User Comments - kakyoism
kakyoism
Posted on: The Neutral Tone
February 12, 2008 at 8:02 AMchangye Impressive understanding as a Japanese! My nit-picking: "学" in 广东话 (ho), as far as I know, in general there is no ending "k" whatsoever in the family of Chinese languages.
Posted on: The Neutral Tone
February 12, 2008 at 7:55 AMfinally30 You have a good point here. The Taiwanese Mandarin tends to have "polarized" pitches for the 4 tones, if you know what I mean :P
Posted on: 最低工资
February 12, 2008 at 7:36 AMhenning 要=should
Posted on: The Neutral Tone
February 12, 2008 at 8:14 AMaert , That's definitely a right direction. As a Chinese, my own explanation is: if the first few characters of a word are over-pronounced, either in terms of duration or strength, the latter part of that word will be forced into a state that sounds like tonally "neutral", but they are still tonal perse, only gentler. The characters of the true neutral tone are probably introduced in this lesson already (I haven't checked it out myself though). In reverse, if a tonally neutral character is stressed on purpose, it will naturally sounds tonal. So, take 我们(wo3 men) as an example, if you want to emphasize the 们, it has to sound like "men2", partly because neutral tone can't sustain for a period of time, partly because the right component (the acoustic component of character) is 门 (men2), so that it won't sound like any other 3 tones in the set.