Three things that improved my Chinese pronunciation
From years of experience teaching French and English phonetics, I know that often, one simple change in the way we make sounds can improve our pronunciation dramatically. But few teachers – and almost no untrained native speaker – can accurately describe what a non-native needs to change in order to pronounce better.
I studied Mandarin mostly on my own, and like most Westerners, I struggled with phonetics: tones, vowel quality, rhythm, aspiration. I realised how much I was lacking when I had an opportunity to join a singing show on Chinese TV. It didn't happen in the end, but before my interview, I wanted to check that a live performance wouldn't cover me with ridicule, and recorded myself singing a song on my iPhone. "Thick laowai" is a generous way to describe what I sounded like. I used my ear and experience as a singer to correct things, and arrived at significant improvement by focusing on three points.
1. Don't push on your consonants
My first foreign language is German. That's what I sounded like: some sort of over-acted mock-Nazi in a bad war movie. From my days of choir training in Europe, I'd learned to articulate my consonants strongly. When I blurred them in Chinese, aiming for the vowel instead, things improved immediately. So, this is the first thing I learned: more vowel, softer consonants.
2. Use your nose
My vowels got more prominent, but they were still largely off. I've been trained as a classical singer, and my rendering of Jay Chou still sounded like Bel Canto practice. One of my goals in coming to China had been to learn Beijing opera and Kunqu, but to my ear, the nasal quality of those singing genres evokes a strangled animal. Not pleasant, at all. Still, I thought there was no harm in trying to sound a little like them. I sang in a nasal voice and suddenly my Jay Chou got a Beijing opera twist. And, it sounded significantly more Chinese. I tried speaking prose, and noted the same improvement.
How do you get a nasal voice? The sound goes through the nose. It's particularly clear when pronouncing a Chinese "i". Imagine a vertical piece of cardboard in the middle of your mouth, then imagine the sound resonating inside a small sphere somewhere between your back teeth and your nose.
3. Use your diaphragm
I always knew my tones were off, but I didn't know why until I listened back to my prose speech carefully. Tones, like all linguistic elements, form a system. Bad tone pronunciation must therefore be a systemic problem.
In a tonal language, changes in pitch carry word meaning, as in the often-quoted 妈，麻，马，骂. All those are pronounced ‘ma’, with tones 1, 2, 3 and 4, meaning mother, hemp, horse and curse. Western learners focus on the difference between tones, trying to use the right one as required. But more fundamental is the difference between marking tones at all and not marking them. We almost never learn about this. From my experience, these changes in pitch require every syllable to begin with an impulse from the diaphragm. To speak better Chinese, give each syllable its own diaphragmatic push.
Concretely: at the start of every syllable, push forward with your diaphragm. To check, put a finger just below your solar plexus -- where your ribs meet at the front -- and push it forward by contracting the very top of your abs. If you do this well, speaking Chinese will feel like a series of small jumps and hops. You will start sounding more like a native, and experience the four tones as different types of dance step. As a side effect, it might even flatten your stomach.