The first in a series [see all Zhonglish posts]. Part 1 — Tones
There’s really nothing fair about growing up as a native English speaker. The world wants to learn your language, no credit to you. But you, personally, get to reap all the benefits. You are invited to go to exotic places like oh, say, Latvia after you graduate from college. In the village of Vandzene, amidst the rolling hills and plentiful lakes of the Talsi region of Kurzeme, you get to “teach” English, although you have no teaching skills in anything, least of all English. You’re treated like a visiting dignitary, with clandestinely expedited access to everything. They’ve also pulled strings to pay you at the highest end of local wages, ironic in that, despite being grossly unfair to long-suffering, hard-working local teachers, it’s not enough to pay off an hour’s worth of interest on your student loans.
And BEST OF ALL, when your Latvian language skills reach the level of a butane-huffing 13-year-old who just got his teeth knocked out in a fight, you are paraded before the local media and adulated in the manner of a minor deity.
Not to single out Vandzene, really. The same story gets played out in Beijing, albeit with Chinese characteristics.
Thus today we present: Zhonglish! Revenge for every native Mandarin speaker and, by extension, for every non-native speaker of English around the world who has been blankly stared at, mocked, ignored, ostracized, discounted, looked down upon, trifled with, or made a fool of as they attempted legitimate communication in English.
(For the record, “hellooooooo” thrown in the direction of aforeign face does not fall under the category of “legitimate communication”)
Oh yeah, the post also includes some reasonably constructive analysis of the “All right, I know I sound like a foreigner speaking Mandarin, but why?” problem.
What is Zhonglish?
To quote the authoritative Urban Dictionary…
“The mangling, garbling, butchering, malapropriating and trashing of the Chinese language, both grammar and pronunciation, by native speakers of English.”
(Yeah, fine, I planted it there. Even better, it wasn’t until I’d hit submit that I realized the definition makes Zhonglish sound a lot more like a verb than a noun. And it should probably be capitalized. I tried to submit a correction, but turned that into a snafu too. Damn, there goes my career as a lexicographer.)
The history of Zhonglish goes back at least to 1963, according to commenter Mike Wright in a discussion of this post on naming the mangled Mandarin of non-native speakers. Although the term has its limitations — not applying to Mandarin speakers without English as their native language; referring more to “Chinese” than Mandarin — it has the advantages of being short and easy to pronounce, containing a Mandarin morpheme, and not being easily confused with Chinglish or other terms that already have well-established meanings. Commenter Brandon has even proposed a Mandarin translation of Zhonglish, zhòngyǔ 重语, which comes doubly recommended as being both ”mispronounced and a malapropism.”
But where to start?
The grammatical and phonological sins of foreigners attempting Mandarin are as multitudinous as Chinese characters. Today’s post begins by picking on two non-native speakers of Mandarin who had the cojones to put their Mandarin skills out on public display, i.e. on video on the internet. More specifically, we’re going to look at tone difficulties for these pretty advanced speakers.
Native English speakers learning Mandarin, and even teachers of Mandarin, tend to be divided about the importance of tone (see Chinese Forums here for some flavor of the discussion). In one camp you have the atonalists, who swear that it doesn’t really matter. Just speak fast. Or a more nuanced version is: don’t bother with the tones initially because they’ll come naturally as you learn the language.
This camp is known charitably as the Ostrich Camp.
The trouble is, as probably every learner of Mandarin knows in theory at least, tones in Mandarin are phonemic, meaning that two words which are otherwise exactly the same can have an entirely different meaning based solely on a difference in tone. This is an old topic and mostly too fundamental to be of interest in this post. I only mention it because I’m continually surprised to find otherwise rational people hanging out in the Ostrich Camp.
