Re: Mandarin aspirated and unaspirated initials

On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 08:54:08AM -0400, Freedberg, Bruce wrote:
[snip]
> Unfortunately it doesn't work that way and I know that by experience. Most
> Mandarin speakers learning French have an extremely hard time learning to
> differentiate voiceless and voiced stops. It takes them years to learn to
> separate two words like "gateau" [gato]: cake and "cadeau" [cado]: present
> in
> speech. I know that by experience, having had Chinese neighbours when I
> lived
> in Paris.
[snip]

You mean, Mandarin-speaking neighbours :-)

My mothertongue, Hokkien, distinguishes both voicing and aspiration. For
example, it has the full range of labial stops: [m], [b], [p], [p_h].
For example, [mA:2] (hair), [bo:2] (no), [po:2] (old lady/grand-aunt),
[p_ho:3] (hug).

Mandarin seems to have quite a smaller set of distinctions.

> ramifications of this discussion for my pronunciation of Mandarin.  I am a
> native English speaker and, when speaking Mandarin, what I believe I am
> doing is incorrectly voicing the unvoiced, unaspirated initials (e.g. pinyin
> "b" and "d" and "g") and correctly not voicing the aspirated ones (pinyin
> "p" "t" and "k").  I aspirate the latter rather heavily, which helps to
> distinguish the two sets.
Not surprising, really. English always aspirates initial unvoiced stops,
so it's difficult for English speakers to pronounce initial unvoiced
unaspirated stops. Somebody prescribed the following method for
identifying if you pronounced a stop correctly:

Hold a piece of paper with one hand over your mouth, and pronounce "top"
and "stop". In the former case, the puff of air from the aspiration will
flutter the paper; in the latter case, it won't. (The 't' in "top" is
aspirated; the 't' in "stop" isn't.) Now it's just a matter of trying to
reproduce the 't' in "stop" without the 's'... :-)

> Does the redundancy of features mean that native Mandarin speakers are not
> going to have much trouble understanding what sound I am trying for, or are
> they just being polite when they assure me that they understand what they're
> hearing?  (note: I don't seem to have any trouble distinguishing the two
> sets of sounds, which seems odd given how much trouble I have in
> consistently pronouncing them).
[snip]

It's much easier to *hear* sounds than to *make* them. For example, I can
tell very distinctly the difference between [o] and [A], but when
speaking, I find it rather difficult to pronounce the two correctly (I
tend to mix them up).

And while I can tell the difference between [h] and [x] easily, I have
difficulty pronouncing them distinctly, esp. when speaking fast.


T

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