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Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that. As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unab

Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that. As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unable to hear tonal differences that changed the meaning of words during my short attempt at learning Chinese. Made me glad I had the good fortune to be born in the country that was 'first to internet'.

beachstartup 12y ago
> I was actually unable to hear tonal differences i find this difficult to believe. how can you tell when someone is asking you a question when speaking to you in casual conversation?
- cobrausn 12y ago
  The more subtle ones I was unable to pick up on. To me, when people spoke, it sounded monotone, especially on those audio exercise sounds played over speakers. I don't have a problem picking up on the tonal differences in English, because the difference is quite a bit more pronounced to me. EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
- zhemao 12y ago
  Those tonal shifts are a lot more obvious than the ones in Chinese. Despite being a "heritage speaker" of Mandarin, I still sometimes confuse words with the same pronunciation but different tones. I remember my mother once asked me to bring her the "bēizi" (cup) and I instead brought her the "bèizi" (blanket). The difference between the two is quite subtle. Chinese speakers rely on context as much as tonality to distinguish similar-sounding words.
  - gohrt 12y ago
    My mother once asked me to bring her a pin, and instead I brought her a pen. Are tones more problematic than homophones (and accent-induced homophones) ?
    - wonderzombie 12y ago
      Yes. In Mandarin, there's a much smaller set of sounds than in English. There are many, many words which sound exactly the same -- same pronunciation, same tone, different hanzi -- before you even get into the issue of same pronunciation, same tones. Hence the reliance on context.
    - bane 12y ago
      How about this example, "bring me the má má http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3 http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3 vs. "Bring me the mǎ" mǎ http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3 http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3 One will get you some hemp, the other a horse.
      - vqc 12y ago
        my favorite one is: mā ma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, mā ma mà mǎ. Which translated literally is: mom rides horse, horse slows, mom scolds horse.
        footpath 12y ago
        That's the first line of a classic Chinese couplet (duìlián). The second line usually goes: Niūniū qiān niú， niú niù， niūniū níng niú. It translates to "little girl leads along the cow, the cow is stubborn, the little girl pinches the cow".
        vqc 12y ago
        I had no idea. Even as an ABC who still speaks semi-competently, I'm having trouble figuring out Niūniū, niù, and, níng. What are the characters? Isn't pinch 捏?
        footpath 12y ago
        妞妞牵牛，牛拗，妞妞拧牛。妞 means girl, 妞妞 is a common name for little girls; 拗 has two different pronunciations, ao and niu; the ao pronunciation is usually used as a verb for bending something, while the niu pronunciation is usually an adjective for stubbornness. I guess 拧 is better translated as to wring or to squeeze and twist, but you get the idea.
- jafaku 12y ago
  As a non-native English speaker, until recently I didn't know ee and i sounded different, eg: bee and bit. Someone explained to me that there are something like 30 vowel sounds in English. Y u no 1 letter = 1 sound???
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    English is actually a mixture of Anglo-Saxon (i.e., "real" English), Norman French (i.e., French as spoken by Danes), ordinary French, several Celtic tongues, various Scandinavian languages/dialects, Latin, Greek, German, and (more recently) everything from Yiddish to Mandarin. If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.
    - logfromblammo 12y ago
      This is exactly why I refer to native English speakers as "sesquilingual". That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think. I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go. Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
  - krapp 12y ago
    "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary" -- James Nicoll It's a messy language.
  - 12y ago
- readymade 12y ago
  It's been well documented that around 8-10 months, infants lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that do not meaningfully contrast in their linguistic environment. An English speaker can certainly hear the tones, and may even be able to pick out different tones in isolation, but it takes significant training to be able to interpret them as contrastive as opposed to inflectional, etc.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    It drives me mad with Swedish. Some of those fricatives... I definitely hear something else than my (Swedish) teacher. I actually put together an MP3 with sounds from Swedish pop songs and told her "look it all sounds like German 'sch', not like 'ch'". She disagreed. There's no question, it is definitely more 'ch'...
- wisty 12y ago
  English uses question tags - you make you voice go up at the end of the sentence you know? Chinese uses little words like 呢 to indicate a question. Or you can just use correct Chinese grammar for questions - "He said what" or "Who said that" or "This is how much". Tones are used for emphasis (emphasising the tone emphasises the word), but not for questions.
paupino_masano 12y ago
I can also relate to this; it took me a while to hear the differences and even longer to speak the differences. While I'm far from perfect, the more exposure to the language I've been getting the more I've started to notice these intricate details. I can only imagine the same goes for other languages too i.e. Once the basics are mastered you can start really diving into the language. Edit: Grammar
alwaysdoit 12y ago
Not just first to internet--first to keyboard. If the chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor, computers would look VERY different.
- vorg 12y ago
  If the Chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor using their ideographs, they wouldn't have used it, and only when alphabetic (or abjad or abugida) language users invented it would it start to get used. Just like when the Chinese invented printing back around 1000 AD, but didn't use it much. Only when Europeans invented printing with movable types around 1500 AD did printing start to get used.
bane 12y ago
It's true. If you grow up in a single language environment, you basically train your brain to slot almost all spoken language into the sounds you use for your language. So if your language has 30 phonemes, all language you hear gets slotted into those 30 phonological slots. e.g. "collar" and "caller" have subtly different sounding vowels, and you have a "recognition" slot for each vowel sound so you can tell them apart. But some dialects of English pronounce the two vowels the same and thus speakers of that dialect only have a single phonological slot. Even if you pronounce them in your dialect, they actually process the sounds the same and hear the same sound. But there's "space" between the slots, and the further a pronunciation is from that slot the more recognizable it is as a unique sound that person without that slot can hear. The problem of course comes when speakers of a language use phonology that sounds close to what you use, but is subtly different and that difference has a crucial meaning, the tones in Chinese for example. Another great one is the vowel length. In English two vowels of the same pronunciation, but different lengths are the same. But in Japanese they can be different. This also happens with consonants, Korean has a "stressed" consonant system that non-Korean speakers literally can't hear because a "k" and a "k" with a stress end up int the same phonological slot. Or an "s" made with your tongue behind you back teeth is a different "s" than one made with your tongue between your teeth. This also works its way into pronunciation, we train certain muscle groups, from our chest and neck to our face and mouth to pronounce certain sounds certain ways. And learning to use different sounds (even if you can recognize them as different) sometimes is not enough to try mimicking the sound, but to actually retrain your muscle groups to use them like a native speaker would. You can develop these additional slots and recognize differences with lots and lots of careful practice. But it's painfully and frustratingly hard.
housel 12y ago
My advice to anyone who wants to learn Mandarin, especially with respect the tonal aspect, should start as young as possible (i.e., don't make a deliberate decision to put off learning the language until later). I started at age 21, and my impression (from observing other learners over the past 25 years) is that most people who begin much later than that have an especially hard time recognizing and reproducing the tones.
natch 12y ago
Can you hear the difference between the word "digest" in "Reader's Digest" and the word "digest" in "digest your food"?
- zhemao 12y ago
  Those are differences in emphasis (DIgest vs diGEST). Tonal differences in Mandarin are more subtle. The same syllable is emphasized, but the "shaping" of the pronunciation is changed. Also note that OP stated that he or she couldn't distinguish between Mandarin tones, not tonal differences in general. This is not difficult to believe, as your ear becomes trained to recognize differences in your native language and ignore slight differences in pronunciation that don't affect the meaning.
  - natch 12y ago
    No, neither is necessarily any more or less subtle than the other. It all depends on the speaker, their dialect and accent, and the situation.

