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Not sure if listening skill to tones in Chinese songs has its own implication, I get the impression that songs are generally harder than daily conversations for a non-native language. To answer the first part of your question: native speaker can not tell the lyrics all the time. One particularly interesting case is the songs by Jay Chou, who is one of the ...

Yes, for example these characters are taken from a Chinese grammar textbook: There are obviously others, but as you can see, it's possible to guess the pronunciation. In other cases, according to the radicals, you can understand if they refer to a certain "topic", for example, the third one in that list is the radical for "water", the last one is the ...

There is a technique I started to use and actually, I've seen it also in other dictionaries, so maybe I wasn't that original... But anyway, the answer is colors! When you're studying new Hanzi or vocabulary, just color each character according to the tone... It's very helpful to remember the tones, because after a while, you visualize the tones in your ...

一 is pronounced in the first tone when it stands alone. It is pronounced in the fourth tone when it precedes a first, second, or third tone. However, it is pronounced in the second tone when it precedes a fourth tone. 不 is a bit similar: It is also pronounced in the fourth tone when it precedes a first, second, or third tone. However, it is pronounced in the ...

As your linked table indicates, the Middle Chinese 陰上 tone generally corresponds to Cantonese tone 2 and Mandarin tone 3, so it is indeed curious that you see both words having tone 4 in Mandarin, which typically corresponds to Middle Chinese 去 tones or 陽上 tones where the syllable onset is an obstruent (全濁聲母). Looking up the characters in the Kangxi ...

Here is a nice short overview on Mandarin tone sandhis: http://web.mit.edu/jinzhang/www/pinyin/tones/index.html If you want to read into the details I have found the following a very good source (from the father of another romanization): "Yuen Ren Chao: A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968, ISBN 0-520-00219-9."

Complete rule of tones change is not a simple subject which can be understood just b a list. But there is a simple one I think might be suitable for you. http://www.trinity.edu/sfield/chin1501/ToneChange.html Plus, if you are a foreigner who want learn Chinese without academic purpose, I think it's enough since many Chinese cannot use tones change complete ...

Looking at 我很好 this falls into the "When there are three 3rd tones in a row" The 我 is one syllable so it falls into this part: If the first word is one syllable, and the second word is two syllables, the first syllable becomes half-3rd tone (˨˩), the second syllable becomes 2nd tone, and the last syllable stays 3rd tone For this 我也很好 this is ...

The rule that applies to sentences also applies to names, that is for a sentence of sequential 3rd tone characters, (Optionally) Split it to phrases by functional groups. For each group, every other character is read as 2nd tone while keeping the last character 3rd tone. 2.1. If a group has even number of characters, the tones become 2,3,...,2,3,2,3. ...

Like others have told you, you might be confused a little bit. First of all, while languages have words made of syllables, Chinese has characters where each character is a syllable. These syllables can be written using the Latin alphabet with some systems, Pinyin being the most common one. Syllables can have 5 different tones: high, rising, fall-rising, ...

No. In songs, most tones disappear. The syllables are sung along the melody of music. We only tell the tone because we can catch what the whole word or sentence is. In songs, usually the melody should be written to convey the tones of syllables (or syllables chosen to much the melody). Mismatch of melody and lyrics can result in misunderstandings. However, ...

(I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, but an avid musicologist and student of Chinese.) I've heard at least some Chinese pop music where the tones are certainly not obliterated, though I think it's reasonable to suppose this happens at least some of the time. My speculation however is that in general something more interesting and complicated happens ...

too many characters can be classified into "形声字", which consists of two parts, one (the radical) indicates the topic the character is referred to and the another indicates the possible pronunciation. xiaohouzi79 shows a good example. But remember, there are some commonly used characters that don't follow this, when you can't read a character, dictionary is ...

Personally I think the IPA given in the Wikipedia page for Pinyin is organized well and the symbols don't change like other pages I've seen, i.e. the browser changes to other symbols ruining the IPA scheme. Like it has been said, the IPA transcription might change in some words endings when you transcribe real speech, so you must be aware of that and know ...

Here is a list for all the pinyin and there correspondence IPA: http://ling.cass.cn/yuyin/english/sampac/sampac.htm You'll need a special font to show the IPA on the page correctly, which is downloadable from the page. This page is in the web site of the Institute of Linguistics, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. NOTE: same letter in different ...

