Drilling the third tone in Mandarin
[
My Mandarin pronunciation is passable, but inconsistent, particularly the third tone. This tends to surface when I haven’t spoken it in a while and particularly when I am not focusing, which tells me the skill is somewhere there, but not yet effortless. Not yet mastered.
Usually, it isn’t the third tone in isolation that trips me up, but in combination with syllables of a different tone.
Here are some examples:
- 股票 [gu3piao4] stocks (3rd followed by 4th)
- 笔记 [bi3ji4] notes (3rd followed by 4th)
- 上涨 [shang4zhang3] to rise (3rd followed by 1st)
I sometimes trying to emphasize a word by dragging out its length. This sometimes makes a third tone word sound like a second tone.
A native speaker gave me this feedback:不要把第三声拖得很长. It doesn’t need to be exaggerated. Instead, it should be relaxed, short, but clear.
When drilling core pronunciation building blocks like this, I find it helpful to practice saying words to Siri on my iPhone.
Archive
chinese tang-dynasty-poetry 李白 python 王维 rl pytorch numpy emacs 杜牧 spinningup networking deep-learning 贺知章 白居易 王昌龄 杜甫 李商隐 tips reinforcement-learning macports jekyll 骆宾王 贾岛 孟浩然 xcode time-series terminal regression rails productivity pandas math macosx lesson-plan helicopters flying fastai conceptual-learning command-line bro 黄巢 韦应物 陈子昂 王翰 王之涣 柳宗元 杜秋娘 李绅 张继 孟郊 刘禹锡 元稹 youtube visdom system sungho stylelint stripe softmax siri sgd scipy scikit-learn scikit safari research qtran qoe qmix pyhton poetry pedagogy papers paper-review optimization openssl openmpi nyc node neural-net multiprocessing mpi morl ml mdp marl mandarin macos machine-learning latex language-learning khan-academy jupyter-notebooks ios-programming intuition homebrew hacking google-cloud github flashcards faker docker dme deepmind dec-pomdp data-wrangling craftsman congestion-control coding books book-review atari anki analogy 3brown1blue 2fa