But even worse, tones don’t come naturally to adult learners (at least those with a non-tonal native language — any tonal-native-language-adult-Mandarin-learners out there?) Difficulties don’t fade away as language skills advance, either, because you start running into new kinds of problems. As you begin putting words together and then clumping them into phrases and sentences, tone continues to affect how you construct things. At the more advanced levels, English patterns of inflection seem to haunt the tonal aspirations of almost every speaker except, well, you-know-who. This isn’t to sound discouraging, it’s just to say that tones are worth focusing on from day one. Learning the tone of each syllable in every word should be as important as learning how to distinguish between zh and j. The effort will bear fruit not just in Street Mandarin 101, but even years later when your brain is turned off and you’re arguing from the gut with your coworker about whether the Olympics really was a watershed event for China.
Without further ado, let me introduce the first two brave souls to undergo the Beijing Sounds tonal treatment. They come to us courtesy of YouTube, where they gamely posted video of themselves giving speeches in Mandarin.
Confucius says: speak my name evenly
I was immediately drawn to “drumdude25″ by the contrast between his truly excellent pronunciation and some of the mean-spirited comments made by anonymous cowards below his YouTube posting.
In working on this post, I asked a number of native speakers (not just Beijingers this time) to listen to this particular clip. No one thought it possible that drumdude25 was a native speaker, but why? Well, they generally couldn’t really say and concluded that, well, it just didn’t sound like the way a native speaker would say it, although his pǔtōnghuà was really very good.
The intonation and pronunciation are good, no doubt. But saying it’s “not quite native speaker” isn’t enough. Is there anything specific to point to? There are a couple of recurring consonant issues, but the most consistent characteristic that marks him as a non-native speaker seems to be tone.In the clip below, you can hear a couple of misses at the beginning (zhīdao) and end (kǒngfūzǐ).
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我们知道大多数外国游客不会说普通话，
wǒmen zhīdao dàduōshù wàiguó yóukè búhuì shuō pǔtōnghuà
We know the majority of foreign guests can’t speak (standard) Mandarin
不过我一点儿也不为他们着急。孔夫子说。。。
búguò wǒ yīdiǎnr yě búwèi tāmen zháojí. kǒngfūzǐ shuō
But I don’t worry about them at all. Confucius says…
Going out on a limb, I’ll take a stab at why he might have missed these.
First, zhīdao has always been a tricky one for me personally, so I can empathize. Since 道 dào is often such a strong syllable by itself, maybe you just want to say the fourth tone. And a common first-fourth tone pair mistake seems to be starting the fourth tone at a higher pitch than the first was at, as if you’re getting set up high so that you can plunge down.
With kǒngfūzǐ , on the other hand, I’m suspecting interference with the English intonation, in which there’s no stress on the last syllable. But failing to provide equal stress for the last syllable in Mandarin just doesn’t work.
Get the full context and watch him speak on YouTube.
The emphasis challenge
Our second YouTuber (view here) does pretty well too — until, that is, he wants to stress the “if” in his sentence. At least, that’s my psychoanalysis for why he puts rúguò where he should have rúguǒ. This kind of thing happens to me anytime I switch my focus from the intonation of the sentence at hand to the overall stress that I’m trying to put on different parts of my speech. In the latter case, it seems like my English Intonational intuition rears its ugly head and wreaks havoc with my tones. But note that in this clip he does get the following 3rd-3rd combination right — sounds like ní yǐjīng – and those can be tough.
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如果你已经会英文
rúguǒ nǐ yǐjīng huì yīngwén
If you can already (speak) English…
[correction later Jan 28: pinyin of 我们知道 was wrong in original post, and first part of first transcript changed to "we"]
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Comments 18
the first guy’s chinese is good. i think the reason it is obvious he is not native is that he is speaking in way too high a voice. no chinese guy, especialy a beijing guy, talks like that. he just does not sound manly, or as a beijinger might say, he sounds 真他妈面。
Posted 28 Jan 2008 at 2:57 pm ¶On contestant number 1:
I think I’m on very dodgy ground, but the zhīdao seems to suffer from the zhī being too short, as much as anything else. Given your previous post on how the syllable often gets drastically shortened, that may seem a little strange. But I certainly did the same for a long time, despite my teacher’s best efforts, and probably still do.
