Whilst I’m persevering with learning Mandarin from Rosetta Stone and a Lonely Planet Phrasebook I went on-line to the Confucius Institute (the state sponsored Chinese School) to brush up on my tones. From page 6 of Chinese for English Kids:
- Z – pronounced by putting forward the tongue to block the air with its tip against the upper teeth ridge, and then dropping the tip to release the air with friction through the narrow passage.
- C – An aspirated blade-alveolar affricate. It is an aspirated equivalent of [z].
- S – A voiceless blade-alveolar fricative. It is produced by putting forward the tongue tip to a position close to the upper teeth ridge to make a narrow passage for the air to run out through with friction.
- R – A voiced blade-palatal fricative. It is pronounced in position for “sh”, but the friction is soft. The vocal cords vibrate.
I got lost just after C. I was hoping for C as in Cat, or R as in Really hard.
Having looked it up I’m still no wiser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative
UPDATE:
Thankfully I found a better resource. It’s actually C, pronounced tsuh, as in cats…
K is kuh as in cats, and Q is chee, as in cheese.
If anyone wants a copy, it’s Easy Peasy Chinese: Mandarin Chinese for Beginners
You’ll want to add a facebook button to your blog. I just bookmarked this article, although I had to complete it manually. Simply my $.02 🙂
– Robson
I did use Disqus, but being in China it means I need to be running a VPN every time I make a tiny change.
Ha, wow, reminds me of the Linguistics Majors in college who used to ask baffling questions to our Mandarin teacher. Do these kinds of ‘descriptions’ really help? 😛
Upper Blade Palatial Fricative. Nice……. Sounds like some kind of massage technique..
I’ve just had a read through your free eBooks – excellent stuff.
I think you explained it well. I’m working with Rosetta Stone Mandarin and I don’t think they go through that much detail (at least not yet) I like Rosetta Stone but they don’t don’t get into too much of the mechanics of the language. I found Rosetta Stone through a college where it’s only $48 and you get access to all the languages and all the levels ( it’s found at http://www.cbcwebcollege.com ). I have to give it a thumbs-up because learning Mandarin is a little trickier than the other languages since I can’t yet read it in order to sound out some words. Even though mechanics might not be its strength, it is easy and it’s fun to use, which is important to me so I will stick with it over the long term. The software remembers me and picks up where I left off. I also like that I can experiment around with the other languages.
I’m persevering with Rosetta Stone, as I can see the logic in learning the language correctly, but I do find it frustrating. Through RS I can construct and say sentences like “the boy is holding a yellow ball” or “the horse is far from the house” and that’s a good start, but for day to day life I’m still reverting to a phrasebook for such simple requests as “How much is that” or “What is this called” and the like and I feel that I’m learning more rapidly trying to decode the answers than I am just sitting about studying.
As you say, Mandarin is considerably harder than other languages – I learnt Spanish to a conversational level in 3 months, just by chatting to people and looking up unknown words in a phrase book, but that’s not so practical with Hanzi.