Tone

Tone. We usually think of it in terms of music, or certain ones which must not be taken by young children when speaking to their parents. Fair enough.

Mandarin uses tone in a different way. In English, as well as Spanish and a great deal (a majority? I'm not sure) of the world's languages, the relative pitch of what you say carries information, but not content. Here's an example:

"What." This is a single word in the English language, albeit with several definitions. Yet you can get a different point across depending on how you say it, whether that's with a high tone, a rising tone, etc.

Here's where Mandarin is different, and I'll illustrate it with two examples.










(I uploaded images of the characters in question, rather than writing them out, for readers whose computers may not have the software installed to read them)

The first two characters are pronounced "xie zi," and it means "to write." The second two characters mean "shoes," and are pronounced... "xie zi."

Here we have two words with the exact same pronunciation, that mean two different things. How in the hell?

Well, this happens a lot in Chinese, and many times you must rely on context to know the difference. This isn't anywhere near as hard as it sounds in theory, or it'd be impossible to know whether someone meant "to," "too," or "two" when they were talking, or if "yo fui" meant "It was me" or "I went."

However, in this case there IS something that differentiates these two words, and that is their relative pitch, or tone. "To write" is "xie zi," BUT... the "xie" in this word carries a tone that starts relatively low and dips even further, followed by "zi" which starts high and drops. "Shoes" is also "xie zi," BUT... "xie" is pronounced with a low, then rising tone, followed by a neutral-toned "zi" which usually takes on a tone based on the one that came before it.

Studying and mastering tone takes quite a while, and it's something I still struggle with regularly. But here we see that it's essential to properly speaking Chinese, as the pitch of your words is the difference between writing something and talking about shoes, as well as a variety of other word pairs only differentiated by tone.

Starting point

Here's where it begins. I'm Frank, a native English speaker who's fluent in Spanish after about 10 years of study. My consistency with Spanish hasn't yet been repeated, sad to say -- I have a few months of Italian under my belt, a year of Japanese, as well as a few songs' worth of Portuguese words.

So I can't make any promises, but I've learned that that's usually the best course of action anyway. For the past few months, and for now, I'm learning the strange, complex, complicated, baffling and yet beautiful Mandarin language.

I get so tired of people talking about how hard various languages are to learn. They're right, of course; I'm not trying to say Mandarin isn't difficult. But why waste so much time worrying about it? You're either going to learn it, or you're not. Difficulty means nothing in the long run, because if it's something worth doing, it's going to be difficult by default. I'm hoping that I can stick with this, and perhaps one day my Mandarin will be on par with my Spanish. We can only hope.

This is just a quick introduction to my new blog. I'll be sharing my thoughts on the language, stuff that has struck me about it, differences from English (i.e. everything), and anything else I feel like talking about. But that's for later on.

For now, hi!