As for Kǒngfūzǐ, could any native speakers tell us whether this is much less frequently used than simply Kǒngzǐ? Either way, I suspect this is not so much interference from English, as simply the knowledge that 子 is usually toneless (as in so many of the situations we discussed for 儿化）. I’ve heard plenty of SE Asians also forget to pronounce the 子 with a third tone. If I had the balls to stand up and expose myself to the same sort of scrutiny this guy has, I reckon there’s a damn good chance I’d make the same slip, and plenty more.
Incidentally, does he actually say 我们知道…rather than 我知道? It’s not entirely clear, but I suspect there’s something in there. And you seem to have 外国游客 as waiguoren ke. Please forgive my being pedantic.
Posted 28 Jan 2008 at 3:07 pm ¶Sima’s right about the “外国游客 as waiguoren ke”.
Just listened to both clips with my wife (Beijinger born and bred, she) and we agree on most of your analysis.She also says that with contestant number one there’s an odd gap between the da and duo in “大多数”- it should be like one word, but it sounds like “da duoshu”- and that there’s a bit too much stress on the “一点儿”.
Posted 28 Jan 2008 at 8:06 pm ¶lee: I agree that voice pitch is interesting. It’s been much discussed in Japanese speakers on Language Log (you can get started here). But I don’t think it can be a differentiator for native/non-native speaker by itself. You can imagine a Beijinger deciding, for whatever reason, to speak in a higher voice as you perceive this fellow to be doing. If you heard him do that, you might think it was odd, “unmanly”, or whatever — but you wouldn’t think he was not a native speaker of Mandarin.
Sima: I think you’re on to something with the “zhī being too short” comment. It probably should be literally shorter longer (oops) because the “dao” is supposed to be non-tonal/5th tone, and in “women zhi dao” the intonational stress ends up falling on the “zhi”. I think you’re probably more right than I was about the Confucius mispronunciation too. I made the correction to “外国游客” and, damn, you’re good to catch the “women not wo” mistake (he actually does a good job of pronouncing it in the clipped “wǒm” fashion often heard around Beijing.
Now about standing up and speaking in Mandarin and posting it on YouTube… I agree, both these guys have my admiration. My own Mandarin is pretty lousy. I only do this kind of thing because I spend a lot of time obsessively thinking about the details. I’m not picking on other people because I think I’m better than they are or, on the other hand, because I’m embarrassed about exposing my own Zhonglish to the world, I just felt like the available examples were more easily available and probably easier to be objective about.
chriswaugh_bj: nice point about the “odd gap between the da and duo in ‘大多数’.” There’s lots of sentence-level inflectional kinds of stuff that I want to be able to provide some helpful analysis on some day. My language skills are probably not quite yet there.
Posted 28 Jan 2008 at 10:25 pm ¶Sima made a good secondary observation that I missed on my earlier comment:
the zhīdao seems to suffer from the zhī being too short, as much as anything else. Given your previous post on how the syllable often gets drastically shortened, that may seem a little strange.
Emphasis added. He’s referring to the zh-dropping post. I didn’t think about it before, but of course if you say “wǒ zhīdao” the zh never gets dropped (as far as I know). In fact, the zhī has the overall stress of the sentence. But the zh in bùzhīdao often gets dropped. This pattern actually makes it a lot easier to distinguish between the two phrases in casual speech.
Posted 29 Jan 2008 at 7:39 am ¶syz: I’m not sure about the whole notion of stress here. I find I’m so conditioned to think in terms of English stress, it’s very hard to escape. At some point during my first year in China, I came to the conclusion that I could use stress, in the English sense, to help. The plan was: 2nd & 4th tones ’stressed’, others not. Given that some part of our perception of stress in English is connected to tonal movements, this seemed like a good plan. And it really helped…for a while. Of course, it doesn’t really work, but it allowed me to make sense of things in my own way, and start building sentences that some people seemed to understand. It obviously caused other problems, like terribly short 1st tones and, in the end, became more hindrance than help.
