Final summary

Final report of my self-tutorial project

1. What I've worked on
During the past few weeks of my self-tutorial project, I tried to practice my archetype at least once a day. Though my hometown dialect also belongs to the Wu sub-group (The dialect sub-group Suzhou dialect belongs to), there are some major differences that I paid attention to.

My archetype is a clip of a talk show, so I had a hard time trying to keep up with the speed of the speech. Then I decided to break the whole speech into several sentence groups to research the subtle features of the pronunciation. I also used my transcription which is fully transcribed in Suzhou phonetic symbols when I practiced and each time I marked the things that should be improved in the future.

Here are some features I focused on:
~Consonants~
Suzhou dialects pretty much turns all the voiceless consonants into voiced ones:
                                                                         /s/---/z/

辰光【zen-kuaon】 （time） ，人民【zen-min】（people）  ，石头【zah-deu】 （stone）

one exception to notice here: /z/ 's pronunciation varies according to  the position in a word.

                                                                         /t/---/d/
                                   账单【tsan-te】(bill)  ，账台【tsan-de】 (cashier)

~vowels~
vowels in Suzhou dialect are not affected by consonants and there are way too many vowels in Suzhou dialect than in Mandarin Chinese.

Triphthongs is a distinct characteristics and very challenging for me and I noticed some features of them:

                                             /niyɛæ/
我在微博上转发了两条苏州绕口令。
(I posted two Suzhou dialect tongue twisters on my Chinese Twitter.)

a. Triphthongs are often pronounced longer and in 4,5, or 6th tone;
b. they are usually functioned as metric foot and are emphatic;
c. there are usually open-ended.

Velar nasal /ŋ/ also needs constant practice because unlike it is in Mandarin, Suzhou dialect places it in the word-initial position. To me, it almost functioned as a consonant.
Also,  /ŋ/ in Suzhou dialect is more back than normal high, back  /ŋ/ in English.
   /ŋɒ/
庙外一只猫。There is a cat outside of the temple.

~tones~
Tones system is much complicated in Suzhou dialect because we have seven tones.
To practice tones, I used listening discrimination skill to break down the whole speech into small segments.
Tone sandhi phenomenon can be very tricky for me so at first my hypothesis was that Mandarin rules also applies to Suzhou dialect.

2. Related materials and resources:
Since there is no official website for Suzhou dialect, I found a BBS created by Suzhou dialect speakers which including many pronunciation tips, history and slang in Suzhou dialect. http://www.suzhouhua.org/home/
Here is another Suzhou dialect gimmick my friend suggested that I practice for tones, prominence, and intonation pattern. http://youtu.be/F9SB6wfWmi8

3. My final attempt:


~A comparison to the archetype~
I'm satisfied with the consonant and vowel clusters. I have made much progress on triphthongs and velar nasal /ŋ/ because at first I'm very worried about how to fully pronounce triphthongs. However, my tones and intonations still need polishing.

4. Final thoughts

I think breaking down the transcription is helpful to my segmental and supresegmental features practice. Also, it is always nice to turn to my Suzhou dialect speaker friend to listen to some more authentic samples which is produced in a more natural environment.

Speech in the talk show is, according to my friend, a little bit exaggerated to make his points, but I find that helpful for my intonation practice because the stress patterns and prominence are more obvious and easier to distinguish and imitate.

Week 11 prominence, intonation and more practice

Last few weeks, I mainly focused on the segmental features of Suzhou dialect, and this week most attention was paid on prominence and intonations.

As I repeatedly mentioned before, Chinese is a tonal language, which means differences in pitch on the same syllabic unit can signify differences of meaning. In mandarin Chinese, thus, the intonation units are separated by thought groups like they are in English; however, we tend not to use prominence to highlight or place focus on an element because Chinese has "very flexible word order which means the highlighting of information may be achieved by moving various sentence elements to the beginning or end of an utterance" (Celce-Murcia, 2010, p.226). For example:

我下周去俄亥俄出差

 wo xia zhou qu e hai e chu chai.

I will go on a business trip to Ohio next week.

If we wish to emphasize the time of the business trip, we will put the time phrase at the start of the sentence:

下周我去俄亥俄出差

 xia zhou wo qu e hai e chu chai.

NEXT WEEK, I will go on a business trip to Ohio.

However, when I tried to apply these rules to Suzhou dialect, it seems that Suzhou dialect does not follow the pattern. I'm really confused about how Suzhou dialect places its prominence because according to my archetype, the stress is not regularly placed on the sense groups or in order to achieve grammatically coherent structure. For instance, for interrogative sentences, interestingly, some of them are in rising tones and the others are in falling tones, making it even more difficult to distinguish.

