{"id":11346,"date":"2019-10-22T20:51:27","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T18:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=11346"},"modified":"2019-10-22T21:33:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T19:33:00","slug":"two-types-of-pronunciation-problems-and-what-to-do-about-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/two-types-of-pronunciation-problems-and-what-to-do-about-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Two types of pronunciation problems and what to do about them"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s safe to say that pronunciation is an overlooked area of learning Chinese. Typically, pronunciation is covered in the first few weeks or sometimes just the first few days of a beginner course. After that, what happens depends on how quickly students learn the tones, initials and finals. And the teacher, of course.<\/p>\n

Students who are good at mimicking and learn quickly are often ignored (because they are already doing better than average).<\/p>\n

Students who are slower to learn are often ignored too after a while (because the teacher gives up or doesn’t have time for them). What remains is sporadic feedback for the students in the middle.<\/p>\n

Two types of beginner pronunciation problems<\/h3>\n

In this article, I’m not going to talk about specific problems with pronunciation, but rather two entirely different types of problems. These often become mixed up, not only by students, but sometimes also by teachers. This makes it significantly harder to learn pronunciation, so my goal here is to make sure you know the difference and what to do in each case.<\/p>\n

Here are the two problems put briefly:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Not being able to produce the correct sound\u00a0<\/strong>–\u00a0<\/strong>This is the type of problem that most people will think of when they think of problems with pronunciation. You already know that this is not the only type because of the title and introduction of this article, but many people act as if they believe that this is the only type of pronunciation problem. An example would be the sound that in Pinyin is written \u00fc<\/em>, which is actually not that hard to pronounce, but causes some problems for native speakers of English since there is no similar sound in that language (but there is in French, German and Swedish, for example).<\/li>\n
  2. Not being able to correctly link the spoken sound with the written form of that sound –\u00a0<\/strong>This means either not being able spell the correct sound using Pinyin (in a listening test) or not being able to recall which sound in the spoken language is associated with a certain Pinyin spelling (in a speaking test). Of course, never having learnt how Pinyin works would be an even bigger problems, since it’s impossible to recall something you haven’t learnt.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Since the first type of problem is what most other resources focusing on pronunciation deal with, I will not discuss it further here. There is no simple, blanket solution to learn to pronounce new sounds correctly, but I suggest you start by listening closely and then mimicking as much as you can<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Even though I have no empiric data to back this up and base this only on my own experience teaching beginners, not being able to connect sound and written symbols actually causes more bad pronunciation for beginners than the tricky sounds do, at least for beginners.<\/p>\n

    Learning spoken sounds through written symbols<\/h3>\n

    The problem of linking spoken sounds and written symbols is often the result of somewhat artificial classroom or online learning. What I mean is that if all language learning happened in natural conversations with native speakers, we wouldn’t have students who think that the u\u00a0<\/em>in xu <\/em>and the\u00a0u <\/em>in shu<\/em> represent the same sound. This is very obvious if you only listen to the spoken language (in fact, you’d have no reason to think they are the same), but impossible to know if you’re not familiar with Pinyin orthography (since they do look identical).<\/p>\n

    Thus, in an ideal world, students would have the time and resources to learn pronunciation without written support, relying on spoken language only, and only then learn how to write the sounds.<\/p>\n

    However, that is impractical as you can not take notes, search for resources online and will have to rely heavily on help from a real human, which is going to be very expensive. Few resources are easy and convenient to use in audio-only mode.<\/p>\n

    So, we’re stuck with students learning pronunciation and Pinyin at the same time. This has both good and bad, depending on how you look at it:<\/p>\n