English With Chinese Tones

nospam@example.com (Mark Cole) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:06:06 -0500

Ping was born in Taiwan and has lived just over half her life in the United States. I was born in Wisconsin and spent most of my growing-up years in Ecuador, South America. So we cover three out of four quadrants of the globe between us. English is a second language for Ping. She speaks it very well; we carry on very deep conversations all in English. My second language was Spanish, which has been marginally useful as I slowly learn Mandarin. Having wrapped my tongue around different sounds as a kid has helped me shape the vowels and consonants of Chinese. Ping is very good at helping me figure out what sounds right.

But there's something about Chinese that is completely absent in both English and Spanish: tones. Asian languages are often described as "singsong." This is because each word has a tone associated to it, a particular relative pitch or pitch shift that determines what word you are saying.

Here are the very basics. There are five tones in Mandarin, referred to as First, Second, Third, Fourth and what they call "Light Tone." The first four are the main ones; the last one, Ping and I call "Fifth" for short. Your voice has to hit a pitch or make a shift relative to the average pitch of your whole sentence.

“First” is a little higher than the average pitch and it’s a steady note, no wavering allowed. If you were to say “ding dong” imitating a door bell, the “ding” has the First tone.

“Second” starts at the average pitch and rises “like an airplane taking off, it just goes up,” says Ping. Second tone sounds to me like you’re asking a question. You know how some people talk in phrases and never actually make what sounds like an affirmative statement: “So there’s this guy? And he’s talking to me? And he’s not really making sense? And then I discover he’s on his cell phone?” The last word of each of those is Second tone.

“Third” can morph a bit, depending on what’s next to it, but Ping describes its pure form as a bungee cord or trampoline sound. If you were to describe the action of someone bouncing at the end of a bungee jump you might say “boing, boing, boing…” That’s Third tone. It starts around the average pitch, drops low and then hooks back up again. Sometimes the bungee breaks, but that’s another story.

“Fourth” starts higher than the average pitch and drops down quickly. To my ear, unfortunately, it sounds like “POW!” or “BANG!” More on that in a minute.

The fifth tone, “Light Tone,” is just a dot. It’s slightly above the average pitch, like First, but it’s as short as you can make it. I can’t think of an English equivalent. Ping describes it like a non-committal nod of acknowledgment, just a “dip-of-the-chin sort of sound.” A dot.

So using a different tone means you’re saying a different word, even if you make the same sounds with your lips and mouth shape. For example, if you close your lips and hum, and then open your mouth while still vocalizing, you can make the sound "ma," which to English speakers is a slightly colloquial reference to a mother, yours or someone else's. That same consonant/vowel combination can mean at least five totally different things in Chinese: mother, numbness, horse, scolding, or a question mark. That’s one distinct definition for each tone!

What Ping and I have discovered is that she sometimes applies Chinese tones to her English. Early in our relationship, I thought she was making accusations every time she asked a question, especially when it was an emotionally loaded issue and my “what are you really saying” radar was on high alert. She couldn’t figure out why simple questions made me so defensive. “Why is everything a hot button?” she wondered.

In Mandarin, you simply say “ma” at the end of your sentence, using Fifth tone, and that makes it a question. Or you make a statement and then just say “yes/no” at the end of it to allow room for the other person’s point of view. That’s a normal, gentle, kind way to have a discussion in Mandarin. But since there’s no “ma” question mark in English, I would hear this statement and assume that it was now up to me to prove or disprove it. She wasn’t asking me, she was challenging me!

To make matters worse, many of the positive, nice things to say in Mandarin, like “yes” or “thank you” or “you’re welcome” or even “love” are Fourth tone which sounds like “POW” or “BANG” or “NO!” or “OUCH!” or “STOP!” to English speakers.

So when Ping said what she wanted to say in English, it sometimes came out with that Chinese tone and to my Western ear, she sounded harsh or combative. How confusing for her! “I felt like a monster!” she says. “I felt like I had to watch everything I said because I could never tell when I would hit another hot button!”

Another good example: I can say “Huh-uh” (“no”) in several different ways. Most are pretty casual. “Are you hungry?” “Huh-uh.” But the same two syllables can be argumentative, as in “Huh-UHH! I did NOT!” The last syllable is drawn out and goes down harder, or down and back up with a little squiggly at the end. Ping used to always say it as Fifth-Fourth, which sounded to my ear like “Ka-POW!” I would wonder, why is she picking a fight; what did I say to provoke that? She was simply using the same tone for the polite Chinese phrase “bu-yong” (“no, I have no need”) when she said the English phrase, and out of nowhere I got quiet and irritable.

Even now that we’ve figured out this is happening, we often don’t recognize it right away in a new context. The other night, I was working on the slide show, and I was moving very fast through the pictures as we discussed what might make a better ending shot for “Clear Blue Sky.” She found herself suddenly thrust into a reflex test situation or video game where she had to react quickly to make her point. So she used English words like “yes!” and “no!” with the Chinese Fourth tone. I heard “good dog!” and “bad dog!” when all she meant was “yeah, that one” or “not that one.” I had to smooth out my reaction to it, reminding myself that she has really good ideas, she respects my ideas and she’s just trying to help me see her vision, which I know will have value, even if I disagree with it, which would be ok, no, really, it would be just fine…

The cool thing was that we were able to talk about it later and laugh about how it went. Now I know to slow down a bit, and she understands how I might get it wrong.

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English With Chinese Tones