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 s

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.