7 ms·

Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of ha

Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds and languages like Spanish and Japanese as easy in terms of sounds.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Honestly if you just write characters over and over while listening to Chinese TV you'll be fine. That's how I studied and when I presented in my Chinese class, the two students from Chongqing (who were taking the class to learn traditional characters) were so surprised at my pronunciation their jaws were on the floor.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  You transcribed TV shows while repeating the words as they spoke them? Did you put an inordinate amount of time in or do you think your methodology was just that good?
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    No I just wrote whatever characters we were studying in class that week over and over while I watched streams of Chinese TV. I watched with Chinese subtitles but I didn't actually try to understand every word. It was mostly about framing my mindset towards a Chinese style of speaking and writing. I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.
s4vi0r 10y ago
Just curious, what are some examples of difficult/weird vowel or consonant sounds that you think English has? And why do you think Spanish is easy in terms of sounds? IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.
- cjslep 10y ago
  In English in The South in the USA, often "can" and "can't" are pronounced the same ("can") with a minor difference in the way the "a" and "n" are held.
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    This is not really true. You're probably hinting at the <t> being unreleased. However, it is definitely still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release
  - robocat 10y ago
    And just as badly, "can't" and "cunt" just vary the vowel length without changing the vowel or consonant sounds (in some English accents). Many languages don't use vowel length to signify changes in meaning, and it is obviously hard to teach.
    - c23gooey 10y ago
      This reminds me of Gough Whitlam, former Australian Prime Minister ~1975: ...Gough also took aim at Sir Winton Turbull when the rural MP shouted: 'I am a Country member'. Whitlam quickly responded with 'I remember', which earned an applause from both sides of the house.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  In American English, a lot of vowels are gliding dipthongs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowel... For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly. Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sounds like Spanish to something like 15-20 in English (depending on the dialect), it's hard to keep track of them all and pronounce them correctly [1], especially since English orthography hinders rather than helps you, whereas dipthongs in Spanish are pronounced exactly as they're rendered (e.g. cauda is like ca-u-da spoken fast). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels
huherto 10y ago
> I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds Glad you mention this. I don't think most native English speakers are aware how complex English phonetics are. There are subtleties that only native speakers can distinguish. That is why many not-native speakers mispronounce some sounds. It is not that we are dummy. Our brain is just unable to hear (and produce) the exact sound.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  English is a strange language, but I wouldn't say especially difficult. Chinese is much harder to learn because it's so inconsistent between what you're supposed to say and the way people actually talk. In addition to using tones that are very unfamiliar and then you also need to learn the written language which is very difficult and requires a Chinese-Chinese dictionary for strange words like manticore and sometimes you can't even find them. I'd put English at around Russian difficulty, hard, but easy to get going. English also has the advantage of having a simple character set (less letters than Russian, French, etc) and English also has a ton of cultural artefacts (songs, movies, etc) to sink your teeth into. My problem with Russian (unlike say, French, which I've also studied) is that I can't even find music to listen to that's anywhere close in production value to English and there are a couple of good movies (Leviathan, for example) but you can only watch them so many times. I don't know of a single Russian TV show that is anywhere close to HBO or Netflix quality. I'd love a recommendation though if someone here knows of one.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    Have you considered Soviet film? Pronunciation is usually very clear.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    I can try and guide you around good Russian music, drop me an email to alamar at my.com or friend ilyak on last.fm - that's me. Note that I'm a fan of all things DIY, production value doesn't mean as much to me as actual content. Regarding movies, you can always go for a huge layer of Soviet films. They take some using to I suppose, but then the supply is endless.
irrational 10y ago
The difference is, I grew up learning English ;-) Seriously though, I tried learning Chinese, but for the life of me I couldn't tell the difference between the tones. They all sounded the same to me. I don't know if it's related, but I don't have an ear for music (Music does nothing for me so I have never listened to it by choice). Spanish on the other hand is amazing. I know an handful of languages, but Spanish by far had the fewest oddities. It is amazing how regular it is.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Noun genders and never-ending verb endings are the drawbacks to Latin-based languages, for a second language learner. Perhaps Spanish with a single gender and English style verbs would be the simplest.
- yzard 10y ago
