Visualization of Common Mandarin Tone Problems by Hong Kong Cantonese Speakers

We summarized common tone problems based on speech data in the corpus. Pitch values for salient tone problems were measured using praat and plotted into tone contours. This section provides Mandarin teachers with in-depth and authentic visual presentation of tone problems produced by Hong Kong Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Instead of determining learners’ tone problems relying on listening, which is abstract, teachers can refer to the concrete visualization of tone to identify learner problems and facilitate their own teaching.

• Tone 3 pronounced as Tone 1
• Tone 3 pronounced as Tone 2
• Tone 3 pronounced as Tone 4

• Tone 4 pronounced as Tone 1
• Tone 4 pronounced as Tone 2
• Tone 4 pronounced as Tone 3