Dreaming in Chinese (7 page)

Bǎo
with the third tone, falling then rising, means you have “eaten your fill.”

Bào
with the fourth, or falling tone, means “a newspaper.” And
bào
also means “to hug or embrace.”

Who knows, with all these versions of
bao
, and just as many for
da
, I may have been asking that boy for anything from a newspaper to a big hug.

Taco Bell in Chinese

English speakers may be surprised to hear this, but English actually has tones, too. Tones in English don’t change the meaning of a word, as they do in Chinese, but they can change the meaning of a whole phrase or sentence.

You’ll recognize this: If you say “We have to gó?” with a rising tone at the end of the sentence, the meaning of the whole sentence is understood as a question.

If, by contrast, you say “We have to go” with no tone or “We have to gò” with a falling tone on “go,” the sentence is understood as just a statement. (Stress also adds nuance to the meaning; if you put a lot of stress on the word “go,” you add a sense of urgency.)

If you answer the question “Do we have to go?” with a simple “No,” you can play with tones to shade the meaning of your answer, too. A falling tone on “nò” is pretty straightforward. But if you pronounce “nǒ” with a falling-then-rising tone (like the third tone in Chinese, which seems to have a kind of gravely-sounding pause at the bottom of the dip), it means something more like “No, but … ” as though there could be consequences or complications in not going.

Knowing this helps outsiders understand
about
tones, but it doesn’t help us much in actually hearing tones and pronouncing them. Mastering tones shouldn’t be as hard as in practice it seems to be; there is no physiological or linguistic reason for tones to be so difficult. In fact, more languages of the world use tones than don’t. And many have more tones than Mandarin does; Cantonese has seven tones; Vietnamese and Thai have five.

But mastering tones
is
hard. The only tone in Mandarin that I can easily recognize in daily chatter is the high tone, because it is so distinctive. One friend, a teacher, told me that the high tone is a dead giveaway of a foreigner’s accent; she said the key to pronouncing the tone right is to hold the high pitch steady, and not let it slide off at the end. “Think of it musically,” she said, “like the mi of do-re-mi. Just aim for mi and hold it there.”

Hearing and saying the tones is one thing; remembering which tone goes with which meaning is quite another. Tones are just one more arbitrary thing to learn about Chinese, similar to the conjugations of Latin verbs (
amo
,
amas
,
amat
), the genders of French nouns (
le chapeau, la vie
), or the honorifics of Japanese.

For the first year or so of studying Chinese, I asked lots of people—Chinese teachers, new students, bilingual China hands—for their tricks for remembering which tones to use. I received a creative collection of responses.

First came the Vivid Colors method for learning tones. This is fun in a parlor-game kind of way. First you assign each tone a color. Then as you learn each new word, you visualize it in that color. Artsy types, and those with a Zen-like nature, do well with this method.

I chose a palette of neon Technicolor, inspired by the bright neon lights that dress up Shanghai buildings at night. These assignments seemed intuitive to me: neon green for a rising tone; red for a falling tone; bright yellow like the sun for a high tone; and blue like the waves in the sea for a falling-rising tone.

My system broke down when I could not remember which color I had assigned to which word. And worse, sometimes the meaning of the word was counterintuitive with the color. Take red, for example.
Hóng
(red) is an important word in China. Red channels good fortune and happiness, and it is symbolic of China as a nation.
Hóng bāo
, red envelopes, are given as gifts at celebrations; brides wear red; red is east; and red is the color of China’s flag. Chinese women look particularly good wearing red. In my system, I assigned red to a falling tone, because I think of a stop sign. Unfortunately,
hóng
actually has a rising tone.

So next came the Full Body method. My Chinese teacher Sandy excelled at this. Sandy, like most of my teachers, was in her early twenties. She had fled the rural provinces for a better life in the east-coast cities, studied at college to teach Chinese as a foreign language, and could talk anyone under the table with her mastery of present perfect progressives (“I have been singing”) or resultative adjectives with postpositive placement (“Iron the clothes dry,” where “dry” is the result of ironing).