  As a Chinese, when I learn English, first is to notice the difference of the pronunciation for foreign languages, I believe same as music singer, for word "Porshe", french will read "e" as "ei", English just mute, German says in the middle, but that's hard for me to memorize it in the middle, Chinese has same sound as "ei". Brain is not getting use to the iconic differences of the sound. second is to correct pronounce the sound, pronunciation of "th" took me one week to practice, because Chinese does not have "th", only "s", that's why lots of Chinese says "sank you" instead of "thank you", that muscle to pronounce that is simply not trained since was born.
  - khuey 10y ago
    "th" (ð/θ) is definitely the hardest phoneme(s) in English, even for native-speaking children.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      Much to the disappointment of her mother who thought "fumb" was cute, I once taught a 3-year-old how to pronounce "th" by telling her to stick her tongue between her teeth and breathe out. Maybe a similarly position-focused (rather than sound-focused) approach would help non-native speakers as well?
loudmax 10y ago
Maybe "hard" isn't exactly the right word, but it's certainly different. The sounds aren't hard to make, but using the wrong tone is like using the wrong vowel. You _have_ to speak each syllable with the correct tone or people won't understand you. This can be frustrating when you're learning the language because the difference is very subtle if you haven't grown up speaking a tonal language. If you say something that sounds correct to your ears, but native Chinese speakers give you blank stares, it's not that they're being obtuse or dense. They really have no idea what you're trying to say. Also there are relatively few sounds in Chinese, so if you make a mistake, you're likely to actually say something different from what you intended.
- flyinghamster 10y ago
  One thing that I've always wondered about tonal languages is whether they would be easier for musicians to learn (especially if they have perfect pitch) than for non-musicians.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    There's a difference between register tones and contour tones. Chinese Languages (such as Mandarin) are contour toned languages - nothing at all like musical notes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Register_tones_and_contour_tones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Register_to...
jimmywanger 10y ago
In my experience, if you're sorta close in English, you can sort of get your point across, even if you mispronounce words, because the mispronounced word means no sense so you start thinking about a possible explanation. In Chinese, a different tone actually is a valid word with its own meaning, so it's a bit harder for you to get your point across.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  To be fair though, if you nail all the other parts of pronunciation/speaking correctly and only get the tones wrong, a Chinese speaker will be able to infer your meaning the vast majority of the time. Half of Korean vocabulary is Chinese, with pronunciation based on ancient Chinese pronunciation, but Korean has no tones and their writing system has recently become more or less completely phonetic. Disambiguation is still not a huge problem for them.
- kaptain 10y ago
  I've met foreigners who have had TERRIBLE tones but still manage to get their point across in Mandarin because of context. Your explanation for why English works despite mispronunciation is the same reason why Chinese works: context. For example, let's assume we were talking about our families. You want to say: 我爱我妈 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my mother". But if you said 我爱我马 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my horse", I would assume you meant you love your mother because of the context.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    Woman + Horse = Mother? That makes darn good sense, actually.
hguant 10y ago
For me, it wasn't the tones or sounds that made Mandarin tricky - once you get used to letting your mouth/tongue make shapes/be places you've trained it not to be the vowle/consonants aren't that bad, and fi you've ever played an instrument/sung, tones are manageable. It was the stupid pictographs. You're literally just memorizing shapes that didn't correspond to anything was the absolute worst. It got better once you learned to recognize the basic forms that were getting composed into parts of other characters, but that really discouraged me/was the hardest part. I basically gave up on written Chinese and focused on pinyin, because that made sense to my head. Source: took two years of Mandarin and lived in Taiwan for a few months
- Haydos585x2 10y ago
  David Moser wrote an essay telling people to focus more on Pinyin and not stress about characters until much later. I totally agree with him. Maybe one day the CCP will force everyone to Pinyin and I can finally read without having to look up half a sentence. http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    I'll put in a vote for Zhuyin: - more consistent (no confusing between the two sounds for "u" for example). - better IMEs - you can filter characters by tone, impossible to do with Google Pinyin for example. - can be used to type Simplified and Traditional - no interference/preconceptions from other languages written in the latin alphabet.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    Moving everything to pinyin probably would introduce a different set of difficulties for a foreigner: while a native Chinese speaker knows the spoken language and context well enough to disambiguate homophones, it's unlikely a Chinese learner would have the same ability.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Honestly if you just write characters over and over while listening to Chinese TV you'll be fine. That's how I studied and when I presented in my Chinese class, the two students from Chongqing (who were taking the class to learn traditional characters) were so surprised at my pronunciation their jaws were on the floor.

