Learn Languages

If you’re interested in tones, you’ll be interested in reading my article on the Universal Tone system found in all Chinese languages and dialects. Since I will assume that most readers are somewhat familiar with Mandarin before delving into Taiwanese, I attempt to draw the parallels between the Mandarin and Taiwanese tone system in this article.

Using the traditional names (with Mandarin and Middle Chinese pronunciations): 平 (ping < bbiañ1), 上 (shang < jjiang2), 去 (qu < kio3), 入 (ru < niëp4); let’s map them out for Mandarin:

	平	上	去	入
陰	“1st tone”	“3rd tone”	“4th tone”	mixed tones
陽	“2nd tone”	“3rd tone”	“4th tone”	mixed tones

Now let’s take a look at the layout of Taiwanese tones to see how they compare in the same chart:

	平	上	去	入
陰	“1st tone”	“2nd tone”	“3rd tone”	“4th tone”
陽	“5th tone”	“6th tone”	“7th tone”	“8th tone”

Notice how the 平 tones in both Mandarin and Taiwanese have the same contours. This means that historically characters carrying these tones will have the same tones in both languages, not accounting for the surface realization of tone sandhi that happens in Taiwanese. But notice how, in Taiwanese, they are called 1st and 5th tones, not “2nd” as in Mandarin, as the counting method is slightly different.

This should also help learners to quickly associate and remember tones as compared with their Mandarin counterparts.

The next confusing thing is that there are two separate 去 tones in Taiwanese. The Middle Chinese counterparts that had voiced consonants at the beginning of the word will carry the lower 去 tone category whereas the unvoiced will carry the upper 去 tone category. Many of those consonants are hard to distinguish in the modern languages, but you’ll still find remnants of this in words starting with l, m, n, bb, and gg.

In the Taiwanese lessons here, I present the tones using the Campbell Universal Pinyin format, which if you’re just typing is to use the contour of the tone in numbers, in other words ‘ma55′ is ‘ma’ in a high flat tone. The format of the presentation in these lessons here is using the actual tone contour graph.

There are two tones: the citation tone and the sandhi tone. The citation tone is how a word is pronounced in isolation or in certain grammatical or syntactical positions in a sentence or phrase. The citation tone will always appear with a vertical bar after the tone contour.

The sandhi tone is what happens when a word is influenced by its grammatical or syntactical position and undergoes a change. The citation tone becomes the sandhi tone, which is a different pronunciation. In these lessons, we use the standard that is used in Chinese dialect publishing of placing the the citation tone first, and the sandhi tone second. The sandhi tone has a vertical bar before the tone contour.

Here is a list of the citation tones in Taiwanese by their traditional order:

1. (55)
2&6. (53)
3. (31)
4. (2)
5. (35)
7. (33)
8. (5)

Here is a list of the citation tones with their sandhi counterparts. Notice that tones 4 and 8 have two sandhi possibilities:

1. (55-33)
2&6. (53-55)
3. (31-53)
4. (h2-53)
4. (ptk2-5)
5. (35-33)
7. (33-21)
8. (h5-31)
8. (ptk5-2)

When you encounter the tone sandhi, don’t read the first tone; read the second one. The first tone is left there as a reference (also it belongs there as part of the word’s inherent spelling). People who are adept at reading Taiwanese in romanization can read citation tone-only text and make the tone changes naturally as they read out loud. After you go through maybe a hundred lessons you’ll probably be able to do this too, but I wouldn’t put that expectation on the student any earlier. It takes getting used to, and the only way you’ll get used to it is by saying the sentences more and more.

Tone sandhi can pose a lot of trouble for the learner of Taiwanese. If you look at the tone sandhi list above, you’ll easily notice that we can split the tones into two groups 1-4 (high) and 5-8 (low). The only exception is where the first tone, high-flat, drops down to mid-flat. Another way to remember how tones change is that in many cases they swap from high to low or from low to high, just watch out for 5 and 7 as these never turn into high tones.

If you’re just beginning to learn Taiwanese, I would say focus first on two Mandarin tones in particular: 1st and 3rd tone. The 3rd tone moves into high gear in Taiwanese, so it sounds like Mandarin 4th tone, or Mandarin 1st tone in front of other words. Now practice moving your 1st tone down a notch to mid-level. You can start practicing with simple words that have 1st and 3rd tones, like ‘train’ 火車 hue-qia or ‘risk’ 風險 hong-hiam.