{"id":36543,"date":"2018-02-07T17:20:07","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T22:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=36543"},"modified":"2018-02-07T18:14:42","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T23:14:42","slug":"when-intonation-overrides-tone-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=36543","title":{"rendered":"When intonation overrides tone, part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Liberman's \"Real tone<\/a>\" (2\/7\/18), replying to \"Tones for real<\/a>\" (2\/5\/18), is a nice demonstration of what's happening in real speech.\u00a0 The question for John McWhorter and all serious language teachers \/ learners is how much of it can be systematized and regularized?\u00a0 In other words, how much of it can be taught \/ learned?<\/p>\n

I will be blunt:\u00a0 I don't think that the discernment and production of speech can be taught \/ learned at this ad hoc, microphonemic level.\u00a0 That is why the very best teachers and best students I know do not focus on lexemes or morphemes, but rather on phrases, clauses, or even whole sentences.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My wife used to drill her students on whole sentences, over and over again, but varying the way they were said with different kinds of emphases, emotions, and implications.<\/p>\n

This kind of approach works much better than slavish fixation on the phonetics of individual terms and expressions.<\/p>\n

I have students from all over the world.\u00a0 The ones who speak English most naturally think in terms of sentences, not individual words.\u00a0 Sometimes they don't write particularly well, but when you hear them speak, they can almost fool you as being native speakers of English — and often they really do fool you.<\/p>\n

I could name names, but will not for fear of embarrassing people.\u00a0 I will just mention anonymously one American speaker of Mandarin who has astonishingly good command of written Chinese, including poetry, which has gained him quite a reputation in China.\u00a0 But when he speaks Mandarin, even after having lived in Taiwan and China for much of the last four decades, and even though grammatically, syntactically, and idiomatically his Mandarin is perfect, and even though his tones are absolutely correct, his speech sounds unnatural, and he unconsciously bobs his head or wags his finger to accentuate the pitch contours of the tones.\u00a0 Why is he like this?\u00a0 It is because, alas, he was largely a Mandarin autodidact for the first two or three years he learned the language, and the few teachers he had used the completely wrong method of flash cards, dictation, vocabulary quizzes, repeating words and terms, etc.<\/p>\n

So I highly recommend the approach described in this post (emphasis on whole phrases, clauses, and sentences) if you want to get over the hangup of whether or not you've got the tones (or vowels or consonants or whatever) of individual lexemes just right.\u00a0 Don't worry about it; don't think about it.\u00a0 Just listen and talk freely.<\/p>\n

I've touched upon these aspects of linguistic analysis, especially as they pertain to language teaching and learning, many times on Language Log, but most prominently in posts like these:<\/p>\n

\"When intonation overrides tone<\/a>\" (6\/4\/13)<\/p>\n

\"When intonation overrides tone, part 2<\/a>\" (5\/11\/17)<\/p>\n

\"Tones and the brain<\/a>\" (3\/3\/15)<\/p>\n

\"'Ni hao' for foreigners<\/a>\" (10\/11\/16)<\/p>\n

\"Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin<\/a>\" (8\/26\/2014)<\/p>\n

\"Stress, emphasis, pause, and meaning in Mandarin<\/a>\" (118\/17)<\/p>\n

\"slip(per)<\/a>\" (7\/22\/14)<\/p>\n

\"Mandarin by the numbers<\/a>\" (6\/8\/13)<\/p>\n

\"Where did Chinese tones come from and where are they going?<\/a> \" (6\/25\/13)<\/p>\n

\"Pinyin memoirs<\/a>\" (8\/13\/16)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Liberman's \"Real tone\" (2\/7\/18), replying to \"Tones for real\" (2\/5\/18), is a nice demonstration of what's happening in real speech.\u00a0 The question for John McWhorter and all serious language teachers \/ learners is how much of it can be systematized and regularized?\u00a0 In other words, how much of it can be taught \/ learned? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36543"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36616,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36543\/revisions\/36616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}