In short: the standard pronunciation is the English pronunciation. There's no Chinese standard way to pronounce English letter (how they are pronounced when they are used as pinyin should not be counted here, I think). Tone does not exist for English letters, as they are English, not Chinese. English intonation should take effect(in English, when 'DVD' is ...

These tone changes, known as tone sandhi, are not indicated according to Hanyu Pinyin rules: 11.1 Only the original tones are indicated; tone sandhi is not indicated. This is why your Google search for "yìnián" would not necessarily yield more results, because it's still supposed to be written as "yīnián" even when it's pronounced "yìnián". EDIT: ...

There is a very interesting phenomenon in Chinese, called 语音变调（tone sandhi). Here are the rules. (Note: all the rules apply only characters in the same word/phrase) Tone Rule #1: 3-3 to 2-3 When there are 2 third tones in a row in the same word/phrase, the first one becomes second tone. This rule is always followed automatically, even though it will not ...

平仄 can not be understood by a Chinese who only speaks Mandarin or some dialects, as I mentioned in my answer to the previous question "Different kinds of writing in Chinese". In mandarin, in many cases, 平 refers to the 1st and 2nd tone. The pattern of 对联 derives from the classic poems, a word-match is enough. Nowadays, we usually write a 对联 at a ...

相 [Xiang1] surname Xiang [xiang1] each other, one another, mutually [xiang4] appearance, portrait, picture You should look into getting a Chinese reader. http://www.loqu8.com has one for free that is really good. It uses the CC-CEDICT dictionary which is really good. If you would like more concrete examples, they're all going to be in Chinese, but there ...

What source do you call authoritative? Any Chinese grammar book and handbook series should explain this at some point. In Wikipedia it is also mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi#Mandarin_Chinese Given that there are these tone sandhi, there are two ways to deal with these. You can either write the original tones, or you can write the ...

I agree with fefe and I would like to show my experience on how to read these acronyms. A native Chinese speaker will read it as he reads these letters in English, however, There is no standard way to pronunce these acronyms. Different people would read them differently, as every one has his own preference (also effected by his dialects,I believe) to read ...

I don't believe there is a standard for it. But from news and gameshows it is quite common to pronounce the first few letters of the alphabet (ABCD..) in first tone as part of a Chinese sentence. For other letters like HXZ that do not go well in first tone, the fourth tone is used. Like I said I don't believe this to be a standard, but a result of people ...

平仄 is not strictly required in modern 对联 but it is in poems some time in history such as Tang Dynasty. If possible, character to character match is preferred. In your example 很 is an adverb for 贵, but 便宜 in total is an adjective. So it's not a good match in characters.

As xiecheng mentioned, tones changes are very complicated, and there is unfortunately little material on subject. Not that you care to this extent, but one can actually "map" tones using audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net). If you do that, you'll see that tones change a lot when they are in sentences and that how and the extent to which a tone can ...

There's no fixed answer how tone sandhi happens when three or more 3rd tone come together. It is still an active research area for linguists. It depends on grammar, speaking rate, and many other things. However, in normal speech, no two 3rd tone would come together (in a word), the first one must change. It seems to be still under debate (among linguists) ...

For people who tell me they "don't get" the tones, or who can say them but quickly forget them, I usually explain them as listed below. I imagine you're well past this point, but the visuals might help remembering them: 1st tone: Sing it -- ♪ 2nd tone: Like a yes/no question -- ? 3rd tone: Low, creaky. -- Still can't think of a good symbol >_< 4th tone: ...

I've been developing and using the TOP (Tonally Orthographic Pinyin) system since 1995. There's a free online converter available at http://www.chinesepronto.com/triple/flashfix.php. The TOP system is redundantly marked for tones: with colors, with capital and small letters, and with the standard Hanyu Pinyin tone marks. The color system is simple and ...

The fourth tone is usually considered low-falling, rather than low-flat. The fourth tone begins just a little lower than where the sixth tone begins. Just start by producing the sixth tone, and then bring the pitch down as low as you can. In terms of tone numbers (a 1-5 scale, with 1 the lowest), fourth tone is usually transcribed as 21, third tone as 33, ...

The pronunciation of 妹妹 (mèimei) could have been mixed up with that of 美眉 (měiméi) due to the popularity of Taiwan TV dramas where the Taiwanese cast tend to pronounce 妹妹 similar to that of 美眉, for example, in shows such as 《星星知我心》. 美眉 (or MM in short) is a term used to describe young and pretty women. This term is to 妹妹 what 葛格 (gége) is to 哥哥 (gēge). The ...