Ma1, Ma2, Ma3, Ma4!
January 28th, 2009 | View Comments
what do the numbers mean after the words in italics? “ri4″ and “dien4″ for example.
Glad you asked! Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the way you say the word is integral to the meaning.
If an English speaker asks, “…ma?” or yells, “MA!”, the “ma” in both cases is the speaker’s mother.
But in Chinese, a word that sounds like “…ma?” means “numbness/pins and needles” while “MA!” means “to scold or yell at”.
This YouTube video does a pretty good job of explaining it:
In the videos above they indicate tone with markings above the vowel. I’ve been doing it with numbers after the pinyin.
- ma1 = mā
- ma2 = má
- ma3 = mǎ
- ma4 = mà
Ma3 is just a bit easier to type than mǎ to make the special character appear.
If you want to practice tone recognition, you can do it with the BBC Chinese Games.
Yvonne posted this on January 28th, 2009 @ 7:24pm in Chinese, Pronunciation | Permalink to "Ma1, Ma2, Ma3, Ma4!"
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Isn’t there also a fifth, neutral tone (albeit one that’s rarely used)?
And thanks for linking to those videos. Thinking of tones in terms of musical notes is a great help in keeping them straight in my head.
Yes. The fifth tone is marked with the number 5 or with no marking over the vowels. The sound of the neutral tone is like a clipped version of the third tone. The neutral tone often morphs into something else during normal speech.
The only example I can think of off the top of my head is 甚麼 (shen2 mo—what). The end of mo gets sort of…swallowed. I’ll need to ask my linguist brother for the technical name for that kind of stop.
The vowel in shen2 mo gets “swallowed” because of the syllable construction. At the end of the vowel, there is actually a silent consonant called a glottal stop, where you literally stop the airflow with the glottis.
The glottis is a valve in your vocal folds. If you say the negation phrase, “uh-uh”, you stop the airflow between the two vowels- you use a glottal stop.
Going back to shen2 mo, the vowel becomes schwa like because of the rising tone in the preceding word AND the glottal stop. This causes the fifth, neutral tone.
Ok, now I want o learn chinese too. Where do I start?
With 你好 (ni2 hao3—hello), of course!