Passionate Mandarin
Over the last few days, I’ve become aware of something. As I’m becoming more and more familiar with the syntax of Mandarin and my vocabulary is steadily increasing, I’ve noticed that my Chinese sounds horrible! No, it’s not the tones, I think I can manage fairly well with them by now. It’s something else. I sound like a news reporter (of the classic kind, the ones who delivered news of a massacre without even blinking an eye).
My Mandarin sounds stale, there is no passion whatsoever. I tried recording myself, and when I hear myself saying “I am so happy to see you”, I don’t sound particularly happy at all. I might have said “I hate you”, but I sounded indifferent. And what happens when I try to sprinkle in a little bit of passion onto the words? You got it, the tones go out the window.
The best remedy is to hear how the language is spoken by the Chinese themselves, since they are able to express feelings in a natural way, without having to think about it, as I am doing. Now I’m watching soap operas, chat shows, cartoons, you name it. So far, it seems to me as the tone of the word that is to be emphasized gets slightly exaggerated, perhaps slightly elongated. But I could be wrong.
But if I’m not wrong, if the tone really does get exaggerated, then I run into a new problem: as I am preparing to emphasize a particular word, I lose the tones of the surrounding words. Challenging, to say the least. Probably more so, because I’m trying to achieve this consciously, whereas a natural speaker emphasizes words without really thinking about it.
