It is true that when people learn Chinese, the very first, and also the most difficult challenge that they will face is learning the four Chinese tones, which we call them the first tone (ˉ), the second tone (ˊ), the third tone (ˇ) and the fourth tone (ˋ). According to the rules of pronouncing those tones, the first tone is a high and flat tone, the second tone is a rising tone, the third tone drops a little bit and then goes up in the end, the fourth tone is a falling tone.
Some Chinese teachers and websites which are teaching Chinese tried hard and came up with different ideas on how to make learning tones easier, while honestly, some of those worked well, but some didn't. I used the idea to let my student connect tones with certain English words that MIGHT have the similar pitch and tones. For example, the first tone is once compared with the tone of the first part ("may") of the English word "maybe". I guess since there are variations of pronunciations in English under different situations, and also because sometimes we impose our own ideas (Chinese people's ideas) on how to pronounce a single English word, it didn't work really well when I taught my students by using this way. However, if you tell them to try to be angry and think about the word "No!" in English, it helps a lot when they are learning the fourth tone.
If by any chance I came up with this idea, that could be I checked my phone randomly as usual, and went through app to app to kill my boredom. When I stopped by an app called "Voice Memos", which is an originally installed app by iPhone, I listened to the recordings of my own singing and looked at the ever-changing voice range bar and felt it was interesting since I could actually SEE my voice. I suddenly realized that if my students could also see their voice while they are practicing the tones, would that be helpful and how that can help?
The image of the voice bar is particularly controlled by the volume of someone's voice. So the louder someone speaks, the larger range of image will shows up on the voice bar. Ideally, the trend of the images for the four tones would be the same from time to time if someone pronounces certain tones correctly, as long as they use a normal voice consistently. I started testing myself by recording me pronouncing four different tones for several times, and checking if there were similarities or differences between the images from the voice bar time to time. The result that I have gotten from my experiment was, there were actually differences between the images from different recordings, since the volume of my voice had minor changes naturally every time I spoke. Of course, the louder my voice was, the larger range of image was reflected on the voice bar. However, besides the volume, I do see there is a stable trend of the images showed up on the voice bar.
Here is the voice bar image that I got for the four tones (I used the first vowel in Pinyin "a" as the sound to convey the tones)
Image1
After several times of recording with normal volume of voices, I actually got the image as shown on the picture above (image1) as an average trend of voice range for the four tones in Chinese respectively. As you can see, if you speak Natalie, the third tone actually has the lowest sound among the others. The second tone is a little bit louder than the third tone, while still lower than the first and the fourth tones. First and fourth tones seemed always competing with each other, sometimes the first tone might beat the fourth tone, while other times the versa. However, the image of the two tones are kind of stable, where the image of the first tone looks like a man with a beer belly, while the fourth tone looks like a lady wearing a big wedding dress.
Amazingly, there were truly some connections between Chinese tones and the iPhone app. I actually felt pretty indulging when I recorded my voice and saw how it has been converted into images. Sometimes it is boring for middle schooler to practice tones, especially when there is no guidance and they don't know where to go. This app might be a good helper at least make them feel it is interesting to practice. Of course, wether it does can help push forward the tones learning or not needed further exploration, and systematic researches on how to use this method efficiently are also needed.
Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：
1. You may inform your students in advance that they need to bring their smartphones to the classroom for this activity.
2. You may assign a set of sound for students to record, and tell them that they will play their recording and show their voices bars to the class after everyone finishes. Or you can ask students to record one by one, so the rest of the class can be quite for the student whoever is recording. You may NOT ask students to spread out and record themselves or in groups, what they will turn in would be a piece of "TALK SHOW"!
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