6 ms·

During my last trip to Fujian China, I became fascinated by the Mandarin word that sounds like, "schma." My wife was born there, and she had told me it meant, "

During my last trip to Fujian China, I became fascinated by the Mandarin word that sounds like, "schma." My wife was born there, and she had told me it meant, "what." But this time, I was really listening to how the word was being used, and it occurred to me, it was being used somewhat like "donc" in French. (Which my French teacher in high school told me was untranslatable.) When I realized, that, my reaction was, "What!?" After our trip, I became obsessed with the word for receipt: "fapiao." I thought my inability to tell the difference in the tones was hilarious, but now she refuses to say the word in front of me at all! This is also hard for me to understand. As far as I'm concerned, she's pretty much just saying, "ma" to me 4 times in a row! There's a difference, but it's very difficult! Why is my befuddlement and amusement at that so annoying? There's this Taiwanese comedienne who was talking about being annoyed at her western boyfriend not being able to tell, so apparently that's a thing.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
This is curious to me. As a Westerner and speaker of a non-tonal language that started learning Chinese already being an adult, I never had any difficulty telling the difference between the tones. I did have difficulty with other sounds of the language (e.g. telling "x" from "sh" or "q" from "ch") - hell, I even have difficulty with English sounds, for example, to this day I need to pay an inordinate amount of attention to tell "eyes" from "ice" and there's no way I'll successfully pronounce them differently in regular real-time conversation. But the Mandarin tones? I find the difference obvious. I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones.
- stcredzero 3y ago
  for example, to this day I need to pay an inordinate amount of attention to tell "eyes" from "ice" I just find that obvious. Wherever I've been in the US, "eyes" is drawn out, but "ice" is short. (Think of imitating a southern accent for "eyes.") The only people I've ever heard saying "eyes" so it sounds like "ice" are native German speakers and other Europeans. (My wife learned German for her Chinese/German comparative lit degree, so the way she says certain things in English sounds menacing to me like how a WWII German movie character says, "We have ways of making you talk!" In particular, when she says, "Your handwriting...looks like WORMS!") I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones. I've been playing traditional music for almost 40 years, and I even qualified to compete at what's basically the world competition once. I think it matters most what one got used to as a child.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    > The only people I've ever heard saying "eyes" so it sounds like "ice" are native German speakers and other Europeans In German, many syllable-final consonants (in particular, "s") are always voiceless, but the English plural "-s" is voicet (which strangely enough none of my English teachers ever botheret to mention) so if you apply German phonological rules to "eyes" you get something that sounts identical to "ice". But Germans hafe no problem pronouncing "eyes" if the "s" is not syllable-final, e.g. in "Eisen" ("eyesn", iron). To learn to speak a languache like a natife, you neet to break habits of thought you didn't even know you hat.
  - totetsu 3y ago
    Isn’t the point of difference that, eyes had a little slide in the first vowel, ‘ah-I ss’ and maybe a more voiced z like s And ice just has extended one ‘ah- s’ a and a more interdental friction s
- retrac 3y ago
  No, you're not alone. Approaching Mandarin I expected tones to be some sort of big hurdle. They're not. They're largely obvious. It's a part of the vowel, basically. Linguistically speaking, there's very little distinction between a vowel and a tone - it's part of how you make the vowel. And tone and vowel quality interact in a complex way, which means you're hearing changes in the vowel, along with the pitches involved. As you mentioned, at the start I was more likely to mix up x and sh than I am to mishear a tone. Other languages use tone, of course, they just don't use it lexically to distinguish words. I also have played an instrument, etc. but I don't know if that's a factor or not. Now, pronouncing the tones is a whole other question. My own Mandarin has like 2.5 tones instead of 4, and I struggle to apply tone contours to long phrases without messing up everything involved. Both English and Mandarin have tone contours (and a lot of them are even the same, for example, slowly rising with a sharp rise over the last few syllables = question) but the tone contours of Mandarin interact with the lexical tones of a word. Something we don't have to worry about in English. I doubt I'll ever get enough practice to make that automatic.
  - stcredzero 3y ago
