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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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.