Thankfully, I like my Mandarin teacher. Her name is Tae Jin Kim and she’s not only funny, she’s wonderful at explaining things. She has us doing the equivalent of jumping jacks and cartwheels with our tongues during our first class, and it was amazing to learn how to make new sounds.
I’ve added to my lexicon the words labials, alveolars, dental sibilants, retroflexes, palatals, velars, all descriptions for what to do with your mouth while speaking. As far as voicing sounds, I learned what unaspirated and aspirated stops, nasals, fricatives and voiced continuants are. Who knew I’d learn a ton of new English while learning Mandarin? Here then is my explanation of each from a Mandarin point of view. This list starts easy and gets REALLY hard.
Labials: No you perverts, not labias, labiALS. That’s when you bring your lips together to make a sound. The unaspirated form would be the letter “b”. Say buh…notice how your lips come together but you don’t use a lot of breath. The aspirated form is “p”. Note the air. When you voice it up through your nose, the nasal, you make an “m”. Put your upper teeth against your lower lip and blow, and you have the fricative “f”.
Alveolars: Touch the tip of your tongue against the hard palate behind your teeth. Unaspirated: “d” Aspirated: “t” Nasal “n” No fricative, but “l” is the voiced continuant.
Dental Sibilants: Basically represents sounds through your teeth. Unaspirated “z” Aspirated “c” Fricative “s”
Velars: The back of your tongue hits the back of the soft pallette. Unaspirated: “g” Aspirated “k” Fricative “h”
Palatals: The middle of your tongue pushes out against the hard pallette ridge. Unaspirated: “j” (sounds like jeeeee) Aspirated: “q” (pronounced cheeee) Fricative: “x” (sounds like sheeee)
Retroflex: Holy shit, this is a hard one. Your tongue has to make a bowl shape and the air passing over it has to create a certain flow to get the right sound. I’ve heard LOTS of Mandarin speakers at work, so I knew the sound. But pronouncing it is HARD The Unaspirated is a “zh” sound but it has a soft “r” mixed in because of your bowl shaped tongue. So it kind of sounds like “zzzzhhhhrrrrr” Aspirated is “ch” but again with the “r” so it’s like “chrrrrrrr” There’s no nasal, but the fricative is “sh” which is like “shirrrrrrr” and the hardest is a cross between a German throaty “r” mixed with the bowl tongue sort of like “rzhrrr”. Nobody got the retroflex sounds right until a few minutes of trying to make them. They are the second most difficult sound we learned that day.
The MOST difficult was the ü sound. First you have to pretend you are saying the sound “eeeeeee” Then, while saying it, close your mouth and shape it like “ooooooo” but while saying “eeeeee”. I think French and German have the same sound, but it’s VERY difficult to catch. I barely got it, but I can’t summon it at will. It takes some planning with my mouth parts.
If those sounds weren’t bad enough, that was just the INITIAL tone list. Which means that sounds in Mandarin could just start with those initials. No mention of finals yet, but I’m sufficiently thrilled that they’re on the way.
We learned a few words to couple with our sounds. Remember my post about the four tones a fay or two ago? All those initials I described can take one of those four tones, or a flat sound, so that’s five tones. If you did the math, pretty quickly you discover that five tones times six vowel sounds times all those initials comes in around 500 and some odd sounds.
And that was only the first class.
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Idol was short and sweet at the Closet. I haven’t listened to the recording yet, but I will have to pull together a quickie update and get something produced.
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Texas is still burning. Mm hmm. Yep. Still burning.
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