Sandy uncorked energy during class. Day after day, week after week, Sandy went aerobic—up on her tiptoes for a high tone; deep knee bends with a falling tone; an upward sweep of her arms for a rising tone; a spritely curtsy for the falling-rising tone. She would not fail us; we would master tones!

This method resonated with some of my fellow students, who practiced the anaerobic version, wagging their fingers or arms like a music conductor as they spoke. We were a fidgety class.

I found one word where this method worked particularly well:
yóuyǒng
(rising, then falling-rising tone) means “swim,” as opposed to
yǒuyòng
(falling-rising, then falling tone), meaning “useful.” I visualized swimming as the arc of the arm rising out of the water (
yóu
= rising tone) then down for the stroke and back up again (
yǒng
= falling-then-rising tone). But this system doesn’t scale well; it was a lot of work for just one word and was finally exhausting.

Some of my classmates tried the Drinking model. During my graduate school days studying linguistics in Texas, we widely accepted the theory that a few beers stripped away linguistic inhibitions, loosening the tongue and accelerating mastery of foreign languages. In China, Tsingtao beers at the local
jiǔ bā
, or “bar,” served that purpose.

The best time to approach tones, of course, would be at birth. Ah, to be born Chinese and have all this come naturally. But with the good news of effortless tone mastery comes a bit of bad news: Chinese speakers have a hard time
not
hearing tones. That is, for Chinese speakers, tones are so integral that they can’t separate the sounds of the word from the tone of the word.

For example, if a foreigner doesn’t pronounce the tone correctly (like me with
dǎbāo
), a typical Chinese person (boy in sombrero) would have a hard time making the leap to imagine what in the world the foreigner was trying to say. It just wouldn’t occur to him that someone might be saying the word “takeout” when he was hearing the word “hug.” Any more than it would occur to an English speaker that a foreigner might be saying, “I was out in Beijing, and I saw no crowds anywhere!” when he was actually saying, “I was out in Beijing, and I saw no clouds anywhere!”

Tones are sometimes even a problem among the Chinese talking to each other. Although speakers of the Sichuan dialect and of standard Mandarin can understand each other pretty well, they wrestle over the tones, which are different. In Sichuanese, the third and fourth tones are reversed from those of Mandarin.

One Chinese woman, who was fluent in English, told me that her attachment to tones caused a real problem for her when she was learning English. She explained that she was taught English vocabulary in a very rote way, word by word, with each new word pronounced with a falling tone. The students would recite lists: hàt, stòp, etc. She said she had to consciously force herself to make that tone on a word rise at the end of the sentence, as when making a question. For example, if she said, “Do you like my hát?” with a rising tone on “hat” to indicate the question, she could hardly do it. “I knew I was supposed to raise the tone, but I didn’t know how to do it,” she said.

Every foreigner struggling to learn Chinese has humbling and classic trouble-with-tones stories like mine with
dǎbāo
. (I can only imagine how the Chinese relate their versions of these stories!) As one friend summed up the situation: the poor foreigners yammer away with tones all bollixed up so the words and the message remain utterly unintelligible to the Chinese. There must be a metaphor here, he suggested, for the gap between what we think we’re saying and what the Chinese are actually hearing.
⁸

And I think he’s right. I think it’s a metaphor for the fragility of how we and the Chinese are getting acquainted. We stumble along toward each other, well intentioned, I would say, and generally moving forward. But we can unwittingly run smack into a gaffe that flusters our perceptions and interpretations of a situation (the Dalai Lama? The Uighurs? Visas? Swine flu? Trade agreements?) or each other. How could we all be so wrong? The moral here: foreigners should pay attention to tones, and the Chinese should learn to imagine words without the proper tone.

7
Even after the variations for tone, there are still lots of homonyms in Chinese. Many syllables spoken with the same tone—exactly identical to the ear—have different meanings. They are usually represented by different characters in the writing system.