    Approaching Mandarin I expected tones to be some sort of big hurdle. They're not. They're largely obvious. It's a part of the vowel, basically. Linguistically speaking, there's very little distinction between a vowel and a tone - it's part of how you make the vowel. Both a Korean teacher of mine and an old housemate (who was a native Russian speaker and had a degree in French) pointed out to me that Americans are "lazy" (that is the technical term, I gathered) about how they use vowels. We get dipthongs confused with pure vowels. Unless it's pointed out to us, we don't think of how we say "oh" as containing an element of "w" at the end. And tone and vowel quality interact in a complex way, which means you're hearing changes in the vowel, along with the pitches involved. Ah ha! I think you just helped me! I hadn't been thinking of these two together! the tone contours of Mandarin interact with the lexical tones of a word. Something we don't have to worry about in English. Tone of voice is diabolically subtle, the way British and American speakers use it. About half the time, we're using it to indicate the opposite or almost opposite meanings of words. My wife from Fujian doesn't think of speech in quite the same way. We got into an argument, because she kept shouting, "BE CAREFUL!" every time someone cut me off in downtown SF traffic. It took me awhile to understand that she was just frightened and was telling me to be careful. ("HOW COULD YOU TWIST SUCH A TENDER EXPRESSION OF CARE!?" -- Which she said in that tone of voice.) Tones don't occupy the same part of my brain as parts of vowels. It's more like a musical soundtrack accompanying the dialog.
huhtenberg 3y ago
"donc" is "therefore" (though shorter and less pompous).
- stcredzero 3y ago
  Except, a French speaker could well just reply, "Donc" without anything else in contexts where an English speaker would never say, "Therefore." In those contexts, "Donc" is more like, "Word!" or "Right on." I would translate those to mean, "Agreed." Or is that just French that French teachers and textbooks talk about to students in America?
  - atnnn 3y ago
    I would say "donc" is used where some might say "so" in English (aka shorter and less pompous "therefore"). I think the meaning of "Agreed" or "Right on" is rare and more implicit. Like saying "therefore" might mean "I accept the premise". As a question, "donc?", like "so?", can mean "and then?", "then what?", "meaning what?", "what next?" or "so what?" As an interjection or at the beginning of a sentence, "donc", like "so", can mean "now then", "that said", "moving on" or "without further ado".
    - stcredzero 3y ago
      Like saying "therefore" might mean "I accept the premise". I basically never hear that as a standalone reply in English! As an interjection or at the beginning of a sentence, "donc", like "so", can mean "now then", "that said", "moving on" or "without further ado". I'm not sure, but I think sometimes when my wife is saying, "schma" it's somewhat like "donc" you describe above. But sometimes, I think she expressing agreement with a person that a third party was a bit mistaken or off the mark, so it's expressing a kind of disagreement. Not sure.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nojs 3y ago
> During my last trip to Fujian China, I became fascinated by the Mandarin word that sounds like, "schma." My wife was born there, and she had told me it meant, "what." That would be 什麼 shén me, pronounced exactly as you described
dgunay 3y ago
Do you have trouble understanding intonated sentences in English too? You can change the meaning of this question pretty significantly by placing a rising intonation on each word: You stole his pen? _You_ stole his pen? -> It was you who stole his pen? You _stole_ his pen? -> You in fact stole his pen, it was not given willingly? You stole _his_ pen? -> You stole his pen, and not someone else's? You stole his _pen_? -> You stole his pen, and not something else of his?
- stcredzero 3y ago
  Do you have trouble understanding intonated sentences in English too? You can change the meaning of this question pretty significantly by placing a rising intonation on each word Read my other comments. You'll find I'm already talking about this! Ok, so it's totally not a rising intonation to me! Wherever you have the _x_, it's emphasis. "Rising" is about the most confusing way to describe it, from my point of view as a layperson. Also, as I point out elsewhere, the way you are talking about "intonated" sentences is more akin to an accompanying soundtrack, where there's a "stinger" played at the moment something significant is said. It's not a part of the vowel! EDIT: Okay, I've been working this out saying it to my self. There's nothing "rising" in "you" when I say "_You_ stole the pen?" The volume doesn't rise through the word. The pitch doesn't rise through the word. The only thing that rises in the whole sentence is the pitch approaching the last part of the sentence to indicate a question. If "rising" is the actual terminology, then that's the most misleading terminology I can think of!
  - dgunay 3y ago
    Maybe "rising" was not 100% correct. You're right in that you can place emphasis without the pitch of the word actually going up (instead you can make the pitch go down, or flat even, and say it with a bit more force & space afterwards). Playing with pitch is just the most obvious example of intonation I can think of in English. I'll admit I also have musical training, so it makes sense _to me_ to think of pitch in these terms. Maybe it doesn't to most people.
aamargulies 3y ago
My Japanese teacher said that, for her, the English words “ear” and “year” are indistinguishable. I see how that could be, the words are very close, the ‘y’ sound is very brief, but it helped me understand how something that is so clear for a native speaker could be very difficult for a foreigner to hear.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

