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Mastering Common Beginner Questions · Acedra
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18:28
you know find these thing these these um these verbs or or nouns or whatever super common that would be asked of you as a beginner if somebody knew you were a beginner what are they gonna ask you what country are you from what are your hobbies and you should master that response because it it it's just it all all around good it promote your fluency increases your pronunciation and your confidence because when you speak and native speakers can understand you're like yes
19:07
I've done it I've nailed it that it's the worst when you say when I talk to my boyfriend and I think I just spoke fluent Mandarin and he goes huh huh that's how important tones and pronunciation are sometimes even at this point two years later it might not be a whole sentence but a word and um I have to look it up and I'm like I just totally botched the tones that's why he didn't understand so it's it's not just they're trying to be rude or disrespectful
19:39
it's like you said potato and you meant to say tomato it's two different words it's not potato potato it's potato tomato so you should have a list like you know in the beginning you should have a list of phrases that you or yo it's commonly used for you and master those tones and pronunciation okay so at the end of this interview do you have anything you wanna say or any questions you wanna ask me to you know give you suggestions hmm well
20:14
two things first thing I would just like to say to everybody which is that just don't give up and um you have to be patient these things take a long time um I'm sure there's some Youtuber out there who says that you can get fluent in 6 months um sure maybe they can do it but for most of us uh it takes years I mean look at how fluent Katrina speaks English it took her years it took a lot of practice and she's still practicing what have you been learning 20 years now
20:49
and you're still more than 20 years I'm still learning so adopt the perspective of that this is your lifelong journey as we've just talked about many times on on this channel and then my second advice is to join the Chinese Immersion Hub so you can practice your pronunciation with us hmm it's for me it's just been one of the best things I could have done for my Chinese learning journey everybody I talk to you says my Chinese has exponentially increased in the past four months
21:23
and I can't help but correlate that with joining the club so join us guys join us uh I think it's really helpful because uh in our Chinese immersion hub we have a chat exclusive chat that you can record your sound and send it to your classmate and get feedback from teacher and classmates if you wanna improve your pronunciation or speaking you can even make a list of things you wanna practice your pronunciation and tones with or you could work with your classmate to make a list and practice
21:59
all together so having feedback having a professional guidance and feedback and a supportive teacher friends I think they are all very important that it's not only for your pronunciation but also for your speaking fluency listening and everything feedback is huge feedback is is huge it is huge yeah thank you so much for coming here today Yimeng thank you thank you so much okay hope it wasn't too much information but I really enjoyed getting to share my experience with everybody
22:39
so thank you for listening today everybody it's very helpful and I really enjoy appreciate it thank you so much so let's say goodbye to the audience thank you bye bye bye bye everybody Do you have any particular suggestions for the "yin" and "ying"? this is a very interesting question first of all I want to tell you that Taiwanese okay people from Taiwan we don't actually have the "ying" sound very clearly you know if you listen to me enough and listen to your boyfriend
0:24
who's from China you know that we pronounce the "ying" sound sound very different so for example English 英文 "ying" wen, right so people from China might sound "ying" wen but me if you hear me saying the word "ying" I actually don't say that I say "yin", it's just like ying so have you ever noticed that you know I have noticed it a little bit and more than anything I've now noticed it in my own speech because maybe I can blame you haha it's not my fault maybe I just kidding but no seriously
1:13
I mean this is something that's really important for everybody to notice which is that Chinese is flexible it's not meaning that the way you're saying it is incorrect it's just a bit of a of a of a accent it's just a diff like a slight variation in Mandarin it doesn't mean it's incorrect but my boyfriend he has a big like throat sound like a nasal sound like a
1:41
it's very strong yeah yeah yeah so when I do not pronounce a strong sound there he feels that I'm mispronouncing it hmm so I'm I'm really trying hard to distinguish the sounds I want to pronounce the Ying sound I just hmm
2:02
I made more yeah like the nasal sound... yeah it's actually all coming from your nose guys so you should feel your nose is like vibrating yeah and I also because I heard some students ask me like oh if in the end we're all speaking fast and nobody enunciate every word why do I bother learn learning how to pronounce every word clearly here's my answer uh I would use uh my experience of learning English like the word you say important when I was learning English as a beginner
2:42
