Pinning down the relevant Chinese character: 01

 

(MBP dictionary)  homophones

Quote 

Each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling, for example new and knew.

Unquote

One of the hurdles for a student of the Chinese language is listening comprehension.  

    With reading (unless it’s a flashby image), one can often pause, look harder, search in one’s brain database of Chinese vocabulary, or even go back over the whole sentence to decode or guess the one unknown character or word from the context.

    The English language has homophones too, e.g., see / sea / C [as in Vit.C], which also need the context for decoding the sound.  However, it pales against the Chinese language with its vast range of homophones, made even harder by tone variations.

    In Chinese, there can be one sound in the same tone but with different characters and meanings, e.g., zuò [4th tone] can be 做 / to make, or 作 / to do, or 坐 / to sit.

    A lot of the students I’ve taught over the decades can’t even tell the difference in the tonal variations.  It all sounds the same to them, so that a sound in the first tone can sound exactly like one in the fourth tone, e.g., shū (书 / book, 1st tone) vs shù (树 / tree, 4th tone).  Their mis-pronouncing 树 shù / tree as 书 shū / book is understandable, as they are (mostly) speakers of a language that’s not so tonal (e.g., English), but mis-hearing a sound says that their brains can’t tell the difference even when it’s perfectly pronounced by the teacher or native-speaker.

    A technique in English for distinguishing homophones (especially when there’s no context, e.g., the sound is delivered in isolation: see / sea) is to ask for confirmation, e.g. (spelling out the letters): “S-E-E or S-E-A?”

    The spoken Chinese language cannot be decoded by breaking down a sound into a string of letters of the alphabet (cf. S-E-E / S-E-A above).  

    If it’s face-to-face communication, one can ask for the sound to be represented in written form — this would happen a lot if the speaker has a heavy accent.

    The quicker way, and especially if it’s down a phone line, is for one to resort to association with another character in a well-known combination (a common usage compound of two or more characters; a proverb/set phrase/saying/expression; or a famous name), to arrive at the right image/character.  For example, for the sound zuò (to make; or to sit), one could say,

是做饭的做，还是坐车的坐

shì zuòfàn de zuò, háishì zuòchē de zuò

is it zuò [make] in zuòfàn [“make meal”], or is it zuò [sit] in zuòchē [“sit vehicle”]

    The spoken English equivalent of the above would be for a surname spelt different ways, asking: 

1. (by spelling it out) “Is it Thompson with a p, or Thomson without a p?”; 

or:

1. (by association with a famous enough name) “Is it Thomson as in Thomson Holidays?” (Of course, this won’t work if the other person hasn’t heard of Thomson Holidays.)

    Another spoken English equivalent would be: (by association) “Is it Margaret as in Margaret Thatcher, or Margret as in Ann-Margret?” (Again, no good if the other person has never heard of the latter, or even neither of the two.)