Popup Chinese

Speaking Practice: Tone Sandhi in the Chinese Word for No

Today's lesson is for elementary Chinese learners. In it we practice saying ten words and phrases, and eight sentences that all contain the character 不. We do this to highlight the tonal change that occurs when you pronounce this character next to another fourth tone character (hint: it changes to second tone). If you're relatively new to Chinese and have been struggling with picking up a natural intonation, this podcast can help.

And if you're a premium subscriber we want to help you even more. Just visit our text page, dial our toll-free telephone number listed there and key in your PIN number when prompted. Then practice speaking these words and sentences (or just talk to us about anything else you'd like). Our system will forward your recording to a teacher who will get back to you in a day or two. And be careful too: we've included a couple of linguistic landmines in some of our sentences to test how good your listening skills really are....

Debbra

said on

October 20, 2009

jeremy.dutton

said on

October 21, 2009

Useful lesson. I enjoy ones like this that are focused much more on the Chinese with minimal banter.

valluckett

said on

October 23, 2009

I noticed that your pinyin transcripts do not reflect the tone changes for 不 (bù). I have seen this before and have heard that this is a standard practice; however, I also have several text books from the Chinese publishers like "Beijing Language and Culture University Press" and "People's Education Press" which all have pinyin that reflects these tone changes. And even several of the children’s books that I bought in Beijing reflect the tone changes. So the rule seems a little fuzzy.

Is this optional? It makes more sense on a practical level to reflect the changes. It seems that pinyin should represent the sound of Chinese more so than the written language – and it can do so more accurately with the changes.

trevelyan

said on

October 23, 2009

@valluckett - it's partly out of convenience, mostly to avoid misleading people. If we did contextual tonal changes for a single character we'd presumably have to do it for the whole lot, including the more complicated and frequent third and second tone changes. And at that point things could easily be misleading. We wouldn't want to confuse people into thinking that third tone characters were actually second character.

Be curious to hear what other people think here. We might be able to get something rigged up that could try to optionally change all of the tones based on contextual analysis.

Gail天堂的声音

said on

October 23, 2009

@valluckett,

ya, i also saw some books with the tone changed. but very few.

Beijing language and culture university may have published one or two books with changed tones to foreigners, but this is really not the usual way to do this.

and i am sure in their books they just changed the pronunciation of 一 and 不，right?

valluckett

said on

October 23, 2009

Yes, they only change 一 and 不. I could see how some of the more complicated tone changes could be misleading. It is not a big deal for me now that I know the rules but as a beginner it would have been a big help.