{"id":5891,"date":"2019-11-18T21:55:58","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T21:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/business-chinese\/lesson-002-the-tones-of-chinese-language\/"},"modified":"2019-11-18T21:55:58","modified_gmt":"2019-11-18T21:55:58","slug":"lesson-002-the-tones-of-chinese-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/de\/lesson-002-the-tones-of-chinese-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson 002 The Tones of Chinese Language"},"content":{"rendered":"
M: Welcome \u6b22\u8fceto LCN. \u6211\u662fML I’m ML, woshi ML.
S: \u6b22\u8fce\u5927\u5bb6, woshi S. Let’s quickly revise what we did in lesson 1.
M: Well, first, Chinese has four tones. Stuart?
S: 1,2,3,4. You say it at home. 1,2,3,4. Remember, flat, rising, down and up, and down. And remember, different tone, different meaning
M: And Chinese has many classifiers, like tiao for long, thin things. So, for example, it’s one tiao snake, two tiao snakes etc., or one ge person, three ge people.
S: There are lots of compound words, like fire chicken \u706b\u9e21 turkey, and fire mountain \u706b\u5c71volcano. And we use pinyin to write down the sounds with the abc.
M: One thing a<\/em>bout writing Pinyin. To show what tone a word is, we put a small horizo<\/em>ntal dash over the vowel part to show it’s 1st tone, a small line going up 45 degrees from left to right for the second, one going down and then up for the 3rd, and one going down from left to right for the fourth.
S: Some sounds don’t always have a tone. They are pro<\/em>nounced lightly, with no particular stress, like \u4e86 or \u5417.
M: Welcome back. Got a pencil and notebook ready? Write what you learn down – helps you to remember. Now for a quick tone practice, and we’ll learn a bit of pinyin, don’t worry a<\/em>bout the meaning. First, your ears must get used to the sounds of Chinese.
S: Guess how XI is pronounced? XI. It’s xi. So the X is not pro<\/em>nounced X, it’s more like "she". Now for XI in the four tones. Don’t forget, you must try to repeat everything we say in Chinese.
M: X\u012b xí x\u01d0 xì. Again, all together. X\u012b xí x\u01d0 xì.
S: Hear the difference? One more. XIAO. So it’s XI, with AO on the end. The AO is pro<\/em>nounced \/au\/, so XIAO is pro<\/em>nounced xiao. In the four tones:
M: xi\u0101o xiáo xi\u01ceo xiào. All together now, xi\u0101o xiáo xi\u01ceo xiào , Again\uff0cxi\u0101o xiáo xi\u01ceo xiào. Very good, \u5f88\u597d\u3002
S: As we said, it’s im<\/em>portant to hear the difference between the tones, so we’ll practice a few more. Don’t worry a<\/em>bout meaning. Get used to the sounds of Chinese first. And you MUST repeat them with us. How a<\/em>bout the sound \/a:\/, easy pinyin, it’s spelt A. Ok, a in the four tones.
M: \u0101 á \u01ce à. All together, \u0101 á \u01ce à. Again, \u0101 á \u01ce à. Very good, hen hao.
S: And another sound. The pinyin is AO, and, remember, it’s pro<\/em>nounced ao. So, here we go.
M: \u0101o áo \u01ceo ào. All together. \u0101o áo \u01ceo ào. \u0251
. Again \u0101o áo \u01ceo ào.
S: \u5f88\u597d very good finish to the lesson. We’ll see you next time. Until then, \u518d\u89c1.
M: Zai jian.
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