Voicing b d g sounds if your language lacks them e g Chinese accents ep 5

Chinese accented English might say it's not good. It's bad instead of it's not good It's bad with a cut or a bus sound instead of a new or a bus sound. Hey amazing people Welcome to today's podcast. We're gonna be talking about a little accent feature that I've always subconsciously Recognized having grown up in a primarily Chinese speaking environment being exposed to Chinese Specifically Cantonese accented English This is about the sound bud and gun how they are substituted in Chinese accents as butter and cup Although this feature is an accent feature of Chinese accent in English We'll also talk about the concepts that govern Why it sounds the way it is such as voicing which applies to all like it just so happens that Chinese doesn't have Voicing for these particular sounds but for other accents other languages. They also have voicing issues. So We'll talk about that as well and we'll talk about exercises about how to practice voicing as well as how you can predict or self-diagnose what features you might have issues with and So you should stick around one of the more subtle features of a Chinese accent that you might not realize is a fairly simple one The fact that there's no bud or guh sounds. That's right There's no voiced plosive sound buh-duh and guh in Chinese accents Specifically Mandarin and Cantonese which are the most common types of accents you'll encounter Instead of the bud or guh sounds you will get a voiceless But the or cup and that's why Chinese accents might instead of saying I have a dog with the duh sound They might say I have a dog With a voiceless duh sound. Do you hear that? I have a dog versus a Chinese accented I have a dog or instead of saying I need to go with a guh sound You might say I need to go with a guh sound or Chinese accented English might say it's not good It's bad instead of it's not good It's bad with a guh or a buh sound instead of a nguh or a buh sound for good and bad Do you hear the difference? I'm gonna repeat the words a couple more times so you can hear it good versus good bad versus bad good good bad Hopefully you could hear it now the difference as I've mentioned before is voicing Chinese languages often do not have but the guh sound which are known as voiced plosives Instead they have two sets of voiceless plosives with one set having Aspiration and the other not having aspiration. So instead of what you might get in romance languages like Spanish or Slavic languages like Russian Like contrast between the sound buh and buh in Chinese you'll get buh and puh or instead of getting a Guh and guh you'll get guh and cuh or instead of duh and duh you'll get duh and tuh So that's how Chinese languages typically operate. They usually have a voiceless unaspirated Plosive like but the or guh and then a voiceless aspirated plosive puh, tuh, and cuh and There's a few that have the voiced version as well. Although for the most common ones you won't have it and that's why they substitute the Buh, duh and guh sounds you get in English and other languages like Spanish and Russian With a harder sort of a harder sound like but the or guh instead of buh, duh or guh Let's review voicing again, and we can learn how to create this effect this concept of voicing Voicing is the vibration of the vocal cords in your throat when you make a particular sound You can actually feel this. So place your hand on your throat Got it. Now say ah Do you feel it vibrate in your throat? That's voicing. That's your vocal cords vibrating that means that the ah sound is voiced because when you say ah You can feel it vibrating here Vowels, however in the vast majority of languages including English and Chinese Are voiced so you can try it with ee and ooh as well. Try it Or You can feel it vibrate. Those are voiced Sounds. Now, of course, it's not just vowels that are voiced. You also have consonants. So in English you got zzz or vvv You got As well, you can feel those are vibrating and English also as well as Spanish and Russian and a lot of European languages have the voiced plosive sounds like muh, duh or guh Chinese however doesn't have that although Chinese as I said before does have voiced vowels and that's pretty typical I think I can't think of any languages that don't have voiced vowels But if you can think of any do comment them below because I'd be curious to know I can't think of any languages that have voiceless. Anyway, Chinese does not have Voiced plosives which are sounds that have a explosive sound. That's why they're called plosives So you block the air from escaping your mouth with some sort of articulator like your tongue or your lips So you're blocking the air then the pressure builds up like when you say puh, you're actually building up pressure and then you release it and That creates a Plosive sound that's the build of a pressure plus the release So for example, buh and puh both of them are plosives made with the lips They're bilabial plosives. Bi meaning two and labial meaning lips so bilabial plosives because you're using the lips to block off the air to create the Puh or a buh sound when you build up that pressure and then release it. We can try it in slow motion So try to build up that pressure in your mouth Put your lips together put them together and then have air try to escape but don't let it escape because you're building up the pressure and then finally Release it. So if you're listening to the podcast, you won't be able to see this, but let's try it together Right building up pressure Release. All right. So that's that's a plosive sound That's the voiceless P sound with a bit of aspiration But that is a plosive sound now You also have it for the B sound which is voiced Which as I mentioned before as you remember you might remember there is vibration in the vocal cords so when you do this you want to say But there's a kind of a rumble before the release so you can hear maybe if you slow down do really slow motion There is a kind of a build-up Buh, okay, that's that's the Voiced version. There's a build-up and that's the vocal cords vibrating that little bit of time when the vocal cords vibrate That is what makes a sound voiced So you should feel a sort of a rumble or a vibration in the throat and potentially the mouth Just before you release it like But let's do this a few times in slow motion but but Let that rumble build up until you can feel that you really can't increase the pressure anymore and then release it but But now increase that speed a little bit because you don't need that long of rumble but but and try not to spit either because it's not a Spitting action and if you're doing that you're probably putting too much pressure and too much effort into it It's just but and so you just kind of speed up until you still have a little bit of that That rumble which causes it to become a voiced sound but