I pronunce it I know every sound and I I pronounce I practice every sound clearly at first important and then when I go to the real world talking to Americans native speakers they say important first I'll be like huh important oh okay that's how you reduce the sound or swallow the sound so what I what I'm trying to say is first you have to know the sound each sound clearly and when you hear the variation or the differences and you know that oh that's how they reduce sound because the
3:23
originally it sounds like this and now it's like that you know and same as in Mandarin Chinese you know ing sound is Ying and then you hear Taiwanese people say Yin oh okay maybe they reduce the they cut the nasal sound in Taiwan so I think it's a for me it's quite important to learn the standard sound clear sound first and when you hear the variation you know oh how they changed the original sound I mean if if anybody needs another example if you've ever worked with especially here in America
4:06
are a lot of the customer services people that we talk on the phone are outsourced to other countries so non native speakers and they often speak really quickly and a lot of the times pretty poor pronunciation and it can be really hard for us even as native speakers to understand um if they uh so so it doesn't mean that their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar is not good it just means that they're speaking too quickly in an incorrect way one thing about ji qi xi and zhi chi shi sound
4:43
ji zhi is a pair, qi chi is a pair, xi shi is a pair so if you know how to pronounce ji and then zhi is just
5:03
oh round your lips curl down no much air out okay so not a lot of uh aspiration so
5:16
so you can practice the pair together I think that's really helpful and I think it also helps from the start differentiate the sounds because yeah especially those are the common ones mixed up you can you know you know okay these are pairs they're not the same sounds though I like that uh huh yeah ji zhi and aspiration qi chi teacher
5:43
qi chi, qi chi, yeah.. it's good to pair them up like that I like that uh huh so the xi sound I think I saw your note you say it's like hiss like a cat or a snake right mm hmm ah so xi and shi is a pair mm hmm yeah xi, shi it's the same amount of air different tongue placement is that what you're saying right right right about anybody who's struggling with the difference between ri and re or si and se
6:22
so what's your struggle because I heard you pronounce pretty well so can you tell me what is uh your struggle I think especially when I'm speaking naturally and it's in a word like maybe Hanzi mm especially because we need to know it's a Zi it's a character word that's the I'm talking about Zi ah I need to like be really careful not to say Hanze so I think when I talk a little faster and again and again this just goes back to our previous topic of hey
6:56
slow down but I can sometimes find myself hmm placing the I sound where the E sound should be it could just be hard the way I solved it is to just really focus and do them back to back do kind of do some drills like ri re, si se, zi ze... it's it's hard but you'll you you get better at it the more you practice it and and listen to words and audios with lots of those sounds but I would love to hear if you had any other suggestions maybe you can just make a comment on
7:31
if I was learning it for the first time because I have practiced it now so that's why it sounds alright but maybe before I I had a hard time distinguishing the sounds yeah I think the the the the pinyin like the English alphabet e uh = -e sound in pinyin this is just uh the sound so hěn è ，wǒ hěn è， it's like the uh..sound r + e = rè if my students cannot pronounce the the ending sound e sound I will suggest them to exaggerate r + r =rè uh uh uh think of è hungry è
8:17
yeah I don't know if that's helpful yeah I think it is and I think the fact that we just comment about it maybe we'll have everybody kind of thinking hey are am I pronouncing this correctly yeah cause there's been a couple times that I have definitely messed up the pronunciation on those and my boyfriend's like hey when you're talking about the word zi if you're specifically talking about that as a you know by itself you better make sure that you say zi so people know what you're talking about
8:46
if you say zhege "ze" they're gonna be like huh when you're talking about Hanzi remember
8:55
and it's different mouth shape different yeah so it's when it's it's
9:16
it is helpful and I think that just again it just goes back to the fact of we need to be dramatic you can be dramatic with your fault face shape at first actually when you watch Chinese speakers speak their mouths actually do not move that much it's not like English where they have all this dramatic face movement especially in the American accent we are like going all over the place with our mouth shaped China Chinese is not like that but at first you can be like Hanzi Hanzi
9:46
right you really be obnoxious and that will help you you wanna you wanna practice the word chuqu yeah that was my first major struggle I just can remember I feel like I have a scene where I'm sitting in the bathroom and I'm listening to audios I had all my friends send me audio send me this word chu qu and I'm just like I just I just they're the same it's just you know it's the same like yeah Choo Choo train sound or something like Choo Choo I just can't differentiate them but if you can
10:23
