Tonal Languages - STOP Focusing on JUST Pitch Contours

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I've watched an analysed a slew of Thai learners speaking Thai over the past couple of weeks, as well as learners of Vietnamese and Chinese. One recurring issue that was playing havoc on their delivery of Thai was overemphasis on the 'theoretical' pitch contours of tones that I suspect they learnt in class, resulting in very unnatural sounding Thai - and tones. The language just didn't flow.
Remember TONE RULES are not originally 'Presecriptive' - They're 'Descriptive' of a snapshot of that language from a certain time and certain place. In this clip I show you how to make your tones sound more natural, and also include charts of how to switch your standard 'Bangkok Thai' to Chiangrai, Chiangmai, Vientienne, Isan - Ubon, Isan - Roi Et, Koh Samui and Phuket tones. As long as you know how to spell the word, you can easily shift your tones. Just remember - in the end, these charts are just a guide - to really make them sound authentic, you'll need to observe HOW native speakers of those dialects pronounce them - and not just follow the pitch contours.
#thai #chinese #vietnamese #tonallanguages
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Опубликовано:

3 окт 2024

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Комментарии : 48

@yussefthe3rd 3 года назад

What your throat is doing from the beginning of the sound to the end of the sound! 10 years of learning tonal languages, and no one has explained it this simply. I've often felt that it's ridiculous how teachers of tonal languages will just tell you these tone sounds, and then say it themselves, and feel like this is enough to learn the tones.

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

it's rare that native speakers of any language will really sit and analyse the mechanics of what they're doing when they speak. Then, that's compounded when they're taught 'rules' of how things should be taught, without actually digging any deeper. those rules get transmitted on as gospel.

@yussefthe3rd 3 года назад

@@StuartJayRaj Very true, the classic 'it's always been done this way' thinking. Two related questions to this great insight you've offered us: how do foreign speakers go about training our throats for making these new "tone" variations? I'm lousy at karaoke and no good at doing impressions, so I feel like I struggle to "produce" the right tones on command. Also, how does improving *hearing* tones relate to being able to produce them, and how can we improve our recognition of tones? I still suck at the 'tell the teacher which tone it is' game...been a huge fan of your content and insights since the early youtube-polyglot days! Great to see more info coming out via Mindkraft

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

ahhh...and THAT'S why I put Mindkraft together. I really believe that we can be our best teachers and even coaches, but we need to know what to be listening for. Have been seeing some amazing shifts in people's language over the past few months. jump into the discord server and have a look around. Give me a shout out when you're in there and let me K ow what your handle is.

@john-raphaellacas8107 3 года назад

I used to move my head when I was learning Chinese. lol True story. Again, a great video!! Drinking my coffee having the time of my life. 最高！！☆

@milanhrvat 3 года назад

I used to do it. And harry potter finger movements.

@climbertrev1 Год назад

Just the other day my Thai girlfriend asked me why I was moving my head when speaking a particular word. She repeated the word her head didn't move. Any movement was all in the throat and the shape of her mouth. Language is about anatomy ultimately.

@aia221b3 3 года назад

The story about the rain made me laugh so much! Leaving a comment to let you know that I liked your channel very much! Plus one subscriber is here :D

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

thank you! I hope the story makes sense to other people... made sense to me at least 😃

@milanhrvat 3 года назад

I'll try to post here again. I think RU-vid blocked me for the 4th time because I'm using a VPN. Nevertheless... I learnt Cantonese for 15 years... learnt? Sorry, learnt it for 3 years and spoke it for 15 years. I actively learnt it to a level where I could use it at work without sounding too much like a gweilo or being excluded at work because everyone wanted to talk in Cantonese and I was the only one who couldn't speak it "fluently". I used to get in the habit of moving my head and doing harry potter finger movements. It was until I looked at myself speaking, a video of myself that I did for youtube once upon a time.... I saw my head move. I did a video years ago how I learnt Cantonese fluently in 3 months and everyone called me a liar, or my mother is asian or some crap like that. Took years to get out of the physical movement habit. However, I had to learn each tone with a number. I know it's probably not the best... but I taught my wife the tones and was the best thing.... whenever I made a mistake... she would quickly tell me tone 3 etc... a personal walking dictionary. Turns out... she wasn't impressed to be used and abused as a free language tutor for so many years. Maybe you're right about all of this.... after 15 years... I am full fluent. But sound gweilo-like.