This is curious to me. As a Westerner and speaker of a non-tonal language that started learning Chinese already being an adult, I never had any difficulty telling the difference between the tones. I did have difficulty with other sounds of the language (e.g. telling "x" from "sh" or "q" from "ch") - hell, I even have difficulty with English sounds, for example, to this day I need to pay an inordinate amount of attention to tell "eyes" from "ice" and there's no way I'll successfully pronounce them differently in regular real-time conversation. But the Mandarin tones? I find the difference obvious. I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones.

stcredzero 3y ago
for example, to this day I need to pay an inordinate amount of attention to tell "eyes" from "ice" I just find that obvious. Wherever I've been in the US, "eyes" is drawn out, but "ice" is short. (Think of imitating a southern accent for "eyes.") The only people I've ever heard saying "eyes" so it sounds like "ice" are native German speakers and other Europeans. (My wife learned German for her Chinese/German comparative lit degree, so the way she says certain things in English sounds menacing to me like how a WWII German movie character says, "We have ways of making you talk!" In particular, when she says, "Your handwriting...looks like WORMS!") I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones. I've been playing traditional music for almost 40 years, and I even qualified to compete at what's basically the world competition once. I think it matters most what one got used to as a child.
- yorwba 3y ago
  > The only people I've ever heard saying "eyes" so it sounds like "ice" are native German speakers and other Europeans In German, many syllable-final consonants (in particular, "s") are always voiceless, but the English plural "-s" is voicet (which strangely enough none of my English teachers ever botheret to mention) so if you apply German phonological rules to "eyes" you get something that sounts identical to "ice". But Germans hafe no problem pronouncing "eyes" if the "s" is not syllable-final, e.g. in "Eisen" ("eyesn", iron). To learn to speak a languache like a natife, you neet to break habits of thought you didn't even know you hat.
- totetsu 3y ago
  Isn’t the point of difference that, eyes had a little slide in the first vowel, ‘ah-I ss’ and maybe a more voiced z like s And ice just has extended one ‘ah- s’ a and a more interdental friction s
retrac 3y ago
No, you're not alone. Approaching Mandarin I expected tones to be some sort of big hurdle. They're not. They're largely obvious. It's a part of the vowel, basically. Linguistically speaking, there's very little distinction between a vowel and a tone - it's part of how you make the vowel. And tone and vowel quality interact in a complex way, which means you're hearing changes in the vowel, along with the pitches involved. As you mentioned, at the start I was more likely to mix up x and sh than I am to mishear a tone. Other languages use tone, of course, they just don't use it lexically to distinguish words. I also have played an instrument, etc. but I don't know if that's a factor or not. Now, pronouncing the tones is a whole other question. My own Mandarin has like 2.5 tones instead of 4, and I struggle to apply tone contours to long phrases without messing up everything involved. Both English and Mandarin have tone contours (and a lot of them are even the same, for example, slowly rising with a sharp rise over the last few syllables = question) but the tone contours of Mandarin interact with the lexical tones of a word. Something we don't have to worry about in English. I doubt I'll ever get enough practice to make that automatic.
- stcredzero 3y ago
  Approaching Mandarin I expected tones to be some sort of big hurdle. They're not. They're largely obvious. It's a part of the vowel, basically. Linguistically speaking, there's very little distinction between a vowel and a tone - it's part of how you make the vowel. Both a Korean teacher of mine and an old housemate (who was a native Russian speaker and had a degree in French) pointed out to me that Americans are "lazy" (that is the technical term, I gathered) about how they use vowels. We get dipthongs confused with pure vowels. Unless it's pointed out to us, we don't think of how we say "oh" as containing an element of "w" at the end. And tone and vowel quality interact in a complex way, which means you're hearing changes in the vowel, along with the pitches involved. Ah ha! I think you just helped me! I hadn't been thinking of these two together! the tone contours of Mandarin interact with the lexical tones of a word. Something we don't have to worry about in English. Tone of voice is diabolically subtle, the way British and American speakers use it. About half the time, we're using it to indicate the opposite or almost opposite meanings of words. My wife from Fujian doesn't think of speech in quite the same way. We got into an argument, because she kept shouting, "BE CAREFUL!" every time someone cut me off in downtown SF traffic. It took me awhile to understand that she was just frightened and was telling me to be careful. ("HOW COULD YOU TWIST SUCH A TENDER EXPRESSION OF CARE!?" -- Which she said in that tone of voice.) Tones don't occupy the same part of my brain as parts of vowels. It's more like a musical soundtrack accompanying the dialog.

