Are We Good or Are We Weird?

In the Peter Rabbit play, Cottontail has a very simple line "We are always good", which I translated as "我们总是乖的". Whenever my daughter is reading this line, she would sound a lot more like "我们总是怪的". I told her that would mean "We are always weird". We had a great laugh about it.

The characters 乖 and 怪 sound basically the same, except for their tones. The first is a flat (first) tone and the other is a dropping (fourth) tone in Pinyin. When I teach my daughter how to pronounce the words individually, she does it correctly. But when we read that sentence, she just could not get it right.

Then I realized that this is a common pronunciation problem for people who speak English, which is an intonation language. In English, words do not have tones on their own and their tones can change according to their placement in a sentence and the sentence itself. Typically, the tone is rising toward the end of a question ("Are we good?") but falling toward the end of a statement ("We are good."). When an English speaker reads a sentence in Chinese, a tonal language, he/she would still intuitively change the tone in the same way. Therefore we have the incorrect pronunciations.

To confirm this, I had my daughter reading a few different sentences in Chinese:

• "乖孩子."("Good kid."). This is a statement, but the word 乖 is at the beginning of the sentence where the tone tends to be flat. She indeed did well with it.
• "我们乖吗?"("Are we good?"). This is a question, with 乖 near the end. Again, she did very well with it.
• "我们总是乖的". Back to our original statement sentence. She reverted back to mispronounce it!

So, that appears to be the problem. As we proceeded to do more of the Peter Rabbit script, I noticed a few other occasions where she mispronounced tones based on sentence structure.

Once we identified the source of the problem, I explained to her what was going on. It made sense to her too. She would pay more attention to this later. But It will take quite a while to correct, as habits carried over from native tongue are always hard to fight against. But it's okay, we are still having great laughs with her proclamation that we are always weird!