more on tones -- a myth buster episode

I am learning Chinese for more than four years now. Yesterday at the lunch table, I talked to my classmates using simple words. I still remember when I learned the word for "I" on the very first day of speaking Chinese. And guess what!? I am stilling pronouncing it wrong! My class mate had to correct me, because my tone was wrong. It's wo3, not wo1 or wo2 or whatever. Same happened a day ago, when I asked a food vendor in the street whether he has anything sweet. It's tian2. Saying tian1 only yields a blank stare from the Chinese person.
Yesterday, a friend told me that the ability to hear tones might be related to musicality. People with some musical talent or practice seem to be much better at it. Being very bad at singing and the like, what could discourage me more? Also, in my first couple years of learning I did pay no (or not much) attention to tones and then when I started I had a bad understanding of tones. It's a bad start, but I am determined to make progress!

There are several ways to explain tones and I think that some are just counter-productive. In this post I want to explain which explanations I think are useful and which are bad. Before I start I should add, that some people can probably hear the different tones when (slowly) spoken to them and can reproduce them just by repeating what they heard. Those people do of course not need any explanation on how to do it! Except of course, they are asked on how to do it. I think that's exactly what happens when I ask a Chinese person about tones. They will most likely give a wrong explanation just because they themselves never needed one. They will just repeat what they have heard...

Now, first of all, the myths:

• The biggest myth in my opinion is that the ton accents of pinyin or zhuyin describe the tones. Because they don't! The accents are merely symbols for the tones (just like Chinese characters are symbols for words and parts of words). Although their shape somehow ressembles a change of pitch in the speakers voice, this information is in no way sufficient to properly reproduce the tones.
• Given this first problem, it is of course also counter-productive to try to explain tones by moving your hand up and down following the shape of the tone accents. Such a movement can be used as symbol to convey the information "this is supposed to be nth tone", but it does not explain how this tone is properly said, either.
• Myth: "The first tone is the standard tone, just said as if you were normally speaking." That's wrong and the truth is: "The first tone has a higher pitch than any other tone." The only true part about the first statement is that the first tone is the only one with a constant pitch. But it's a constantly higher pitch and that matters.
• Myth: "The second tone is just like as if you were asking a question." That's actually true: the raising tone is used in Western language to indicate a question. But this explanation falls short of explaining the difference between the Wester-language question-tone and the Chinese raising tone. The problem is that the question-tone applies to an entire ending of sentence, which can be one syllable or more, while the Chinese raising tone (like any other tone) only applies locally to one single syllable.
• Myth: "The third tone falls and then rises again." That's actually quite true, but it is not the most helpful explanation. More helpful is to say that the third tone is actually the one with the lowest pitch and when trying to say it, we can safely omit the falling part, start very slow and then raise the pitch. This way it is actually raising just like the second tone, but overall the pitch is lower. When the teacher in the beginner's course here in Taipei gave that explanation, it felt like a revelation to me. Finally I was able to understand why the tone sounded somewhat different from what I thought it would.
• Myth: "The fourth tone is pronounced as if you were very angry. And it's always very short and abrupt." Well, for the anger, the same caution applies as for the trick with thinking of the second tone as a question. Concerning the fact that people always pronounce the fourth tone short and abrupt I am still puzzled. They always do it, when they want to show me how fourth tone is pronounced, but in normal speech I can not find the same pattern. 

Here is an image from "Reading and Writing Chinese" which I think explains the tones better than fore-mentioned myths. Since it is a book about reading and writing this does not promise too much, but I find it's a good start.

As for me, I now need much more practice...