EdHominem 10y ago
You transcribed TV shows while repeating the words as they spoke them? Did you put an inordinate amount of time in or do you think your methodology was just that good?
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  No I just wrote whatever characters we were studying in class that week over and over while I watched streams of Chinese TV. I watched with Chinese subtitles but I didn't actually try to understand every word. It was mostly about framing my mindset towards a Chinese style of speaking and writing. I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.

s4vi0r 10y ago

Just curious, what are some examples of difficult/weird vowel or consonant sounds that you think English has? And why do you think Spanish is easy in terms of sounds? IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.

cjslep 10y ago
In English in The South in the USA, often "can" and "can't" are pronounced the same ("can") with a minor difference in the way the "a" and "n" are held.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  This is not really true. You're probably hinting at the <t> being unreleased. However, it is definitely still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release
- robocat 10y ago
  And just as badly, "can't" and "cunt" just vary the vowel length without changing the vowel or consonant sounds (in some English accents). Many languages don't use vowel length to signify changes in meaning, and it is obviously hard to teach.
  - c23gooey 10y ago
    This reminds me of Gough Whitlam, former Australian Prime Minister ~1975: ...Gough also took aim at Sir Winton Turbull when the rural MP shouted: 'I am a Country member'. Whitlam quickly responded with 'I remember', which earned an applause from both sides of the house.
smallnamespace 10y ago
In American English, a lot of vowels are gliding dipthongs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowel... For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly. Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sounds like Spanish to something like 15-20 in English (depending on the dialect), it's hard to keep track of them all and pronounce them correctly [1], especially since English orthography hinders rather than helps you, whereas dipthongs in Spanish are pronounced exactly as they're rendered (e.g. cauda is like ca-u-da spoken fast). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels

huherto 10y ago

> I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds Glad you mention this. I don't think most native English speakers are aware how complex English phonetics are. There are subtleties that only native speakers can distinguish. That is why many not-native speakers mispronounce some sounds. It is not that we are dummy. Our brain is just unable to hear (and produce) the exact sound.

3pt14159 10y ago
English is a strange language, but I wouldn't say especially difficult. Chinese is much harder to learn because it's so inconsistent between what you're supposed to say and the way people actually talk. In addition to using tones that are very unfamiliar and then you also need to learn the written language which is very difficult and requires a Chinese-Chinese dictionary for strange words like manticore and sometimes you can't even find them. I'd put English at around Russian difficulty, hard, but easy to get going. English also has the advantage of having a simple character set (less letters than Russian, French, etc) and English also has a ton of cultural artefacts (songs, movies, etc) to sink your teeth into. My problem with Russian (unlike say, French, which I've also studied) is that I can't even find music to listen to that's anywhere close in production value to English and there are a couple of good movies (Leviathan, for example) but you can only watch them so many times. I don't know of a single Russian TV show that is anywhere close to HBO or Netflix quality. I'd love a recommendation though if someone here knows of one.
- abalashov 10y ago
  Have you considered Soviet film? Pronunciation is usually very clear.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  I can try and guide you around good Russian music, drop me an email to alamar at my.com or friend ilyak on last.fm - that's me. Note that I'm a fan of all things DIY, production value doesn't mean as much to me as actual content. Regarding movies, you can always go for a huge layer of Soviet films. They take some using to I suppose, but then the supply is endless.