if you all can just find hard words for you and just study them and study them especially like it's so meaningful to find these actually like major common words like chu qu how many times you say that all the time right it's really common word so for chu qu you know chi sound right chi and then the the ending sound is Wu chi + wu = chu and remember it's the first tone so when you say chu qu even the pronunciation is very similar but the tones are different right right
11:06
so you hear ha ha ha ha ha
11:11
chu qu and the chu sound is less not much uh aspiration as qu very strong right right so chu qu I feel that it's when you do you really putting a lot out there yeah for native speaker it's also very difficult to move your tongue very fast chu qu chu qu chu qu you know if you want to enunciate so the the the standard pronunciation would be but if I speak faster actually I just say Choo Choo
11:58
this is Taiwan you know Taiwanese uh speed Mandarin so we just we're lazy the lazy pronunciation is chu qu
12:22
we just move our mouth and use the air aspiration to differentiate the sound Choo Choo Choo Choo Choo yeah if you have specific questions about you know specific pronunciation you can ask me in our Chinese Immersion Hub I can demonstrate that to you if anybody else is interested welcome to join us and yes
12:45
we like my favorite thing is we work together like help correct cause as I mentioned not everybody has the same issue so using your 同學們(classmates) to help you you know it's really it's really nice so question No. 3 what about tongue tips specifically the tricky second and third tongue do you have any strategy for these tones you want to share with when you're trying to learn tones think about the humming so like if we're trying to do the um měiguó we just go
13:24
so try our our humming tactic at first forget about the pronunciation of the actual syllables but get the sounds right because I think all speakers of Mandarin Chinese would agree that the hardest part for them is tones either that or they're gonna say hanzi but for me it's definitely tones I think it's just so foreign to us as English speakers so I love that hum tactic that Katrina has taught me but I don't actually think I did that that much when I learn like
13:57
I didn't know that what I would do a lot of is dramatic hand signals though like when I'm trying to say měiguó I'm going měiguó you know how when you listen to music for the first time hmm actually understand the meaning of a song but after one or two times listening to it you can mimic the sounds and the pronunciation of the whole song and it might not be for a month or a year or 10 years later that you're like wait that's actually what they meant when they like that's the real
14:33
meaning of this song learning Chinese in some way is a lot like that so as I mentioned before listening is going to be the most important thing here the more you listen to a native speakers I do believe that will help you not gonna say that you don't have to train your own self but the more you listen the better so uh in terms of the tricky third and second tone I would say in the in the start find again as I mentioned these really common frequency high frequency words so for example
15:10
if you're American what's something you need to know how to say
15:15
a lot of speakers myself included will have this tendency to say měiguó maygua and my theory is that this is because when we first learn tones they told us two third tones back to back your first tone is gonna become a second tone for example wǒ gǎnjué it should be wǒ（3 tone) but we are not going to say wǒ gǎnjué we are going to say wo2 gǎnjué wǒ gǎnjué becomes wo2 gǎnjué hmm so that's what we we we were trying really hard to focus on this this kind of change yes
15:59
these rules and so you when you see a third second your brain kind of switches to think oh something needs to change here I think anyways this is just my theory of why I hear so many of my classmates and I in my own experience I also with this word specifically wanted to say meiguo so try to find some words that are meaningful to you and in your life so for example for me I like to play basketball so lánqiú that was one of the first words I learn because if somebody asks me 你的愛好是什麼？
16:40
I need to say 打籃球 ⛹️♀️ so for me two second tones back to get back to back is really hard but um because I learn how to say this word 籃球 lánqiú it's like I have the rhythm of two second tones back to back in my head it's hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm but you know I have the memorization uh I'd like to give the example of the word 選擇 xuǎnzé that's a third tone and then a second tone 選擇 xuǎnzé don't know why but this word I guess I must have put a lot of emphasis on it in the beginning
17:24
it's stuck with me this this sound so if I ever come across a new word that is third second I just think about xuǎnzé and then I replace it so xuǎnzé měiguó same different pronunciation you know same uh huh uh huh so I think it all goes back to that humming tactic which I didn't like I said I don't think I knew that when I tried learning tones but you guys can try that humming tactic and then you can also try finding some like sort of hack words that really stick with you
18:04
you get feedback once somebody tells you you've done it right and you continuously are doing it right you kind of use that as a model as a template I know a lot of students that are struggling with the second tone I just tell my student think about you have a question huh huh huh？ hmm hmm huh huh
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