Even though only little more than a month has passed since the previous report, enough has happened to motivate a new article. The previous post dealt with my Chinese ability in general terms and also more specifically about listening ability. I concluded that my ability in general is probably good enough to survive the master’s degree program I’m currently enrolled in. I also lamented the fact that spoken Chinese is much more context-based than any other language I’ve studied, which makes listening something of a problem sometimes. This time I will talk about pronunciation.
Attitude and pronunciation
I regularly ask people I speak with to offer suggestions for how to improve my pronunciation and I have done so since I first started learning. Often, these questions are met by surprise: “Why do you want to improve your pronunciation, it’s already quite good!” The answer is complex and something I plan to write more about later on Hacking Chinese, but it’s precisely because I have this attitude that I have managed to acquire the pronunciation I have now. If I were content with being better than the average foreigner, I could have stopped focusing on pronunciation years ago. The road to good pronunciation is very long and being complacent certainly doesn’t help. Thus, I still think I need to improve and that’s what this article is be about.
A question of tones
In general, I think my pronunciation of initials, medials and finals is pretty good. I don’t want to say that it’s perfect, but it’s definitely good enough for teaching Chinese to students. Even though I’ve tried, I haven’t found any serious problems in this area for a couple of years, so I don’t think this is something I need to improve much.
Tones are different, though. I don’t think I have much problems when pronouncing them individually or in isolated words, but as soon as words are connected into longer sentences and intonation starts being important, I make several small but significant mistakes. During this semester, I’ve asked a number of people to pay attention to my pronunciation (thanks to those who have helped, you know who you are). I have also recorded my own speaking to analyse myself. The native speakers may have used different words to describe these problems, but in essence, they mostly agree on the below analysis. I do, too.
Second tone, fourth tone and pitch range
In general, my tones are correct insofar as the direction is correct (second tone rises, fourth tone falls), but the distinction isn’t clear enough. Occasionally, both these tones are incomplete and usually too low. There are some other, minor problems, but I would say the main problem is pitch range. Since I seem to speak Chinese with a deeper voice than I speak English or Swedish, the pitch range becomes too narrow.
The suggested solution looks as follows:
- Prolong second tones. Since the direction is already correct, making the tone longer will ensure that it goes high enough as well. Once I’m used to that, it should be easier to keep the tone height while decreasing the time it takes to get there. Right now it feels a bit uncomfortable, but I’ve checked with a few people and they think the new, higher version sounds better.
- Modifying the onset of the fourth tone. Right now, the general contour is correct (falling), but the fall is a bit abrupt. If I want to speak clearly to allow others to master tones as will, I should mark the beginning of the fourth tone better. See the graphs below.
- Paying more attention to the third tone. In theory and most of the time when I speak, I pronounce it correctly, but I sometimes slip. This is probably best remedied through more practice. My best performance here is good enough, so it’s mostly a matter of making sure my normal performance approaches my best performance.

The T4 to the left is from a tone reference chart and is a model T4 (female speaker, which explains the higher pitch in general). The T4 to the right is my own normal T4. Both pitch contours were drawn using Praat. Note that I lack the plateau in the onset (red ellipse).
Proposed line of attack
Changing pronunciation in general is hard, changing pitch range when you speak is several magnitudes harder. People tend to identify themselves with their own voices, so changing something as basic as pitch range requires time and courage. I’ll simply have to accept that this will take some work and time. I don’t doubt that it can be done, though. my plan is roughly as follows, although it isn’t really serial (I won’t wait until step one is entirely completed before attempting step two and so on).
- Individual syllables
- Disyllabic words
- Sentences
- Natural speech
The goal is to practice each step until it feels natural. Changing natural speech will be very hard indeed, so I’ll try to build up to it slowly, making sure I’ve implemented the above changes in a controlled environment. I’ll have several native speakers helping me, so I’m sure I will be just fine.
