III

The last week we've been concentrating intently on tones. Mandarin Chinese (for those who don't know) has four "tones," which essentially means changes in pitch within the space of one syllable. English, or at least American English, generally doesn't change pitch within a syllable, but from syllable to syllable, going up and down. Of course in Mandarin they are not called syllables. Instead a unit of sound is divided into what's known as initials and finals. Initials resembling what in English are called consonants, and finals resembling what in English is called vowels. As I explain to students when I teach English pronunciation, a vowel is the breath and the consonant is the rudder to steer it (actually I don't use such poetic language when I teach), and so the tones come into play on the final, controlled by the rising and falling of air. As in 西, which in pinyin, the sort of English alphabet version of Chinese, is pronounced "xī," and translated as west, or the West. In pinyin then "x" is pronounced like the /s/ in she, and "i" like the /ē/ in see. Xī then sounds like she, except for the tone, the line over the i that bumps up the pitch a few notches. So instead of she, it's xī, and there is no way to write what it sounds like in English without resorting to metaphor. Meanwhile, the high pitch vibrates the back of my throat, and contrasts with the low vibration of she. I have to stretch my cheeks to get it out.

The tones are tricky to hear. In Mandarin there are four. The first tone I just described. The others involve rising and falling, a / over the letter indicating a tone that that rises like a question, a \/ over the letter indicates a rising and falling, and the \ indicates a falling only, a sharp and quick tone that is easier for me to distinguish than the other two I just mentioned. The first one, the line over the letter described above, is more comfortable to say, like singing a high note. It doesn't bend or drop or demand me to do anything other than raise my voice within the imagined space of a syllable. After three months the child begins to distinguish individual phonemes says the language acquisition scientists. And for the rest of its life it will continue to hone its ability to make finer distinctions of the world around it, from sound to shape to color to faces to voices and then when it gets older, to words to people to things. We get good at specializing and are rewarded for it, each one of us an expert in seeing the things our sense have been tuned to see. When I was a kid my brother liked to fall asleep with the television on, and though I was in another room, and two closed doors away, I could not tune it out, laying awake in rage. Today at the crowded cafe doing class prep for the week I had no problem concentrating. Everyone else was Chinese.

This last week my tutor helped me work on finals. We spent the bulk of two hours repeating the sounds of a - o - e - i - u - ü. Though they may look innocuous on the computer screen, they are quite difficult. Part of their difficulty is that I have to unlearn how I read those letters in addition to learning the sounds. "a" is easy, like "ah," provided I keep my tone up. "o" is like saying "whah" except the top of my jaw is tied to the bottom jaw and I've found that if I take a minute to uncouple them, and only open my lower jaw to make the sound my tutor gives the signal that I've done some thing right. "e" is like "uh" and in the context of the rest of the sounds, when practicing, at first gave me fits but it no longer does. "i" is easy, pronounced like the Japanese video game "Y's," that Aaron, when we were kids, insisted was pronounced /ē/'s, and though I was never really sure, I did it anyway. "u" is like "ooh," but higher in tone and it takes me as second to find the form, my lips rounded and protruding. "ü" is like "eww," gross, except is held longer and vibrates, and doesn't have the e part of eww. My ears then don't work, and instead I rely on my ability to string logical directions together (i.e. thoughts) and the shape of my face; the muscles in my mouth and their memory. If I'm working hard my jaw and lips are sore and my brain is tired. Like and athlete, it seems to me, some soreness is a requisite of progress. Which in this case is a foundation of intelligible and manageable pronunciation upon which I can build the rest of my language skills on. I've been told that this is the way to do Mandarin.