妈 mā 麻 má 马 mǎ 骂 mà
One of the hardest parts about learning Chinese for me is the tones. I can pronounce the tones fine (when I concentrate), and if a word is said to me in isolation I can perceive its tones without a problem. The problem for me is that when I memorise a new word, I don’t naturally internalise the tone. For me, the pronunciation of the word is intrinsic to it, whereas the tone is just an add-on. For me 水饺 (dumplings) will always be pronounced shui jiao. I just have to force myself to remember that 水饺 is meant to be pronounced shuǐ jiǎo (not, for example, shuì jiào, which means 睡觉 go to sleep). Of course, the tone is an integral part of the word. For native Chinese speakers, 水饺 and 睡觉 are as distinct as the words dinner and Donna are to us English speakers. But, not having grown up speaking a tonal language, tones will always be something extrinsic to me.
The answer to this problem is just to study more, of course. If you revise and practise using a word long enough then eventually you will internalise the tone. The tones of the most basic words (e.g. 日, 火, 车, 知道) are all etched into my brain. I never have to look their tones up.
But I’m lazy, so I turn to mnemonics. I note that I’m not the first person to have this problem, and other people have suggested mnemonics for tone memorisation before, namely:
- Associating the tone (and hence the word) with an emotion.
- Making individual mnemonics for each word, e.g. an aeroplane’s wings are straight, so 飞机 is pronounced fēi jī.
- Colour-coding each word in your review list by tone.
These are all OK, but my favourite method is weirder. It’s the one that is used in the most common system of romanisation of the Hmong language, the RPA (Romanised Popular Alphabet). In it, the word Hmong is spelt Hmoob. Looks weird right? But it makes sense. The ‘oo’ is just another representation of the coda, which is not really /oŋ/, but actually /ɔ̃/. And the ‘b’ at the end is not intended to be pronounced – it’s just a tone marker.
I think this system is quite brilliant. I bet if I told 50 people that Hmong was pronounced “Hmong + high tone”, and another 50 that Hmong was pronounced “Hmoob, where the -b was not pronounced -b, but represented the high tone”, way way more of the second group would remember the tone. For us Westerners, spelling is an integral part of a new word, which we internalise, where as tone is not. Interestingly, this is also the principle behind the extremely unpopular Gwoyeu Romatzyh system of romanising Chinese (which is rather terribly done, if I might say so).
| Tone | Hmong Daw example | RPA spelling |
|---|---|---|
| High ˥ | /pɔ́/ ‘ball’ | pob |
| Mid ˧ | /pɔ/ ‘spleen’ | po |
| Low ˩ | /pɔ̀/ ‘thorn’ | pos |
| High-falling ˥˧ | /pɔ̂/ ‘female’ | poj |
| Mid-rising ˧˦ | /pɔ̌/ ‘to throw’ | pov |
| Low checked (creaky) tone ˩ | /pɔ̰̀/ ‘to see’ | pom |
| Mid-falling breathy tone ˧˩ | /pɔ̤̂/ ‘grandmother’ | pog |
This system obviously works better for languages which don’t usually have consonantal codas (or whose range of such are reduced) – Chinese is happily one of these languages. It’s easy enough to remember mas for horse 马 and mat for mother 妈. Much less easy to remember mătr for face and măts for eye (for mặt and mắt in Vietnamese).
It’s a crazy idea, but I’ve tried it and it words pretty well. I use -t, -p, -s, and -k for tones 1, 2, 3 and 4. You just have to memorise, for example, jit bens instead of jī běn for fundamental 基本 and chit dait instead of chī dāi for dementia 痴呆. Then you can use the mnemonic as a hook for another mnemonic. For example, “if you cheat on your diet, you’ll get dementia”. Cheat diet -> chit dait -> chī dāi.
The main drawback is that, apart from being kind of ridiculous, the system also gets confusing if you have any awareness of the lost consonantal codas. For example, under my system, moon 月 yuè would be yuek, and 福 fú would be fup. Etymologically however, 月 is yuet (or even *ngiuæt, if you go back far enough, according to Wiki), and 福 is fuk. These codas are of importance if you also study another CJKV language (月 and 福 are getsu and fuku in Japanese; yut6 and fuk1 in Cantonese; nguyệt and phúc in Vietnamese).
They’re just mnemonics. And like all mnemonics, they’re just a way to get ahead without putting in too much effort. Eventually you still have to do the study.
Linguo... dead. Linguo IS dead 