Practicing Chinese Tone Changes
Wow, looks like I started off the year with a two-week blogging break! I’m not finished blogging, by any means, but I’ve been busy finishing off AllSet Learning’s new products, dealing with a sick household, and preparing for a new baby (due next week!).
The AllSet Learning Store now has 8 downloadable products, and the latest 3 products are entirely related to tone changes. Tone change rules (referred to in linguistics as “tone sandhi,” or 变调规则 in Chinese pedagogy) are an important concept for learners to master, but you’re never ready for it right after you just learned pinyin and the four tones. Tone change rules need to be addressed sometime in the “elementary” period, and when exactly the learner is ready is going to vary a bit from person to person. You know a learner is ready when she starts truly acquiring individual tones and noticing on her own that what Chinese people say doesn’t always match the tones on the pinyin.
Unfortunately, textbooks tend to force learners to memorize these rules too early, before learners really have a strong concept of the tones in the first place. To give a specific example: New Practical Chinese Reader 1, Lesson 1 covers the sounds of pinyin (pp. 5-6), followed immediately by the four tones (p. 6), followed immediately by “third tone sandhi” (p. 7). Yikes!
Mastering Chinese tones is a long-term endeavor, which starts with learning what the four tones sound like and how to produce them. This foundation is essential before moving on to tone changes. Even after learning all the rules as an elementary learner, it’s going to take quite some time to be able to consistently apply those tone change rules in whole sentences, so most intermediate learners will benefit from more challenging tone change exercises.
With all this in mind, AllSet Learning has created the exercises that learners need at various stages. Our new products are:
– A2 Tone Changes
– B1 Tone Changes
– B1 Tone Changes for Third Tones
Feel free to ask questions about the products. Our versioning system makes it easy to update the products and add features.
I’ll be addressing some of the complexities of tone changes in future posts.
New child? WTF? PRC citizens are subject to the one-child policy. Is this one of those things where foreigners think they’re exempt from Chinese laws? Like the good old days of the French Concession, when foreigners could not legally be tried by Chinese courts.
We think imperialism is dead, but it’s alive and well today.
Ha ha… Foreigners are exempt from the law. Or, rather, Chinese citizens are exempt when they marry foreigners.
My understanding is the PRC has changed the policy so that if one of the couple is an only child, they are allowed to have another. My b-i-l and his wife are confronting this issue.