huhtenberg 3y ago

"donc" is "therefore" (though shorter and less pompous).

stcredzero 3y ago
Except, a French speaker could well just reply, "Donc" without anything else in contexts where an English speaker would never say, "Therefore." In those contexts, "Donc" is more like, "Word!" or "Right on." I would translate those to mean, "Agreed." Or is that just French that French teachers and textbooks talk about to students in America?
- atnnn 3y ago
  I would say "donc" is used where some might say "so" in English (aka shorter and less pompous "therefore"). I think the meaning of "Agreed" or "Right on" is rare and more implicit. Like saying "therefore" might mean "I accept the premise". As a question, "donc?", like "so?", can mean "and then?", "then what?", "meaning what?", "what next?" or "so what?" As an interjection or at the beginning of a sentence, "donc", like "so", can mean "now then", "that said", "moving on" or "without further ado".
  - stcredzero 3y ago
    Like saying "therefore" might mean "I accept the premise". I basically never hear that as a standalone reply in English! As an interjection or at the beginning of a sentence, "donc", like "so", can mean "now then", "that said", "moving on" or "without further ado". I'm not sure, but I think sometimes when my wife is saying, "schma" it's somewhat like "donc" you describe above. But sometimes, I think she expressing agreement with a person that a third party was a bit mistaken or off the mark, so it's expressing a kind of disagreement. Not sure.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

nojs 3y ago

> During my last trip to Fujian China, I became fascinated by the Mandarin word that sounds like, "schma." My wife was born there, and she had told me it meant, "what." That would be 什麼 shén me, pronounced exactly as you described

dgunay 3y ago

Do you have trouble understanding intonated sentences in English too? You can change the meaning of this question pretty significantly by placing a rising intonation on each word: You stole his pen? _You_ stole his pen? -> It was you who stole his pen? You _stole_ his pen? -> You in fact stole his pen, it was not given willingly? You stole _his_ pen? -> You stole his pen, and not someone else's? You stole his _pen_? -> You stole his pen, and not something else of his?

stcredzero 3y ago
Do you have trouble understanding intonated sentences in English too? You can change the meaning of this question pretty significantly by placing a rising intonation on each word Read my other comments. You'll find I'm already talking about this! Ok, so it's totally not a rising intonation to me! Wherever you have the _x_, it's emphasis. "Rising" is about the most confusing way to describe it, from my point of view as a layperson. Also, as I point out elsewhere, the way you are talking about "intonated" sentences is more akin to an accompanying soundtrack, where there's a "stinger" played at the moment something significant is said. It's not a part of the vowel! EDIT: Okay, I've been working this out saying it to my self. There's nothing "rising" in "you" when I say "_You_ stole the pen?" The volume doesn't rise through the word. The pitch doesn't rise through the word. The only thing that rises in the whole sentence is the pitch approaching the last part of the sentence to indicate a question. If "rising" is the actual terminology, then that's the most misleading terminology I can think of!
- dgunay 3y ago
  Maybe "rising" was not 100% correct. You're right in that you can place emphasis without the pitch of the word actually going up (instead you can make the pitch go down, or flat even, and say it with a bit more force & space afterwards). Playing with pitch is just the most obvious example of intonation I can think of in English. I'll admit I also have musical training, so it makes sense _to me_ to think of pitch in these terms. Maybe it doesn't to most people.

aamargulies 3y ago

My Japanese teacher said that, for her, the English words “ear” and “year” are indistinguishable. I see how that could be, the words are very close, the ‘y’ sound is very brief, but it helped me understand how something that is so clear for a native speaker could be very difficult for a foreigner to hear.