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flameproof -



Quote:

I don't quite understand why it doesn't make sense. Surely it is entirely possible to learn
mandarin just by listening up to quite a high level.

who said you can't? Kids can speak good Chinese before the ever see the first character. Lots of
folk in China can't read and write, still, can talk.



Quote:

In my view you can learn tonal languages by listening just as you learn other languages.

All languages are tonal, ok, except sign language. If you don't use tones you speak like PC
generated sound.



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HashiriKata -



Quote:


Originally Posted by flameproof

All languages are tonal, ok, except sign language. If you don't use tones you speak like PC
generated sound.


This is a very new concept of tones (a clearly mistaken one, of course! )










flameproof -

HashiriKata
Spoken language is always sound. You can pick up tones perfectly by hearing. In fact, many Chinese
don't know tones at all.










roddy -

Many English speakers don't know that you make 'th' sounds by putting your tongue slightly forward
of your teeth. That doesn't stop Chinese learners of English struggling to make the sound
inordinately grateful when you explain this to them. Sometimes they're so happy they don't even
say sankyou.










OneEye -



Quote:

Many English speakers don't know that you make 'th' sounds by putting your tongue slightly forward
of your teeth. That doesn't stop Chinese learners of English struggling to make the sound
inordinately grateful when you explain this to them. Sometimes they're so happy they don't even
say sankyou.

Precisely. There are sounds in Mandarin you just can't learn by simply listening. I've never met
anyone who claimed to have learned English just by listening who didn't have a strong accent due
to pronunciation issues.

bomaci,

It just makes no sense to skip studying the tones. Your argument seems to be that you can learn
just by listening, and I haven't disagreed with that. I just don't think it's the best way to go.
A little studying makes things so much easier. Sure, listening is important, but I think you'd be
impeding your own progress by not studying a bit. And like I've said, a few hours of studying the
tones and pinyin can save a lot of time and headache.

Thanks for the IME recommendation, though.










flameproof -



Quote:

you just can't learn by simply listening

Children learn by listening. You can really ignore tones completely when you just listen, because
you simply copy. As long as you copy correct you are 100% accurate.










xiaocai -



Quote:

Children learn by listening.



Quote:

Kids can speak good Chinese before the ever see the first character

I think kids are different from adults in terms of "picking up a language", and quite obviously,
this forum is not for children who are interested in learning Chinese...So the analogies might not
be very appropriate here.
Kids have the gift for imitation but will start losing it when growing up. So that is why there
are "native speakers" and "non-native speakers".

Even for those "semi-native speakers" like me whose fisrt language is not mandarin, the fisrt
Chinese classes would be 四声 and 拼音 in primary school (maybe this is taught in kindergarten
now). And we did have to memorize quite a few rules and practice everyday...










roddy -

To say that kids learn by listening is a major oversimplification - they listen and also speak and
get huge amounts of feedback on the speech. There's also theories of critical periods for language
acquisition; and the fact that (most) adults have the ability to learn in additional ways that
children just don't have.

Quote:

As long as you copy correct you are 100% accurate.

Obviously. It's the copying correctly that's the problem.










flameproof -



Quote:

Obviously. It's the copying correctly that's the problem.

I agree to some extend. You have to be aware that you need to have some accuracy. But that's the
way to go.

To learn tones with no context is meaningless, dead boring and for me impossible.

(OK, when I look up a word in Pleco I look at the Pinyin tone marks and use them, but I prefer
listening)










OneEye -



Quote:

Children learn by listening. You can really ignore tones completely when you just listen, because
you simply copy. As long as you copy correct you are 100% accurate.

Actually, what you quoted from my previous post was not about tones, but pronunciation issues.
There are some consonants in Mandarin that simply don't exist in English (the retroflexed i, r,
sh, zh). And, like I wrote earlier, there are also some pairs of consonants that sound the same to
an English-speaker's ear, but are actually different sounds in Mandarin (zh/j, q/ch, and x/sh).

It becomes difficult to distinguish these sounds when you don't hear them in your native language
and you never say them. A child can hear these and imitate them, but an adult has more difficulty
because he hears a foreign language through a "filter" of his own language. After some explanation
and training, it's possible for him to differentiate between the sounds and to produce them on his
own, but it would be very difficult to just get it right by listening only.

Sure, if you can copy 100% correctly, no problem, but I have a very hard time believing anyone can
do that without studying it. I have a highly trained ear as a professional composer and music
studio engineer, and can hear things in music that 99.9% of the population never could (my success
depends on it), and I had trouble hearing the difference between these sounds until I used the FSI
Pronunciation and Romanization Module. And it's precisely because I had no exposure to these
sounds and that I was hearing through an American "filter" that I had these problems, and I really
believe that no amount of listening to dialogue would have fixed this. But within a few days of
spending one hour per day on the FSI P&R Module, I had no trouble at all with pronunciation,
tones, transcribing pinyin, or anything related.

Back to my original point: I'm sure that you can learn Chinese to a high level without studying
pinyin, tones, proper pronunciation, or any of that. I never argued against that, though you and
bomaci seem to be trying very hard to convince me of it. My argument is that it's not a good idea,
considering the bang for the buck you get from studying it. It just doesn't seem to be a smart way
to go about it. And, boring or not, it's only a few hours, and the payoff is more than worth a
little boredom.

So, if you can explain to me why it makes more sense not to study it, please do. I'll admit I was
wrong. But don't just tell me that it's possible, or that some people have done it. That's
irrelevant. Reportedly, Stan Getz couldn't read music, but that doesn't mean I'm going to tell
every kid that picks up a sax that they shouldn't bother learning to read music. Listening is
extremely important in jazz and language, and I'm not discounting that, but it isn't the be all
and end all. Studying stuff on paper builds skill and knowledge that will help tremendously when
it comes to actually producing sound.












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