mother tongue nor English, that I speak fluently, are tonal languages, I guess my brains took that long to finally make the right connections...


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## Metasur1

It's fun to see how non-Chinese speakers discuss the idfficulties of how to learn the tone together with the words, something that has not come into my attention, being me a native Chinese speaker. It's good to know one's blind spot. 

If U R learning it with "Immersion" method, I think you would eventually find out that people speak with a certain difference of tones that U learnt on the textbooks. Actually there should be 5 tones "left' in Mandarin Chinese, including the "slight tone" 輕聲 which apparently is excluded in China's teaching system, though it's still spoken there. There were more tones in pre-Manchu Dynasty Chinese, which can still be heard in some dialects or languages influenced by Chinese.


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## DernierVirage

kirsitn said:


> Not necessarily. It might just be that they are tone deaf and simply don't hear any difference between the tones.


 
I know what you mean. I have a very bad sense of tone even with music and when I am listening to spoken Chinese, I have huge trouble distinguishing the 2nd and 3rd tones when spoken quickly. It's the same when I speak, these tones cause me big trouble, especially when one follows the other.

That is why I find the best way to learn is to have the "music" of a complete phrase firmly in your mind, if not you are trying to think of the tone while speaking, which rapidly becomes impossible!


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## DernierVirage

Metasur1 said:


> If U R learning it with "Immersion" method, I think you would eventually find out that people speak with a certain difference of tones that U learnt on the textbooks.


 
Interesting what you say here - even if tones are my problem area, I have in fact always been surprised by the absence of differences in tones when people in different parts of the country are speaking Putonghua. 

Or are you referring to the use of tones in local dialects?


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## Teach & Learn

Metasur1 said:


> Actually there should be 5 tones "left' in Mandarin Chinese, including the "slight tone" 輕聲 which apparently is excluded in China's teaching system, though it's still spoken there.



5 tones are taught since grade 1 or even kindergarten, so where on earth did you get the idea that is excluded in China's education system?


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## kirsitn

The pronunciation system taught to foreigners learning mandarin is usually pinyin, which has four tones + a neutral tone (what you call a slight tone). So I guess you could say that there are five tones, but the focus for most foreigners is on the four main tones since the neutral tone is normally the least difficult part.


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## DernierVirage

Reply to Teach & Learn :

You are 100% right.

As you say, the "neutral tone" is of course taught to us, but since it rarely poses a problem to students, everyone just refers to the "4 tones" as a matter of convenience.


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