Though I take your point about a native speaking in a high voice still sounding like a native, lee’s point on the pitch has some merit. I think raising ones pitch can be an effective coping strategy for some learners. My feeling is that it makes the speaker much more aware of his tones, and maybe helps the listener a little too. It does of course sound unnatural.
Though this guy seems to be beyond the level he should need to use such a strategy, he is in a pretty stressful situation. He also seems extremely well rehearsed, and it would be interesting to know how much he was coached.
I wonder whether Mrs Waugh’s observation on 大多数 indicates an undue stress on 大, perhaps caused by a feeling that this is necessary to show that it’s not just a majority, but a big majority.
btw, I think it’s an inspired post, and agree it’s a great source. Would be interesting if the guy dropped by to tell us about it. I’d love to know how long he’d been studying for, where etc. Perhaps you could leave an invitation on his youtube page.
Posted 29 Jan 2008 at 1:39 pm ¶Hi Rui: really glad you spoke up. I’ve always been curious about the tonal-to-tonal native language transfer. I’d love to know if it has some general benefit — i.e. generally makes learning the pronunciation of Mandarin easier, in your case. But now that I think about it, I suppose there’s way too much individual variation in ability to be able to say anything definitive.
It would be kind of fun (albeit unscientific and inconclusive) to compare your Mandarin pronunciation to your (non-tonal-language native speaker) classmates. If y’all feel inspired to exchange emails with some sound files, I could promise not to post any of it to the www without your permission :^) Email is bjsheng *at* gmail dot com
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 8:26 pm ¶Revisiting some of your old entries, I am finally getting around to commenting.
While doing research for my master’s thesis, I came across at least one study that showed perhaps a slight (but not definite) advantage to adult learners of tonal languages when learning Mandarin.
(If you’re really serious, e-mail me and I could probably dig up the reference for you.)
Posted 02 Aug 2008 at 6:54 am ¶After listening at length to both guys speak Mandarin (including watching their posts on You Tube) I think the overall problem is not necessarily with the tones, but with the sound in general. We have a certain way of speaking in English that doesn’t translate well to Chinese. These things include nasalizing alot of vowel sounds, giving stress to certain words that wouldn’t be stressed in Mandarin, destressing certain words and sylables that would normally be not be stressed in Mandarin, an general “soft, American” sound, pauses that are more appropriate for English rather than Mandarin, the speed at which the language is delivered, and let’s not forget, the improper use of, or lacking in use of Particles (such as Ba, Bei, A, O).
I’ve found that in my own Mandarin one of my weakest points is my use of 语气助词 Particles that help give your language an emotional context.
I once met a Chinese woman who spoke wonderful English with very little Chinese accent, but she ended nearly every sentence with “A” or “Ha”. It was so ingrained in her nature, just as it’s so ingrained in our nature to stress certain words to help convey our emotions in English that we seem to forget how to properly use our Particles.
Sure 吗 (Ma) is easy, that’s how you ask a question, but what about 嘛 (Ma)? It’s so elusive, and hard to understand when to use it and when not to. The answer to how we should let these words add color and feeling to our language is tremendously elusive.
Posted 17 Aug 2008 at 4:38 am ¶Xiao Hu — I really like the idea of the particles in Zhonglish. Agreed: very subtle and difficult to teach and incorporate correctly. I can’t come within a mile myself. But I did notice talking the other day to a woman in my company, native English speaker, that she has incorporated the ǹg (like “uh-huh”) agreement into her English conversations! Not quite the same, but evidence of how unconscious these things can be.
