You should check out Grace Mandarin Chinese, she has great videos with pictures and phonetics on how to pronounce these difficult sounds, it truly helps!
As someone who is learning both Japanese and Chinese, I'm glad that I seem to have finally found a Chinese learning channel that is as good as the likes of MattvsJapan, Livakivi, and Dogen. Although I understand that Japanese has more cultural influence than China in The West, I was still surprised to find out that the online language learning community for Chinese is far quieter than its Japanese counterpart (on youtube anyway). But from what I've seen from your videos, I want to say that I find your videos really useful and enjoyable.
woww it's such an honor to be compared to such large titans in the space!! yeah, I haven't found many chinese learning youtubers, except for ones that already learned chinese and are now teaching english to chinese speakers, or those "shocking people with my perfect _____" videos. hopefully I can show my journey and help others out as i'm still trying to figure out this whole language learning thing :)
@@bianca.phdinprogress thanks for the anki deck too! I've been looking for a decent deck for Mandarin for ages and with your's I think I at last have one.
Thanks Bianca, this is actually extremely helpful. I imagine these are common issues. Any clue on how to get the "a" in Chinese to sound less American?
which "a" are you talking about? the way you pronounce the "a" in chan and chang is very different, but thats because of the g consonant changing the position of the mouth that you use to pronounce the "a"!
Learning pronunciation is a part of learning a language. Most people just do not focus on it whatsoever, as it is very time consuming and people want to progress fast. Mostly, when I see people going to a HSK 4 level within only 5-6 month, I know how they got there as soon as I hear them speaking. Namely, by completely neglecting pronunciation and intonation. I hear plenty of people speaking preety much English with Chinese words, so your suggestion is the only way to minimize it. Great video and I think your pronunciation is already good and your intonation even very good😍. When I started learning Mandarin years ago, I used the pronunciation course of Mandarin Blueprint and worked on it for the first 2 month of my journey. For the next two years I would at least once a week go back to the pronunciation course by Chinesepod and would practise my zh,ch,sh,z, s, q,j,x etc.. Luckily, tones weren't as hard for me, as one of my native languages is a tonal language. Though, I have to say, tones are not = tones.
aww thank you for the kind words and for your great perspective!! yeah, I think improving pronunciation is a two part endeavor: 1) recognition of proper/improper pronunciation 2) modify your vocalization to fit the proper pronunciation. that means that as your ability to recognize good/poor sounds, you're ability to self correct also increases!
I'm trying to convince him to come into videos but he's a bit reluctant HAH. I'm planning on doing Chinese food cooking videos (he's a great cook) and other activities with him speaking in Chinese though!
Give yourself time! Allow yourself to fail, and keep trying! You won’t get perfect pronunciation overnight. Even now I don’t have perfect pronunciation or even close to perfect pronunciation. But for some practical steps, 1) record yourself speaking 2) compare how you sound to how native audio sounds (preferably when you’re saying the same sentence) 3) modify each word until it sounds more like the audio! Overtime, you’ll get closer and closer to the native sounding pronunciation!
Great video 👍🏾. I also recently found the interview you did in another guy’s channel 2 months ago. So good! You should try and share some clips here 🙌🏾
Sometimes, , some Mandarin sounds are similar to or same as certain W and.E Euro languages For example, umlaut unin German andbplain u in Frenchband Mandarin qu. "e" in zhege or kuaile or 2 le particles and " e" sometimes in Scottish Gaelic, etc. (More strangely, the " hl" sound in Cantonese sub dialect Seiyap, Welsh spell as "ll" , snd Zulu in S Africa and ??? in Mozambique use same sound!!!)
honestly, I don't really care for pronunciation apps. Many use AI to help identify your pronunciation, but it's not great at giving feedback to let you know why the pronunciation sounds wrongs. books are helpful, but it's great for more beginner pronunciations because they're still comparing it to english pronunciation systems. Chinese can't be pronounced properly through english vocalizations, but it's a great start. I find that a combination of feedback from a native speaker (friend or tutor) alongside listening to native content and shadowing/self-correcting is the best. This though is more helpful when you're at and intermediate stage. At beginner stages, the focus should be on learning how to hear the different pronunciations (can't really self correct or change your speech positions if you don't know what sounds wrong or what sounds right!). For me, I read out loud to my bf and he tells me what sounds weird (identify what types of pronunciations I tend to sound like an english speaker). Then I say those specific words in different ways, using different parts of my voice (vocal cords, throat, roof of the mouth, jaw) until it sounds right (or better, sometimes pronunciation is a multi-step process). then I read the sentence that word was in a few times getting his feedback on if I pronounced it correctly or not. this could be done with a tutor or friend or teacher. it's just a pretty tedious process, but I found that it helped me out the most with my own pronunciation!
for beginners, various people will have various perspectives! MattvsJapan doesn't recommend to speak until you get to conversational fluency, and at that point you shadow native speakers (listen to someone speak, record yourself saying that sentence, listen back and identify the issues). I personally think that practicing pronunciation from the start could be very useful with enough guidance (from a friend, partner, teacher, or if you're really disciplined, doing shadowing with videos). But the app that I found fairly okay at letting me know if my pronunciation is TOTALLY off, was Hanbook (it's also a dictionary). It's not perfect, but it could be helpful in the beginner stages to learn how to identify what sounds/tones are the hardest for you. Hacking chinese has some pretty good informational resources for the beginner stages as well, but they're more instructional, not apps from my understanding. Unfortunately, apps are not the best as practicing pronunciation, unless they involve connecting you to native speakers or teachers.
@@bianca.phdinprogress Thanks. And about MattVSJapan..I don't take him seriously anymore since some recordings of him surfaced + testimonials from youtubers giving examples of how crappy of a person he really is behind the scenes, also his recent predatory marketing tactics .
@@encapsulatio oh dear... I haven't heard of that yet. yikes. I did briefly hear about his new "course" thing on r/chineselanguage, but I wasn't able to look at it myself because I think it was deleted? not a great look. i'll definitely consider whether I should promote him or not then on my channel.. a bit of a challenging situation though since if I want to be honest about my journey, it did start with a binge of his channel to learn about language acquisition....
he does speak fluent english! was born in china but came to the states in middle school. in his perspective he sounds like a chinese-american speaker (because he's not as eloquent in chinese as his english... going through highschool/college in america will do that to you though!) his fam only speaks mandarin though. but i'm trying to learn asap mostly because i'll be starting neuroscience PhD programs soon and i'll have less time to learn!
