This tip assumes you know what tones are, if you don’t Google – “tonal languages”
Tones, it is all about the tones.
The most important part of learning a tonal language is getting the tones and combinations of tones exactly right.
An intelligent native English speaker with some exposure to different languages can pronounce the phonetics better than a Chinese person who learned a dialect first then learned Mandarin. Southern Chinese have a really hard time saying shi, they always say si. One of the things that makes Chinese hard to learn is that few people actually speak standard Chinese. (Chinese … is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language)
You cannot learn to speak Chinese without tones. Speaking toneless Chinese is painful to the ear and incomprehensible. It is similar to speaking English like this – “You cwnnot stwrt to lewrn to spewk ChLnese wLth out tones. SpewkLng toneless ChLnese Ls pwLnful to the ewr. There Ls nothLng more wnnoyLng thwn someone spewkLng ChLnese wLthout the tones… “
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Tones change meanings. Classic example “ma”
ma1 = Mother; ma2 = rope; ma3 = horse; ma4 = scold
Do you want to talk like this – this it the horse that gave birth to me. This is my step-rope she married my father last year. – ?
How to get the tones right?
Practice saying any word in tonal pairs – ma is fine you already know how to pronounce that – ma like mama/mother.
1-1,1-2,1-3,1-4 /2-1,2-2,2-3,2-4 / 3-1,3-2,3-3,3-4 / 4-1,4-2,4-3,4-4
Practicing these tone combinations is absolutely essential to speaking Chinese like a native.
Start from day 1 if you want to be intelligible.
Enjoy!
