European languages, students may have been taught how to
pronounce words, but they won’t have had to pay attention
to where they pitched their voice while pronouncing them.
In Mandarin (and other tonal languages such as Thai and
Cantonese), tones are used to differentiate words from each
other, and one word can have many meanings depending
on its tone. When you have only used tones to convey the
intention of the word (for example, questioning, ordering,
reprimanding), to use them to give a word meaning can
be a huge leap. Some studies suggest that when non-
tonal-language speakers are in the early stages of learning
Mandarin, their brains are not capable of processing tone
properly, and some areas of the brain have to be trained by
practice to do so.
Mandarin teachers have many strategies to teach
tones. Terry Tang explains, “Since Westerners come
from a ‘no-tone’ environment, the most important
things is to make them hear the four tones and be able
…
the process of teaching and
learning Mandarin requires a more
involved, multi-sensory approach
which should be easier for children
than adults.
to tell the difference. This is very easy to say, but super-
hard to achieve. What I normally do is to use their own
expressions to introduce the four tones. For example,
for the first tone (flat) I tell my students it should sound
like when the doctor asks you to open your mouth and
say ‘Ahhhh’. For the second tone (up), I say it is similar
to the rising sound at the end of a question, like ‘Huh?’
The third tone (down-up) is the most confusing. I tell
my students to imagine a mum asking a child to do
something. After 1,000 times, the child will finally say ‘All
right’ (where the ‘all’ is going down and the right is going
up) – that is similar to the down-up tone. The fourth tone
(
going down) can also be confusing. For this, I tell students
to either imagine they have just dropped something, and
they let out a short ‘Ahh!’, or they are trying to scare
someone with a ‘Boo!’”
Other teachers might use hand gestures and
different body movements, such as raising their
eyebrows and stamping their feet, to help teach and
reinforce tones. In many classes, students are also
encouraged to make the gestures when they speak, as
it can help to speed up their learning. For Westerners,
being expected to make odd-looking gestures and
movements while attempting to speak in a foreign
language is something they have probably never
encountered in any other language class before.
Aside from tones, to pronounce many of the
syllables needed in Mandarin, Westerners have to
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