Funny Story With Chinese and Tones
Seeing the Tones of Standard mandarin Chinese with Praat
When you beginning get-go studying Chinese, you are introduced to Mandarin'due south iv primary tones. Y'all are invariably shown some variation of the chart on the right. You may have wondered where these lines came from. Are they just some artist'due south conception of how the tones audio that everyone ended up agreeing on? No, really, they're tone contours, the outcome of linguistic research into the pitch profile of the diverse tones of Standard mandarin Chinese.
At this point, your average language pupil is going, "oh, right, pitch contour. Linguisticky mumbo jumbo. Whatever." He then decides to accept the nautical chart, no matter how helpful or useless he happens to find it, and move on. The reality, nonetheless, is that pitch contour is incredibly easy to see, thanks to a piece of free linguistic software called Praat. I'm going to show y'all how to practise this yourself in a few piece of cake steps so that you lot can stop accepting this "tone contour" stuff on faith solitary.
Using Praat to See the Tones of Mandarin Chinese
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Download Praat. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and all kinds of platforms. Very geek friendly.
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Open Praat. The current version is 5.0.04, so that's the one I'll be using in all my screenshots. When you open up Praat, you see two windows like this:
OK, possibly not the near user-friendly interface in the earth, but don't worry. Information technology's not hard.
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Y'all run into two Praat windows open. We're just going to ignore that one on the correct, because nosotros're non going to utilize it. In the left window, click on "Read" in the meridian bill of fare, then select "Read from file…".
From here y'all can open various sound files, such every bit .WAV files or even .MP3 files. To continue things elementary, though, I want to open a file which contains simply one spoken Mandarin syllable. For this, I can plow to my Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills. In the downloadable file, there'southward a directory called "1-Char Adj" which has several monosyllabic word examples for each of Mandarin'southward four principal tones. (Considering the tone drills are freely bachelor for download, you tin reproduce this exact example, if yous wish.)
I choose the fourth-tone word "dà" (meaning "big") and open up information technology. It appears in the window:
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Now "Audio da4" should be highlighted in blue. If it isn't, click on information technology. Select "Edit" from the menu at the right:
(OK, now I'grand taking this actually ho-hum for those of you that might exist intimidated by a piece of "linguistic software," but I should point out that all we've done so far, really, is (1) open up Praaat, (2) open up an audio file, (iii) click on edit.)
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This will bring upwards a new window that looks like this:
OK, at present we run across ii boxes. The i on the superlative is a waveform. The 1 on the bottom is a spectrogram, which is besides where the pitch contour will be displayed. The pitch contour is the ane we're interested in.
Why is information technology all scrunched up on the left, though? That's because the entire file is displayed in the window, and with the exception of the very beginning, almost of the file is silence. So permit's zoom in on what we're interested in. Click and elevate in the window to select the blackish parts on the left. They should be highlighted in pink. Now plow your attention to the iv little buttons in the bottom left corner of the window labeled "all," "in," "out," and "sel." These are really zoom options, which stand for "show all," "zoom in," "zoom out," and "zoom in on selection." So click on "sel" now. You may desire to resize the window at this indicate to arrive more square. You lot should see something like this:
At present the pitch contour should be quite obvious, a blue line. (The ghostly grayish background is the spectogram. We won't be paying much attention to information technology, but we'll appreciate it making the image look cooler).
Are you surprised? There's a funny break in it, but yous can clearly see the falling pitch contour that we would wait for the fourth tone word "dà."
That's it! Yous can echo this method for as many words as you want to. Y'all can examine the pitch contours of native speakers' speech, and you tin can fifty-fifty record yourself and look at the pitch contour of your own spoken language.
On that note, though, I had better point a few other things out.
Some complications
First, permit's look at the pitch contours of all four Mandarin tones. From at present on nosotros'll exist ignoring the waveform in the top box in both my explanations and screenshots, and I'll add pinyin to the graphics to make the sounds easier to identify. Here'southward a sampling (again, taken from my tone drills):
Many of you are thinking, wow, they actually practise look similar the chart! But then the critics speak up: why isn't showtime tone totally level? It kind of has an arc to it. Shouldn't third tone rise more than at the terminate? And what is with that break in 4th tone?
Well, the truth is that the nautical chart I opened with is an idealized version of the tone contours. The real thing is actually quite a bit messier. To illustrate my signal further, I'll give y'all the pitch contours of some disyllabic Standard mandarin chunks:
So… why the dip in 2d tone "bú" of "bú cuò"? Why don't the second tones "liú" and "xíng" ascent to the same peak, if they're both second tones? In "jiǎohuá" why doesn't the tertiary tone ascension more and why does the 2nd tone seem to dip? Is there a problem with the source data?
No, in that location isn't a trouble with the source data. Theoretically, yous should be able to re-record the words again and again until the pitch contours look how you lot want them to. But if you listen to the audio data we used, it sounds fine. And then what gives?
My point is non to confuse you. There are answers to all these questions. But when y'all get downward to the pitch contour of individual words spoken past private people, the state of affairs is, in reality, incredibly complex, and a nice little tone diagram doesn't even begin to explain it all.
Determination
Then what are you lot supposed to take away from all this? Well, first, I hope you did encounter that in general, the tones of Mandarin do follow the trends depicted in the basic tone diagram. I'k a visual learner, and I really struggled with the tones, and so I feel similar information technology helped me to be able to connect the audio data with a visual representation somehow. And it's a whole lot easier to do than I first suspected.
2nd, I hope you understand that if you're struggling with tones, y'all really shouldn't beat yourself up over it. The reality of tones in action is incredibly complex, and the basic tone chart is a gross oversimplification. The good news is that your brain is already fully equipped to figure out the existent bargain, and the bones tone nautical chart is the only starting point you lot really need.
Lastly, If you thought this was going to be some kind of method which allows you to mimic the tones of native speakers through visual pitch profile comparisons, I'm sorry to tell y'all that I think that'southward a very bad idea. Pitch contours "in the wild" aren't consistent enough for that. It'southward the kind of thought that might appeal to a programmer or a perfectionist, merely in reality, that kind of practice isn't likely to help you communicate amend in Chinese.
John Pasden
John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.
Source: https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/01/21/seeing-the-tones-of-mandarin-chinese-with-praat