irrational 10y ago

The difference is, I grew up learning English ;-) Seriously though, I tried learning Chinese, but for the life of me I couldn't tell the difference between the tones. They all sounded the same to me. I don't know if it's related, but I don't have an ear for music (Music does nothing for me so I have never listened to it by choice). Spanish on the other hand is amazing. I know an handful of languages, but Spanish by far had the fewest oddities. It is amazing how regular it is.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
Noun genders and never-ending verb endings are the drawbacks to Latin-based languages, for a second language learner. Perhaps Spanish with a single gender and English style verbs would be the simplest.
yzard 10y ago
As a Chinese, when I learn English, first is to notice the difference of the pronunciation for foreign languages, I believe same as music singer, for word "Porshe", french will read "e" as "ei", English just mute, German says in the middle, but that's hard for me to memorize it in the middle, Chinese has same sound as "ei". Brain is not getting use to the iconic differences of the sound. second is to correct pronounce the sound, pronunciation of "th" took me one week to practice, because Chinese does not have "th", only "s", that's why lots of Chinese says "sank you" instead of "thank you", that muscle to pronounce that is simply not trained since was born.
- khuey 10y ago
  "th" (ð/θ) is definitely the hardest phoneme(s) in English, even for native-speaking children.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Much to the disappointment of her mother who thought "fumb" was cute, I once taught a 3-year-old how to pronounce "th" by telling her to stick her tongue between her teeth and breathe out. Maybe a similarly position-focused (rather than sound-focused) approach would help non-native speakers as well?

loudmax 10y ago

Maybe "hard" isn't exactly the right word, but it's certainly different. The sounds aren't hard to make, but using the wrong tone is like using the wrong vowel. You _have_ to speak each syllable with the correct tone or people won't understand you. This can be frustrating when you're learning the language because the difference is very subtle if you haven't grown up speaking a tonal language. If you say something that sounds correct to your ears, but native Chinese speakers give you blank stares, it's not that they're being obtuse or dense. They really have no idea what you're trying to say. Also there are relatively few sounds in Chinese, so if you make a mistake, you're likely to actually say something different from what you intended.

flyinghamster 10y ago
One thing that I've always wondered about tonal languages is whether they would be easier for musicians to learn (especially if they have perfect pitch) than for non-musicians.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  There's a difference between register tones and contour tones. Chinese Languages (such as Mandarin) are contour toned languages - nothing at all like musical notes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Register_tones_and_contour_tones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Register_to...

jimmywanger 10y ago

In my experience, if you're sorta close in English, you can sort of get your point across, even if you mispronounce words, because the mispronounced word means no sense so you start thinking about a possible explanation. In Chinese, a different tone actually is a valid word with its own meaning, so it's a bit harder for you to get your point across.

smallnamespace 10y ago
To be fair though, if you nail all the other parts of pronunciation/speaking correctly and only get the tones wrong, a Chinese speaker will be able to infer your meaning the vast majority of the time. Half of Korean vocabulary is Chinese, with pronunciation based on ancient Chinese pronunciation, but Korean has no tones and their writing system has recently become more or less completely phonetic. Disambiguation is still not a huge problem for them.
kaptain 10y ago
I've met foreigners who have had TERRIBLE tones but still manage to get their point across in Mandarin because of context. Your explanation for why English works despite mispronunciation is the same reason why Chinese works: context. For example, let's assume we were talking about our families. You want to say: 我爱我妈 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my mother". But if you said 我爱我马 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my horse", I would assume you meant you love your mother because of the context.
- WildUtah 10y ago
  Woman + Horse = Mother? That makes darn good sense, actually.

hguant 10y ago

For me, it wasn't the tones or sounds that made Mandarin tricky - once you get used to letting your mouth/tongue make shapes/be places you've trained it not to be the vowle/consonants aren't that bad, and fi you've ever played an instrument/sung, tones are manageable. It was the stupid pictographs. You're literally just memorizing shapes that didn't correspond to anything was the absolute worst. It got better once you learned to recognize the basic forms that were getting composed into parts of other characters, but that really discouraged me/was the hardest part. I basically gave up on written Chinese and focused on pinyin, because that made sense to my head. Source: took two years of Mandarin and lived in Taiwan for a few months

Haydos585x2 10y ago
David Moser wrote an essay telling people to focus more on Pinyin and not stress about characters until much later. I totally agree with him. Maybe one day the CCP will force everyone to Pinyin and I can finally read without having to look up half a sentence. http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
- lacampbell 10y ago
  I'll put in a vote for Zhuyin: - more consistent (no confusing between the two sounds for "u" for example). - better IMEs - you can filter characters by tone, impossible to do with Google Pinyin for example. - can be used to type Simplified and Traditional - no interference/preconceptions from other languages written in the latin alphabet.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Moving everything to pinyin probably would introduce a different set of difficulties for a foreigner: while a native Chinese speaker knows the spoken language and context well enough to disambiguate homophones, it's unlikely a Chinese learner would have the same ability.