Posted 27 Aug 2008 at 6:12 pm ¶Great call about zhi1dao vs zhi1dao4 (sorry no pinyin). There’s a real temptation, certainly on my part at least, to ignore the “neutral” tone due to its relative elusiveness. What i find most mysterious is the way the “neutral” tone actually (sure i’ll be corrected if wrong) occupies a range of positions determined in relation to the previous syllable. At my level i’ve gotten no further than establishing that the neutral tone must generally be said higher in pitch than a preceding 3rd (好的), and lower in pitch than preceding 1st and 2nd tones, （”妈妈”, “来了”). In relation to the 4th tone, i’ve yet to identify a pattern: think 对啊 (as in that interjection-with-a-touch-of-”i already know” while not expecting the duifang to pause or stop talking…here i hear the 啊 slightly above the tail end of 对)， vs 不用啦 and 够吗 vs 够了.
On that score, i sometimes encounter foreigners who complain of the Chinese “refusing” to understand them, and to them i’ve been known to preach the gospel of 3 tones – high (1 & 4), low (3 & neutral) and rising. Of course this, like me, is rather a long way from native/non-native, but i thought in this way for my first year or so in China and can honestly say that i never ever had a problem with Chinese people understanding me.
Posted 17 Oct 2008 at 10:24 pm ¶Hi chubb: great point about systematic variability of the neutral tone (wow that sounds wonky). And there’s something false-friendish about calling it “neutral”, a term that tries to seduce you into thinking “oh, I can just say it however I want and it will be fine.” If I remember, I will check out what Chao’s Grammar (a recently acquired distraction) has to say. I think I remember something insightful.
On the idea of Zhonglish speakers learning it: the neutral tone is something that I think varies a lot from region to region, even deep within Mandarin country. Perhaps because of this, dictionaries often disagree. At least that’s my perception. The one that I’ve found most consistently “accurate” (if it’s worthy of being called accurate — I mean that it conforms to the habits of my Beijinger informants) is the ABC.
Posted 17 Oct 2008 at 10:48 pm ¶syz and chubb,
I think there are maybe three different considerations needed for pinning the ‘neutral’ tone…
But first, the usual description of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th tones lets us down here. It seems more helpful to me to use the 1-5 scale, which I believe Chao uses (syz can confirm). In this system, the tone of a given syllable is represented on a pitch scale where 1 is low and 5 is high, so the basic reading of a single syllable would be treated thus:
1st tone: 55 (i.e. high-high)
2nd tone: 35
3rd tone: 214 (in practice, the rise to 4 is rarely completed – 211 is more likely)
4th tone: 51
This could really do with a groovy little diagram, but I’m not that clever…
Oh, the diagram here may help:
http://tinyurl.com/68ahhr
Using this system, we can describe some familiar expressions:
妈妈 (māma) 55 2
爷爷 (yéye) 35 3
姐姐 (jiějie) 21 4
爸爸 (bàba) 51 1
In each case we can see that on the second syllable, there is a fall to the ‘neutral’ syllable, except in the case of 姐姐 – just as chubb explains.
It’s easy to see how many of us get into our heads that the 道 in zhīdao (55 2) seem to be zhīdào (55 51).
So, the three suggestions for consideration:
1) In each case, the preceding tone dictates the pitch of the ‘neutral’ tone. This seems to be largely true, and even though the four examples above are all reduplications, I think it still applies generally.
2) Some care my be needed with respect to the ‘original’ tone of the ‘neutral’ tone syllable. I think that generally this is overridden by 1), above, but wouldn’t like to wholly discount it. My feeling is that not all ‘words’ will fit this pattern. It maybe that the relationship between the characters and their status as a ‘word’ comes into play.
3) There are certainly effects at the phrase or sentence level. I think chubb has hinted at this with some of his examples.
Surely this is all too messy to actually be ‘taught’…one simply needs massive exposure to day-to-day ‘real-life’ Mandarin conversation. It certainly needn’t be explicitly taught in the early stages of a Mandarin course for foreigners, but I do wonder about the description given of the 3rd tone to learners.