but but and so if you're a Chinese speaker trying to sound more native in English or other languages that have voiced Plosives like bada which Chinese lacks then you want to keep practicing this until you can really easily do it without thinking But you know you can you want to speed it up so it sounds fluid Natural, but you don't want to speed it up so much Do you just skip that rumble that voicing that is the voicing and that's what causes it to become a buddha sound one more thing This might not be happening for a lot of you, but it might be happening for some of you You don't want the air to be escaping through your nose The air should be trying to escape through your mouth because this is an oral sound if it escapes through the nose it becomes a nasal sound and what you get instead is an M sound like And there's no pressure because the air is escaping through your nose you don't want that you want it to try to escape through the mouth and Create that sound not through the nose which would be and you don't get that pressure now. Let's try saying it in a word bad very slowly bad Speeding up a little bit bad Bad, it's a buff sound you get that little rumble. That's the voicing and they get bad Bad like that and not bad, but like bad so you can hear bad versus bad There's a little bit of a book and you can slow down Speed I think you'll be able to hear a little bit of rumble bad Versus bad and that second one isn't what you don't want because that's more of a Chinese accent Congratulations, that's how you do a voice bus The good and the dust sounds are basically the same though But for those sounds you block the air in your mouth with different parts of your tongue so for example with a Sound use the front of the tongue to touch top and block the air you get Duck duck right and then go use the back of the tongue to block the air in your mouth and you go go Go go go and not go Because that last one which is the Chinese accent does not have any real amount of Rumbling that voicing before the release and caused it to sound a bit off a little bit like a case Sound that you get in in Russian or in Spanish All right So practice this enough and you'll be able to say quick enough that you can still have a little bit of this rumble Which is to say voicing by the way, you might have noticed this but voicing is a continuum So it's not like a computer that's either on or off but rather like a light bulb with a dimmer switch as you turn it on Slowly the light might not completely fill the room and so it becomes completely bright It might still feel dark even when the lights are on But at some point as you're turning that light switch there You're turning that dimmer becomes brighter and brighter and brighter and some point you're like, okay The room is now right so you can see that it's like a continuum like that right voicing might be completely Lacking then there's a little bit of voicing but it might still feel like it's voices and at some point it becomes Voiced and different languages have different thresholds Of whether it's a voiced or voiceless sound at some point they consider the voice sound or a voiceless sound similar to the light Well, you know at some point it's lit enough and beyond that it's kind of dark it may be different from person to person and it is different from language to language and Listeners will subconsciously or consciously identify sounds as being either voiced or voiceless Just like we can tell if the room feels dark or bright the lack of voicing in Chinese Plosives like but yeah, it's slightly less voiceless than the Spanish or Russian But and cuh, but it's way more voiceless than they're booked and good Which is why it feels like a fata or cut sometimes to the ears of speakers of those languages English's voiced Buddha and go sounds are slightly less voiced than other languages, but a lot more voice than Chinese So finally, let's talk about how you might identify these potential issues in your own accent A lot of this knowledge deals with phonological in this is the set of phonemes I use sounds that are used in the language. You can often find a list of these on Wikipedia Just type in language phonology like Spanish phonology or Mandarin phonology it will often show you a set of symbols in the IPA the international Outlet that will tell you what sounds exist and if a sound exists in your target language, let's say English Maybe you're learning English and this sound doesn't exist in your native language You'll likely substitute it with something else For example, the first sound is super rare among world languages and speakers of various languages may substitute it with tough or stuff So you might get instead of thank you. You might get thank you or thank you If you look at Mandarin or to Cantonese phonology, you will see that the phonology lists No, but duh or duh sounds which predicts correctly that these speakers will often Substitute the buh-duh and guh sounds with buh-duh and cuh the voiceless versions Funnily enough this reminds me of the first time I watched avatar by James Cameron With the blue aliens if you've seen that movie, I think a lot of you probably have the alien Na'vi People the Na'vi people and the aliens Had a sort of Na'vi accent, which was very well done because while watching the movie I had no idea. It was actually a real language Real as in it was created with linguistic principles But I was thinking wow it it sounds so real and based on the accent of Natiri one of the aliens When she said the word rider like someone who rides a horse in that case that riding this flying animal based on how she pronounced rider as right there I Predicted that the language would like Chinese lack the voice but the guh sounds because when she said rider It didn't sound like a D to me. It sounded like a duck sound like it like a Spanish T or a Russian T After the movie, I immediately went to Wikipedia and I discovered that the language had in fact been designed by a real Linguistics professor and it indeed lacked the buh-duh-guh sounds So I think this accent was very plausible and realistic since it followed all the expected accent substitution at least the ones I noticed Anyway, so today we've learned about voicing and how Chinese accents may substitute buh-duh-guh sounds for the voiceless version of That sound namely buh-duh-uh-guh. This applies not only to Chinese speakers speaking English But also Chinese speakers learning other languages such as Spanish or Russian. And so if you're a Chinese speaker that does this Then I Hope this helps and I hope this helps for the rest of you listen to this as well as we also touch upon What voicing is and a lot of languages have different voicing rules than English does So if you've enjoyed this episode I'd love for you to subscribe and give it a review wherever you listen to your podcasts and until next time amazing people Let's make your accent amazing