Recognizing tones in multiple syllable sets (Beginner Chinese)

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Querneus
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Re: Recognizing tones in multiple syllable sets (Beginner Chinese)

Postby Querneus » Sun Oct 06, 2019 8:53 pm

I would recommend using Forvo:
https://forvo.com/languages/zh/

It has recordings for a massive growing number of common terms, names and phrases (currently 116000), made by random Mandarin speakers on the Internet. You can easily copy-and-paste the phrase you're listening to on an online Chinese parser like the one on MDBG.net ( https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=translate ) to know what the tones you're listening to are.

Just be aware that native speakers differ on how much they use the neutral (5th) tone, so sometimes you'll hear full tones where MDBG.net says there's a neutral tone or viceversa. Native speakers also differ on the exact vowel sounds used, e.g. in leosmith's link, the girl who did the recordings pronounces 北京 Běijīng with a strange -ei sound (it sounds rather like Cantonese -ai [ɐɪ̯]); some speakers also pronounce the -eng in peng/beng/meng/feng, as in 颱風 táifēng 'typhoon', like [ɔŋ] (something like English "awng" in a southern British accent) instead of [əŋ] (something like English "ung"). You'll regularly deal with these differences in real-world Mandarin regardless though.

(Also, MDBG.net, and all other parsers of Chinese for that matter, very occasionally fail to parse the phrase you feed them correctly, usually because of the "greedy-and-dumb" algorithms normally used that try to grab as many characters on the right as they can. You need to use your knowledge of Chinese to fix that in those rare occasions.)
Last edited by Querneus on Mon Oct 07, 2019 12:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Recognizing tones in multiple syllable sets (Beginner Chinese)

Postby leosmith » Sun Oct 06, 2019 11:23 pm

Ser wrote:the girl who did the recordings pronounces 北京 Běijīng with a strange -ei sound

You got me curious so I checked. Yeah, very non-standard imo. If I didn't know the word I would have guessed bai3jing1. Also notice that the ing in jing sounds almost like i+eng (two syllables). This is pretty common, but definitely a variation.
Last edited by leosmith on Mon Oct 07, 2019 4:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Recognizing tones in multiple syllable sets (Beginner Chinese)

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Oct 07, 2019 10:58 am

leosmith wrote:
Ser wrote:the girl who did the recordings pronounces 北京 Běijīng with a strange -ei sound

You got me curious so I checked. Yeah, very non-standard imo. If I didn't know the word I would have guessed bai3jing1. Also notice that the ing in jing sounds almost like i+eng. This is pretty common, but definitely a variation.


Somehow this got me thinking of vowel breaking English, e.g. as in Southern Drawl:
/æ/ → [æ(ə)]
/ɛ/ → [ɛ(ə)]
/ɪ/ → [ɪ(ə)]
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Re: Recognizing tones in multiple syllable sets (Beginner Chinese)

Postby mtokudome » Mon Oct 14, 2019 12:23 pm

I've used the Tone Pair Drills from Sinosplice before. It was pretty helpful:

https://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/tone-pair-drills
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