Does anyone recall being made aware of the relatively high neutral tone following a third tone, or the general lack of a rise on the third tone, in the early stages of formal study? Did it/might it have help(ed)?
Posted 18 Oct 2008 at 10:00 am ¶On the subject of 知道: I don’t think simply pronouncing the 道 in all its fourth-tone glory is enough to reveal oneself as a non-native speaker. It is only enough to reveal oneself as a non-northern speaker. My wife is from Taiwan and she absolutely pronounces the 道 with a full falling tone, the same as when she says 到了 or 找不到.
In my observation, Mandarin speakers from Taiwan and neighboring areas seem to make sparing use of the neutral tone compared to northerners; when I listen specifically to the tones of my wife and her Taiwanese friends, it’s hard to pick out any neutral tones except on repeated syllables (爷爷, 妹妹, etc.) and particles like 了 and 吧. And yet no Beijinger would claim she and her friends don’t sound like native speakers. On the other hand, they are very consistent about it; if you sometimes use Beijingish neutral tones and sometimes not (especially if it’s in the space of a single sentence!) that’ll probably be a dead giveaway.
I think the lack/misuse of particles is a key point here. Through years of mimicry I think I have the proper use of 啊 and 吧 more or less down, but 嘛 is still a mystery to me. There also seems to be some regional variance in particle usage, which means there is no single “correct” style for us poor laowai to learn. But reading this discussion makes me realize I should be paying more attention to those little pseudo-words when I listen to native speakers.
Posted 19 Feb 2009 at 4:18 pm ¶嘛 and 么 are even mysteries to themselves. The reason you don’t know them and can’t learn them is they don’t follow rigid patters and they vary by region immensely. Not only the sound, but the pitch, and it’s use vary with region and person. The reason you can’t learn them is the same reason you can’t teach them, because no one can write you a set of rules to follow or even good general guidelines. Furthermore, time bears that out in contrast to other things that you couldn’t have learned by any means other than unconsciously absorbing them, particles defy absorption and understanding to a stunning degree. But, not to worry, particles aren’t going to be the thing that sets you out as a non-native speaker. And picking out a non-native speaker for china, in my opinion, seems many worlds harder than picking out an american accent, but even that is hard many times. With American english you can always almost find a problem with rhythm, stress, speed, or vowel/consonants being slightly off in some cases. The range for american is really narrow for the most part. There’s a lot of bad speakers of mandarin (and less ‘bad’ speakers of english in my opinion) so one is forced to grasp at strange things. Like, they’ll eliminate certain mistakes if they think some region’s people have some trait when they speak, even though it sounds ‘off’. I’m done here.
Posted 19 Feb 2009 at 10:47 pm ¶@Steve, glad you found your way back to this post. Re-reading, I find there’s a lot to disagree with. Your point about dao4 is right on — not at all a good marker of Zhonglish by itself (I’ve read about the existence of “Mandarin with no neutral tone” but have no experience with it myself). I guess you could make an argument about consistency, e.g. if he said zhi1dao4 in one place and zhi1dao5 in another — but I didn’t do anything that clever.
Listening now with fresh ears, I also think the quality that sticks out the most has to do with the vowels. But that kind of analysis will have to wait for a new post.
Agree with both you and hsknotes that 嘛 is a mess of idiosyncratic variation. I mark myself as an FOB Zhonglish speaker by just skipping it most of the time.
Posted 20 Feb 2009 at 10:06 am ¶Haha, holy shit!
I read this post all the way through, all the comments, and then finally turned on my VPN (greets from Guilin) and the guy in the video is my good friend Christian from college, the guy who inspired me to work hard on my own Mandarin!
Fucking brilliant!
Christian worked his ass off, and I’m glad to see he’s done well for himself.
Posted 24 Nov 2009 at 1:54 am ¶A friend from college — that’s a random closed loop. If you ever mention the post to him tell him it’s a damn solid accent.
Posted 24 Nov 2009 at 7:19 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 2
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