I talked to one of my friends who are a born-and-raise Suzhou citizen, trying to figure out the intonation pattern. According to her experience, "I cannot conclude many rules or patterns, all I can say is that Suzhou dialect tends to be in a very high pitch when stressing something and it has a very elegant rhythm like music."

Of course, such description does not help a lot, but she did suggest that I should try to listen to some folk songs (usually without music) and explore the patterns there.

I took her advice and try to imitate the intonation pattern in this folk gimmick and it turned out to be a little bit easier because syllables with pitch 5 occurs in regular intervals.

Here is my practice of the gimmick:

Week 10 intonation pattern and more practice

I started to notice that the general fluctuation of Suzhou dialect is more obvious and complicated than Mandarin Chinese,probably due to the fact that there are more tones and triphthongs in Suzhou dialect.
In order to grasp the intonation pattern, I listened to the archetype while marking the intonation on the script.

In Mandarin Chinese, at the end of the sentence or sense group, the intonation is usually dropping; however, in Suzhou dialect, as we can see in the script, some of the sentences end in a rising intonation which is usually used in interrogative sentences. In addition, contrary to Mandarin Chinese, the pauses between two clauses in a sentence are mainly rising.
Listening discrimination skill really works in distinguishing intonation patterns and helps me focus on the suprasegmental features of the archetype.
Here is my practice trying to imitate the archetype according to the script:




For the following weeks, I will pay more attention to other suprasegmental features and tonal changes.

Week 9 stress and tone sandhi in Suzhou dialect...

English is known to be a stress-timed language which means syllables are grouped into metric foot which contains strongly stressed syllables, lightly stressed syllables and unstressed syllables, causing it to have a regular rhythmic beat while Chinese, to the contrary, is a syllable-timed language with tonal changes as its major characteristics. It means that Chinese has fairly regular stress on each syllable. Thus, when Chinese learners speak English they, as Celce-Murcia said, "tend to stress syllables in English  more equally, without giving sufficient stress to the main words and without sufficiently reducing unstressed syllables.

Also, Chinese language does not have much variations in assimilation, linking, or other connected speech features because we have very clear word boundaries. The situation also applies to Suzhou dialect.

However, as I mentioned last week,we use different pitches and tones to make stress and distinguish different words. For instance, in English lexical stress will result in part-of-speech alternations between nouns and verbs while in Chinese different tones with the same consonants and vowels combinations signals  different meanings. For example, "yi sheng" with both words on first tone means "medical doctor" and if the second word changes into fourth tone the meaning changes accordingly to "the whole life". 

We have 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese and 7 tones in Suzhou dialect.

In certain cases, the tones of syllables will change when they are combined into words or phrases. These tone changes are called "tone sandhi". These changes are not written out in Pinyin, but they are used when we say words and phrases. Here are the sandhi rules in mandarin Chinese:

3 + 3 => 2 + 3    你好(hello) ni3hao3 => ni2hao3

3 + 1 or 2 or 4 => 3* + 1 or 2 or 4, where 3* means a third tone without the final rise 

你听 （you listen!）ni3ting1 => ni3*ting1

yi1 + 1 or 2 or 3 => yi4 + 1 or 2 or 3  一天(one day)  yi1tian1 =>> yi4tian1

yi1 + 4 => yi2 + 4 一面(one aspect) yi1mian4 => yi2mian4

bu4 + 4 => bu2 +4  不是 (no!)   bu4shi4 => bu2shi4

Tone sandhi also appears in Suzhou dialect.

qi 523               qi 44                  

                                      

mi 231                 mi 23                                             

This week's practice!

Week 7-8 Tones and more practice

I focused on the tonal changes of Suzhou dialect in Week 7 and 8.

In Mandarin Chinese, there are four tones:

1. The 'first tone' or 'high flat tone' 
2. The 'second tone' or 'rising tone' 
3. The 'third tone' or 'dipping tone'
4. The 'fourth tone' or 'falling tone' 

The tonal system of Suzhou dialect is a little more complicated than Mandarin Chinese. 

In Suzhou dialect, tones are not exactly as they are in Mandarin and we have 3 more tones.

I tried to match tones in Suzhou dialect with mandarin tones:

Mandarin                                  Suzhou Dialect

first tone                                                 1 

                                                             2

Fourth tone                                            3

Third tone                                              4

                                                             5

                                                             6

second tone                                           7

Here are my demonstration of these tones in Suzhou dialect:

1 yin pin: 开 /kɛ/  to open

2 yang ping: 爬 /bʊ:/ to crawl

3 shang: 水 /sjʊ/ water

4 yin qu: 看/ku/ to look

5 yang qu: 笨 /ben/ stupid

6 yin ru: 只 /tsa/ measure word for puppies

7 yang ru: 白 /ba/ white

Here are some more practice focusing on consonants and vowels I mentioned last few weeks: