Tuesday, May 5, 2009
A Pocket Chinese/English Dictionary
Before leaving the U.S., I picked out a handy, dandy pocket Chinese/English dictionary. With tens of thousands of words, helpful travel phrases, a description of Chinese grammar, and other tidbits, I figured I was set. My complacency was put to rest, the first time I looked up a word I wanted to translate.
I already knew that I would not be able to read the Chinese characters. Although they were a major unifying force for the various Chinese languages that use them, they are useless from a phonetic perspective. However, I was under the misguided notion that I would know what to do with the pinyin transliteration. Although pinyin is similar, there is not a true correspondence to English pronunciation. This is partially because Chinese sounds are just plain different than English sounds. But, unfortunately, it is also because pinyin uses many of the letters differently, especially the vowels. And it turns out there is another twist. Mandarin is a tonal language with four tones. That means any given syllable can be said four different ways and convey different meanings. And to top it all off, even with pinyin+tones, there are many, many homonyms in Chinese. For some reason, this last point does not trouble me at the moment. Possibly because I don’t know any of them yet.
Interestingly, my new handy, dandy pocket dictionary provided no pronunciation guide for pinyin. As with most items of interest, when I went online, I found any number of guides to pinyin pronunciation for English speakers. And they were not all the same. There are enough variations in English pronunciation, when you consider just the United States, never mind England, the Caribbean, India, or the rest of the world. Some guides took a standardized linguistic approach. But there still seemed to be some discrepancies.
The oddest discrepancy of the bunch has to do with the tones. Evidently it is very important that I use the tones, even exaggerate the tones, because otherwise, the Chinese don’t understand most English-speakers learning Mandarin. However, Chinese speakers of Mandarin can get away with not using the tones and still be understood. Is that some form of language racism? Or is it just “that’s not fair” whining from those of us who can’t hear the subtle differences in pronunciation?
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This was written by Carolyn. It is posted under my account due to a technical glitch.
ReplyDeleteHi, Diane, wishing you well! I submitted the text below on your
blog site but it wasn't accepted. So, I'm sending directly to you
via e-mail in the hopes that you will receive it.
Why Chinese speakers can get away without using tones and still be
understood.
The reason is that as native speakers speak they create a linguistic
context in which the overall meaning is clear in spite of small
deviations or inaccuracies. For example, in English, if you said or
wrote to someone "Don't worry. I'll send you a chick for the amount
I owe you" -- the other person would expect a check, not a chicken
or a good looking young woman.
On the other hand, if a recent immigrant with poor English skills
insisted "No worry. I give you chick!" you might not be so sure
(especially if this person worked at a chicken processing factory).
Likewise in Chinese. For example, "hao3ma0" means "OK?", whereas
hao4ma4 means "number" (as in telephone number or building number in
an address). Early in my Chinese language experience, I had a
frustrating phone conversation with a person who kept asking me for
a phone number when I thought he was asking me if everything was
OK. So everytime he asked me for the hao4ma4 (phone number), I
responded "hao3" (OK!) until he finally slammed down the phone in disgust.
In the case of hao4ma4, a linguistic context would be supplied by
the prefix (for example) dian4hua4 (telephone). So speaking the
phrase dianhua haoma would supply sufficient context that the
meaning would be clear regardless of tones.
SO: tones are extremely important for beginning Chinese language
students because your initial vocabulary is so limited. Once you
acquire a large enough vocabulary (and sufficient facility with
grammar) to create sentences that supply a decent linguistic context
to convey your meaning, you can be less concerned about tones.
Nonetheless, you may still find yourself going through the ritual
inquiry about tones (i.e. is it ma1ma2ma3ma4?). And tones (and
vowel pronunciation) will remain crucial in certain phrases, as for
example, the difference between zheng4fu3 (government) and zhang4fu
(husband).