I’ve always had a friendly argument with one of my friends (whose Chinese is wonderful) about the importance of tones.

I have always believed that if you speak quickly enough, the context of the situation will fill in the blanks of any words whose tones have been uttered completely wrongly. To some extent this is true.

I mean come on. The difference between the second and third tones is so slight, it’s impossible not to make the leap in understanding, surely? Well now, thanks to my teacher at Live the Language and my precocious little know-all at home, the truth of the matter is coming through, and it’s not particularly helpful.

<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-3591" title="the four tones" src="http://ltl-chinois.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/4tones-300x180.gif" alt="" width="300" height="180" />Tones do matter. Yet another burden to lug up the mountain of learning Chinese. To Chinese people, words spoken with different tones are completely different words.

They simply do not hear how similar the words are, and this is by no means a shortcoming. The same problem occurs in English – for example the words ‘beat’ and ‘bit’ are impossible to confuse to a native speaker, but my Chinese friends claim they sound identical. It’s all to do with what you have in your own language as a basis on which to start learning another.

But bilingual people, clever devils that they are, have the marvellous gift of not only being able to hear the difference between wrongly pronounced words, they can also understand why speakers of second languages struggle.

They get it.

My little boy is very helpful. He has to be, or my neighbours and friends simply wouldn’t understand me half the time. So he is always chiming in with the right pronunciation when hisbabysitter smiles blankly at something I have just said.

<img class="alignleft" title="chinese" src="http://ltlcdn1.ltl.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/chinese.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" />

‘Oh, I see!’ her face lights up when he explains that although I said I had just bought a new enemy spy, in fact I had acquired a new rug from IKEA. And to a bemused shopkeeper of whom I have just enquired the whereabouts of cat poop, he will explain that we need food for our pet. Those pesky second and third tones again.

I do still recognise more characters than he does, though I am sure this will not last long.

I don’t dwell on the fact that the ones he has learned to write in a few months are better than those I have been practising for years.

So when it comes to homework, I can help him. Sometimes this involves looking for certain characters in a text and writing down their pinyin. Because I invariably get the tone wrong, when I have spotted the right character I also have to tell him what it means in English so that he can say it correctly before he writes down the pinyin. Very, very occasionally I get it right by mere chance. ‘Mummy! That’s the right tone!’ he will exclaim in disbelief. ‘That was lucky!’

I will never get them off pat like a native speaker, but I now realise it is important to try.

And it includes, somehow, nailing that second and third.

[This story was contributed by <a href="http://ltl-chinois.fr/" target="_blank">L</a>TL student Debbie Mason from the UK (Individual one-on-one classes)]