@olivereckert2492 3 года назад

id really love to see an in-depth lesson on Vietnamese tones and how to pronounce them. The resources for Vietnamese are very limited which is a shame

@sazji Год назад

Thank you so much for this analysis! It's interesting how students of many disciplines - music, language, writing - tend to concentrate so much on "the rules" (of music theory, of grammar, of pronunciation, of "correct sentence structure", etc.) that they confuse the "rules" for the thing itself. One of the best teachers of Turkish music theory I know, constantly reminds students that those complex "rules" are descriptive. They are a way of talking about a thing that exists already, not "rules for how you have to do it." The result is, they're trying to produce the tones according to the pitches they've been taught, rather than listening to what is really going on. It's interesting that Chinese and Vietnamese never really thought much of "tones" until westerners started analyzing them (according to the aspect that stood out the most to them, the pitch). The words Vietnamese use for their tones, "dấu," are actually the names of diacritics, which were devised by Portuguese. It feels to me like language teachers fall into the same trap. Almost every Vietnamese teacher I've ever seen is standing there doing the hand motions, but there's so much more going on there! Learning to feel them, and what is going on in the mouth and throat, is such a better approach. Also, I firmly believe language learners should start by just listening. It's doubly important in languages that use the same or modified version of the learner's native language's alphabet. Learn to hear the sounds, and reproduce them, THEN learn to write them. I've heard so many Vietnamese learners pronounce ơ the same as ô, and even o the same as ô, because they're thinking of them as "different kinds of o." (Forgetting that an "o" is literally nothing but a circle; it has no inherent sound.) Similarly, many Vietnamese teachers will say "a" is like the English "ah," and "e" is like English "eh." I guess they are, if you completely ignore what's going on in the throat! Once again...focusing on letters rather than actual sounds.

@kori228 3 месяца назад

> It's interesting that Chinese and Vietnamese never really thought much of "tones" until westerners started analyzing them (according to the aspect that stood out the most to them, the pitch). well no, Chinese scholars and poets had long categorized Chinese syllables as having one of four tone classes 平上去入 (as you should already be aware as Stuart has covered in other vids). They just didn't care about the actual pitch melody because there was so much variation that it was more important to preserve distinction than any single pitch melody.

@sazji 2 месяца назад

@@kori228 That’s what I’m saying - the westerners concentrated on pitch over other characteristics, but now even teachers of those languages tend to focus almost exclusively on pitch. In Vietnamese especially it leads to a lot of confusion for learners because of the pitch description vs what they’re actually hearing.

@kori228 2 месяца назад

@@sazji The variation I'm talking about spans entire languages (the Chinese 平上去入 is from a book on rhyming poetry across Chinese varieties). The tone classes fundamentally don't tell you how to articulate the tones, they're just categories. From a modern perspective, the conditioning factor that lead to the tones had already been lost for 1500 years so they're actually useless if you don't know what tone contours a specific variety has to begin with. IMO pitch is still the most important factor for learning tones today if you're an L2 learner, but people have to realize it's not absolute pitch-it's relative to your own pitch range, and that the citation form doesn't isn't necessarily how it's pronounced in flowing speech.

@blenderconch 3 года назад

Excellent! This seems like a really key insight to keep in mind. Thanks!

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

new learners mightn't realise the importance initially, but ultimately, this can make or break your Language

@exploshaun 3 года назад

As a native speaker, you’re absolutely correct that we can’t explain what tones are because I have no idea what you were doing with your throat.

@erichallin1 3 года назад

Excellent explanation Stu. I've been exposed to Thai for over forty years but without ever studying it but have also been exposed to all these people telling me about the importance of tones. Eureka...

@adamnyback 3 года назад

I understand tongue position since I can move my tongue in various directions, but what is throat position?

@Garfield_Minecraft 2 года назад

Mindkraft Minecraft... Lol misheard..

@fredrickcampbell8198 Год назад

3:42 Tone happens to have another meaning that is synonymous with pitch. Before this video, I had believed that tone as in pitch was meant. I now understand that tone as in tone of voice was meant, which matches what I myself observe in the two Chinese varieties I speak.

@VillageboiRobbie 7 месяцев назад

WHAT DOES HE MEAN BY THROAT POSITION? I swear this is like some esoteric secret that he alludes to but never reveals? I've watched all the videos, subscribed to his course CTF. Still I have never found the answer.

@johngtran 11 месяцев назад

You are good my friend. Keep it up.

@tedcrowley6080 3 года назад

Is this system taught anywhere? I'm learning Mandarin, not Thai. so the charts in this video weren't meaningful for me. What are the 5 horizontal sections? This and other videos urge me to stop thinking about pitch patterns. That is useless until I learn some alternative. I don't want to join a community. I wish to study something and learn it. Thanks.

@JoshAwang 3 года назад

Native speakers won't be able to deep-dive the way Stu does here, because as the saying goes, "Ask a fish what is water and it'll ask you, "Water? What is that?" and most natives don't even have the lexicon to effectively describe it to non-native speakers

@fredrickcampbell8198 Год назад

Native here, and what you say is true. English itself uses tones, but no native English speaker will notice it, while a tonal language speaker, if they are trying to match the sounds to what they are familiar with, will literally vary the tone of how the say things to get it to sound like a native, even if they might not notice that is what they are trying to do. I suspect it is possible to teach a tonal language using the tones in English as a guide for native English speakers. The problem is that English tones vary everytime something is said depending on where the emphasis of the sentence is placed In my rendition of this sentence, the first word of this sentence uses the third tone in Mandarin Chinese. As for this sentence, the second word uses the third tone as well. Apparently, the articles, (the, a, and an) the prepositions (for, on and in), "to" in infinitives, ... use the third tone. The second tone in Mandarin Chinese corresponds to the last syllable in a question where no question pronouns (Where, when, how, ...) Do note that I am a Malaysian (Mandarin Chinese and English) speaker, and what I said might not be true for other dialects of English or Mandarin Chinese. Postscript: I think I just discovered a Cantonese Chinese tone distinction with the word "into" when used in a sentence where it is not emphasized. Note: Into is very much emphasized in the previous sentence and might be in this one. An example of an unemphasized "into" is at 4:50.

@JoshAwang Год назад

@@fredrickcampbell8198 Indeed and thanks for bringing up tones in the spoken English language as well, and as you put it, we don't even realise it exists until we take a step back and observe intentionally. The only difference is that in English we use tones and length of vowels to fine tune nuances of the meaning, and add emphasis to meaning, or even to give some kind of context. As for using tones in spoken English as reference, I usually use "you too???" (ask incredulously) to teach my students the falling and rising tone respectively in Thai.

@fredrickcampbell8198 Год назад

@@JoshAwang I went to a Malaysian (Chinese vernacular school) and never understood the neutral tone 輕聲. The video actually helped me to understand it with an example of a Chinese lemma that I found on Wiktionary when I looked up 輕聲. Postscript: Just so you know, I picked up the traditional characters myself, as it was not taught in school. My sister, for example, can't read traditional characters and considers them "ugly".

@6Uncles 10 месяцев назад

6:24 | Stu is the Language Yoda, confirmed.

@IanPaulSaligumba 11 месяцев назад

How is the Thai Language in Chiang Rai different from Bangkok?

@kasikasivendjinn5345 2 года назад

I’m a native Mandarin speaker and I don’t know this. I’ll need to change my approach to learning Vietnamese

@fredrickcampbell8198 Год назад

I am learning Tamil. In Tamil, there are long and short vowels. As a (Hokkien and Mandarin) Chinese speaker, I notice that the short vowels in Tamil match the fourth tone in Mandarin (to be edited) () shows grouping for conjunctions where there can be ambiguity or edited section

@fredrickcampbell8198 Год назад

By the way, your Mandarin Chinese is indistinguishable from a Malaysian's native dialect

@fredrickcampbell8198 Год назад

You know, for some of the other people I've heard who don't sound native to me, upon further consideration, it is possible they are speaking a dialect of Mandarin that is not mine, since I find that they are somehow not mispronouncing anything.

@xxkq0 3 года назад

Should it not be 塞音 rather than 赛音 on the grid?

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

yes! good catch

@jessicarichards8531 2 года назад

"call your ma!"

@gurfatehsingh4328 3 года назад

G'day Stu! Iron rooves (?) or roofs (!)...

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

I'd like to think that I could bring it into popular usage 😉 The beauty of language .... we can make of it what we want it to be 😁😁😁

@lucidlo1981 3 года назад

涼拌海蜇皮！

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

Hahaha - exactly! Doing that actually does help in the initial stages just to get in the ball park of the tone ... but it needs to be reigned in fast

@mr-default2022 3 года назад

ผมงง

@StuartJayRaj 3 года назад

งงตรงไหนบ้าง เดี๋ยวช่วย

@dravenmaster7859 3 года назад

น่าจะงงตรงฟังภาษาอังกฤษไม่ออกละมั้งครับ

@majermike Год назад

4:14 are you saying that modern tones are based on nuances of the original words that have been dropped thru evolution? I agree words like 妈, 麻, 马, 骂 or ใหม่, ไหม, ไม้ are pronounce the same except for the throat, precisely because throat action is what modulates frequency. Are you suggesting teaching new learners how to modulate the muscles in their throats rather than teaching them to mimic frequencies?