"To learn the sound of Chinese, it is very easy: just take an empty tin can, stand at the top of the stairs and throw the can down the stairs. Listen to the can

"To learn the sound of Chinese, it is very easy: just take an empty tin can, stand at the top of the stairs and throw the can down the stairs. Listen to the can bounce as it falls down those stairs and that is exactly what Chinese sounds like. [...] TING TONG KLING KLANG..." Hey, that's not true. Hitting an empty soup can in various ways, you basically hear an explosive sound with each collision, then a ringing as the can resonates, then the ringing fades. Hitting it along the sides, the ringing could be loosely interpreted as an "ii" vowel, but it also seems to be like "ah-ee-uh" if I listen closely. Hitting it on the bottom, the vowel analogue of the ringing sound is decidedly "uh". It is only by linguistic convention that this sound is transcribed for English speakers as "ting" or "bang". That actually makes some sense, because those words begin with an explosive consonant and have a single vowel followed by "ng", which can be compared to an approximately-pure ringing fading out. Still, there is definitely no "n" or "ng" sound from the can; I'd transcribe some of the sounds as "tuh" and "baeyuh". A human saying "ting" sounds very different from the can. I think there are beatboxers who could make a much better approximation, and I suspect a language with different sounds (some languages have click sounds, for example) would transcribe it differently. (Offhand, does anyone happen to know how other languages transcribe various sounds? Bang, ding, thud, hiss, gulp, crash?) If he wanted to make that point, he should have said, "Roll a tin can down the stairs, then ask an English speaker to tell you what it sounded like, and listen to the sounds the English speaker makes." If you're gonna make a crude joke, at least make it work right. God dammit.