Benchmarking
Before I started analysing the problem(s) in detail, I did a recording with me reading an article. It’s roughly three minutes long and even if it isn’t the best I can do (I speak much better than I read), I still think it’s fairly representative of my pronunciation in general. I’ll leave that article alone for at least a month or two until I feel that I have actually achieved something. Then I’ll read it again and see if I have really achieved something or not. I used Praat to check some passages of that article, but tones in connected speech are so complex that I think that seeing the pitch contour doesn’t help much. In this case, I’ll rely on competent native speakers instead.
Please help
Changing pronunciation like this is difficult in many ways, but one of the hardest parts is staying focused. Naturally, I can’t spend all my energy thinking about tones, because that will make communication awkward. However, it would be very nice indeed if people who speak with me regularly remind me of this. As you well know, I don’t mind being corrected, indeed, it’s an essential part of learning. With your help, I should be able to correct these problems!
This proficiency report won’t actually be a traditional proficiency report, but since it deals with my Chinese learning in much the same way, I’m going to put this among the rest of the progress reports to make things more coherent. If you want to read an update of my Chinese studies, you could look at the post from September last year. I have of course improved since then, but not in any significant way that merits a new progress report. Instead, this time I want to talk about this spring and what I intend to do. For once, I have lots of time on my hands and I need to invest it wisely. Before I start going into details, let us remind ourselves of my overall goal at the moment:
Overall learning goal: I want to take my Chinese to a level where I can manage an MA in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, taught in Chinese for Chinese-speaking students. Without dying. This mostly involves being able to swallow academic literature at a reasonable pace, being able to understand fast-paced, formal spoken Chinese, as well as being able to write formal Chinese with more fluency. If things go according to my plans, I might be required to do this starting from September 2012, so this is the deadline for most of the goals mentioned here.
What I’m going to do below is detail in fairly specific terms what I’m going to do this spring in order to achieve the above-mentioned goal. As usual, I’ve divided the goals and tasks into the four standard categories of speaking, listening, reading and writing. I have also added vocabulary.
Please note: These are my long-term goals. They aren’t the goals I will work towards on a daily basis. I won’t sit down thinking that now I’m going to practise listening for two hours. It doesn’t work like that. Long-term goals are broken down into manageable chunks and short-term goals, but I won’t discuss them because it would take too much time. Read more about goals here. All tasks mention below overlap if possible, so spending X hours reading book Y will also count against the read-a-total-number-of-Z-hours goal.
Please also note: This article is updated regularly to show how things are going. I find this to be much more efficient than copying the goals and commenting on them for each month. Thus, the numbers here are typically update once a month and linked to from the summary for that month. Here are the summaries published so far:
懸樑刺股 – This Chinese idiom (成語) means “to study diligently”, but how diligently? If translated literally, it means to tie one’s hair to the rafters (so as to not fall asleep) and jab one’s thigh (in order to stay awake). In this way, the student can study more. Perhaps I won’t study that diligently, but I still like the story.
Speaking
In general, I don’t feel that speaking is a big problem. That doesn’t mean that I have nothing to learn and that my pronunciation is perfect, it just means that I think that I could survive with the language level I have now. Sure, I would probably need to adjust and start using more formal language, but I feel that this is very difficult to practise on my own. Also, this problem is connected to writing, since focusing on improving writing will at least give me the tools to speak more formally as well. Once I start a master’s degree program, I’m sure I can convert my writing skill into more formal speaking. I’m not saying that it will be easy, but I do think it’s the least of my problems right now. Let’s move on to more interesting areas.
Tasks to complete before September 1st:
Listening
I’m convinced I need both quantity and quality when it comes to improving listening ability. I’ve been focusing on quantity a lot during the autumn and it worked out fairly well. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of radio, news broadcasts and podcasts. I’m not going to go into why I think this kind of aural immersion is essential, I’ll just say that I intend to continue doing it. Any material is good, as long as I can understand what’s being said (which is true for 95% of all the material I’ve found so far, so this s not a problem).
