Mandarin - a very tonal language

Much has been written about the (awful) four tones of Mandarin Chinese but never really have I felt that my personal experiences were reflected truly in any of those writings. That is very possibly due to the fact that everyone indeed has a different experience mastering the tones, however, I still wish to quickly address the way that I have come to terms with them. There are some who say that studying a foreign language with a native speaker of the language to be studied has its own hardships. I believe this to be both true and not. Considering the studying of the tones, however, I must say that I have been confused more than helped by many of my early Chinese teachers at university – all of them native speakers. At some point I simply stopped caring and it was only after two years of living in the country and many misunderstandings that I had that sudden epiphany. It started with the simple word “xing” which if pronounced using the second tone means as much as “ok”, “alright”, “good” – something affirmative. I could actually taste saying it right. It did taste good. And the funny thing was that I did not even try. And that was at the heart of my epiphany. As a western foreigner, if you do not try to pronounce the second tone consciously you tend to actually hit it. This, I believe, is due to the untonal nature of western languages (Germanic, Latin, Anglo, Slavic) which, if you tried to enforce a tonal system on them, basically use the second tone a lot. Without even trying, the second tone should come quite naturally to many western foreigners. The remaining three tones are beautiful because they are so very much over the top. It is almost like singing. Tone one is the constant hum, almost like a tinnitus after an AC/DC concert, tone three is the one where your voice goes on a rollercoaster dip and tone four is the tone angry Chinese women seem to use throughout when screaming at people. Of course, we must not forget about the neutral tone which in my opinion has not yet really been analyzed and classified correctly. Maybe we should forget about it until further notice… So long Sam.