Recently I came across an interesting research paper investigating the popular claim that native speakers can still understand Mandarin learners who ignore tones.
The paper is called Knocking tones off their perch: investigating the intelligibility of
Anglophone beginner learners of Mandarin Chinese.
Its author, Robert Neal, coordinator for the Swire Chinese Centre, took secondary school Chinese learners and researched the degree to which their speech could be understood despite tonal inaccuracies.
Perhaps surprisingly, Neal found that “heavily accented tones did not necessarily lead to lower levels of comprehensibility and intelligibility.”
The temptation here might be to conclude that tones don’t really matter that much since we can probably make ourselves understood and get by without them.
But this would be a big mistake.
Dig deeper and we find that the likelihood of being understood with mispronounced tones depends heavily on the word being spoken and the context in which it arises:
“…there are clear differences in the levels of intelligibility depending on
Robert Neal, Homerton College, University of Cambridge
which word is being pronounced…the overall average intelligibility rating for the pronoun ‘wŏ’ (I) is 98.15% while the rating for ‘shí’ (ten) is only 40.58%.”
Intelligibility also varied depending on the nature of the task the children were asked to perform. When “contextual information” was present to aid comprehension, their Chinese was more likely to be understood. They were most easily understood when speaking Mandarin freely in full sentences.
I find it striking how closely this research matches my own experience of being a beginner learner.
As I’ve documented on this blog, I paid little attention to tones when I first began learning Chinese. And one of the main reasons was that I was able to make myself understood without them.
The warnings of educators and advanced learners that it’s essential to get tones right from the start rang hollow as they contradicted my lived experience.
When I said basic phrases like “你最近怎么样？” or “我喜欢学习中文” native speakers could clearly understand what I meant and would respond appropriately.
This, as I found out later, is because at a beginner level, the things we tend to say are so simple, banal and predictable that we can get away with murder.
But problems invariably arise at intermediate to advanced stages. At this point any learner who wants to express themselves beyond predictable platitudes will run into serious issues if their tones are off. This is especially true if you live or work in a Chinese speaking environment and need to communicate specific, context independent information effectively.
For example, if I want to tell a shopkeeper that I’d like to buy 10 apples but I pronounce 十 with a fourth tone instead of a second, there’s a strong chance this will be misunderstood as meaning 四 (four). Over time, these sorts of misunderstandings take their toll and become incredibly frustrating.
I know because I experienced it. At an intermediate level, the more I ventured to speak the more frequently misunderstandings occurred. This affected my confidence badly: there’s nothing worse than the feeling of not being able to communicate clearly in a language you’ve been studying hard for several years.
Eventually, I conceded defeat. The killjoy influencers whose stark warnings about tones I’d ignored for so long had been right all along. I went back and retrained myself to perceive and produce tones accurately, a process I documented here and here.
My advice to other learners who ignore tones would be to think carefully about what you want to achieve in the future. If your ambitions are greater than being able to mutter a few basic phrases badly then the sooner you take tones seriously the less painful you will find them to master in the long run.
Take it from someone who left it very late!
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