Quality has been sadly lacking, however. What I mean with quality is active listening where I spend time to really understand what’s being said and weed out any problems. I have several ideas on how to go about doing this, but here is one: I will pick a news broadcast (perhaps 10 minutes long), then I will try to transcribe what’s being said, then correct/complete my transcription with the official one. After that, I’ll go through the text in search for new words, interesting patterns and so on. Then I will add the news broadcast to a special review queue, which I will listen through occasionally. In general, I want to spend more time on fewer minutes of audio, delving deeper instead of just aiming for quantity.
Tasks to complete before September 1st:
Writing
My main focus (compared to what I’ve done earlier, not in absolute terms) over the coming seven months should be writing. Being able to make myself understood in Chinese is simply not good enough, I need to be able to express myself correctly as well. This require s a awful lot of practise, including analysing my own mistakes and listening to other people’s advice. In my experience, writing an article might take an hour, but correcting it and understanding why the corrections were made might take three times as long. As for listening, however, I think there is call for both quantity and quality.
Another problem I need to fix is that my handwriting isn’t good enough. I need to learn this for many reasons, but the fact that I want to teach Chinese should be enough. There might also be tests, reports and so on during a master’s degree program that requires handwriting. Don’t get me wrong here ,though, it’s not as if I can’t write Chinese by hand, it’s just that I’m not good enough. I’m too slow, need to think too much and have forgotten how to write some characters.
Tasks to complete before September 1st:
Reading
I’ve already said that writing should be the main focus, but reading comes a close second. Reading is a less direct way to improve writing, but is still essential. Also, reading in itself is necessary because I need to be able to read texts on topics such as grammar, phonology or syntax without having to look up one word every sentence. I have read texts on these topics before, but not close to the amount I need. Just as for the other areas, reading is also about quantity and quality. I need to read more, regardless what I read, and I need to need more relevant literature in-depth, with 100% comprehension as the goal. Doing this, I will of course also pick up the vocabulary I need, but more about this later.
In the following list, “read” means just read through and “study” means read, understand and take notes.
Tasks to complete before September 1st:
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the glue that connects all the above parts. I currently have more than 20 000 active cards in my Anki deck, so pure volume is not my main problem. I need to focus on learning specialised words in areas I will need (anything related to language study) and I also need to start sorting out near synonyms and word usage.
Tasks to complete before September 1st:
Meta and miscellaneous
This category is naturally more difficult to discuss, but I do think I need to learn more about Chinese. Much of this will come from books I have already included above, so I won’t mention them again. However, I do think that I need to learn more about second language acquisition in general, which is probably best done in English. I also have some other more or less ambitious projects going which can’t be sorted in any of the above categories.
Tasks to complete before September 1st:
A plea for help
This is an ambitious undertaking. I estimate that it will take about eight hours daily to complete everything on this list. Every day, including weekends. This means that any kind of longer break will severely increase the workload. Still, I’m not going to do much else during this semester (apart from taking some credits in Chinese, but I think those will be largely incorporated into tasks already mentioned in this post), so it’s definitely possible. Leaving one day each week for things not related to studying, I’ll have 9+ hours workdays, which is quite a lot, but not impossible.
The major problem is that this is my own time and the only one keeping track of it is me. Nine hours a day might not sound like much if you spend that time at work everyday, but this is different. Very different. Therefore, I need your help. I don’t need any encouragement right now, because I’ve just started, but I need people to keep in touch, ask questions and read my updates. Cheering on is welcome at any moment. If you have any suggestions for what I should study you’re more than welcome to leave a comment. Likewise, if you have ideas on how to practise something I’ve written here, do let me know. Thank you!
Edit 1: Added goal: Meta: Build up a queue of at least 20 articles ready for publication on Hacking Chinese (these are of course in addition to the normal one article/week).
Edit 2: Added goal: Meta: Write Hacking Chinese book.
Edit 3: Reduced all “X hours” goals with 25% to allow for more time on the meta/misc category.
Edit 4: Changed “transcribe 100 news items” to “transcribe 5 hours of formal Chinese”.
Edit 5: Cancelled the goal “Update twitter account daily in Chinese (everyday language)”.
Edit 6: Cancelled “Take the TOCFL test again, even though I have passed it”