by Jaime Welch

Created on: July 31, 2009   Last Updated: August 01, 2009

In order to bridge the gap between Mandarin and English, one must be aware of the major differences of these two languages. As a native English speaker who taught English in Taiwan to native Mandarin speakers and studied Mandarin myself, I have seen the common mistakes and struggles of both. Whether learning Mandarin or English, the difference in the tonality and phonetics of the language can cause new language learners much difficulty.

Tonality

Mandarin is a tonal language, English is not. A tone is, basically, an accent. In English, we accent the last word of a sentence to turn it into a question. For example, "You like hIM?" When we hear someone's voice raise an octave with him, we know they are questioning the sanity of our romantic choice. Also, we tend to accent the important words in a sentence, like the nouns and verbs. This usually makes our speech pattern look like rolling waves, as we modulate our voices up and down, but usually smoothly with out sudden drops or rises. As a native English speaker, we aren't ever really taught this or even aware that we do this. We just learn by hearing and rarely question.

Mandarin, on the other hand, has four tones, and every single word (character) is assigned a tone. To hear the difference and read an explanation of the four tones, click on this link http://www.uiowa.edu/~linguist/faculty/beckman/lotw0 1/mantone.html. To summarize, the first tone is a high even tone, which sounds like a dial tone. The second tone is a rising tone, like what an English speaker will do at the end of a sentence to imply a question. The third tone falls, then rises sharply, often called a falling rising tone. Think of what a mother's voice sounds like when she is expressing incredulity. For example, "You WhAT?" At the beginning of "what" her voice drops to a growl, and then she ends with a high-pitched screech. The fourth tone is a falling tone, which is not common in English, but has more of a sharp sound that starts high and ends low like how an English soldier might yell, "Halt!" when on guard duty.

Now, imagine the horror of an English speaker beginning to learn Mandarin, when they realize the sound, ma has four different meanings, depending on how it is accented. Or imagine the confusion of a Mandarin speaker when they are constantly corrected on the way they stress and accent certain words, but aren't given many hard and fast rules to guide them. To bridge the gap from English to Mandarin or Mandarin to English, teacher

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