[laurieg]

For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.

My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.

The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.

The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.

Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.

[ronyeh]

> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3.

I’m wondering if we can find good examples to teach the Mandarin tones. I think two or three syllable words are best because it illustrates the contour of the tones.

[thaumasiotes]

Pitch levels are important enough in English that native speakers spontaneously develop ways to write them down, even though the standard written language has no way to indicate them.

However, they operate at the level of the sentence rather than the individual word, which sets up a conflict if an English speaker wants to learn Chinese.

The most common uses of pitch in English are to annotate the grammatical structure of a sentence, making it clear which words belong together in larger phrases, and to mark yes/no questions.

English does have one clear example of lexical tone, the "I don't know" word, which is pronounced very similarly to the Mandarin pinyin éēě. (If pronounced with the mouth open. With the mouth closed, it would be more like 嗯嗯嗯 in the same 2-1-3 tone sequence.)