beachstartup 12y ago

> I was actually unable to hear tonal differences i find this difficult to believe. how can you tell when someone is asking you a question when speaking to you in casual conversation?

cobrausn 12y ago
The more subtle ones I was unable to pick up on. To me, when people spoke, it sounded monotone, especially on those audio exercise sounds played over speakers. I don't have a problem picking up on the tonal differences in English, because the difference is quite a bit more pronounced to me. EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
zhemao 12y ago
Those tonal shifts are a lot more obvious than the ones in Chinese. Despite being a "heritage speaker" of Mandarin, I still sometimes confuse words with the same pronunciation but different tones. I remember my mother once asked me to bring her the "bēizi" (cup) and I instead brought her the "bèizi" (blanket). The difference between the two is quite subtle. Chinese speakers rely on context as much as tonality to distinguish similar-sounding words.
- gohrt 12y ago
  My mother once asked me to bring her a pin, and instead I brought her a pen. Are tones more problematic than homophones (and accent-induced homophones) ?
  - wonderzombie 12y ago
    Yes. In Mandarin, there's a much smaller set of sounds than in English. There are many, many words which sound exactly the same -- same pronunciation, same tone, different hanzi -- before you even get into the issue of same pronunciation, same tones. Hence the reliance on context.
  - bane 12y ago
    How about this example, "bring me the má má http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3 http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3 vs. "Bring me the mǎ" mǎ http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3 http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3 One will get you some hemp, the other a horse.
    - vqc 12y ago
      my favorite one is: mā ma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, mā ma mà mǎ. Which translated literally is: mom rides horse, horse slows, mom scolds horse.
      - footpath 12y ago
        That's the first line of a classic Chinese couplet (duìlián). The second line usually goes: Niūniū qiān niú， niú niù， niūniū níng niú. It translates to "little girl leads along the cow, the cow is stubborn, the little girl pinches the cow".
        vqc 12y ago
        I had no idea. Even as an ABC who still speaks semi-competently, I'm having trouble figuring out Niūniū, niù, and, níng. What are the characters? Isn't pinch 捏?
        footpath 12y ago
        妞妞牵牛，牛拗，妞妞拧牛。妞 means girl, 妞妞 is a common name for little girls; 拗 has two different pronunciations, ao and niu; the ao pronunciation is usually used as a verb for bending something, while the niu pronunciation is usually an adjective for stubbornness. I guess 拧 is better translated as to wring or to squeeze and twist, but you get the idea.
jafaku 12y ago
As a non-native English speaker, until recently I didn't know ee and i sounded different, eg: bee and bit. Someone explained to me that there are something like 30 vowel sounds in English. Y u no 1 letter = 1 sound???
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  English is actually a mixture of Anglo-Saxon (i.e., "real" English), Norman French (i.e., French as spoken by Danes), ordinary French, several Celtic tongues, various Scandinavian languages/dialects, Latin, Greek, German, and (more recently) everything from Yiddish to Mandarin. If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    This is exactly why I refer to native English speakers as "sesquilingual". That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think. I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go. Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
- krapp 12y ago
  "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary" -- James Nicoll It's a messy language.
- 12y ago
readymade 12y ago
It's been well documented that around 8-10 months, infants lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that do not meaningfully contrast in their linguistic environment. An English speaker can certainly hear the tones, and may even be able to pick out different tones in isolation, but it takes significant training to be able to interpret them as contrastive as opposed to inflectional, etc.
- Tomte 12y ago
  It drives me mad with Swedish. Some of those fricatives... I definitely hear something else than my (Swedish) teacher. I actually put together an MP3 with sounds from Swedish pop songs and told her "look it all sounds like German 'sch', not like 'ch'". She disagreed. There's no question, it is definitely more 'ch'...
wisty 12y ago
English uses question tags - you make you voice go up at the end of the sentence you know? Chinese uses little words like 呢 to indicate a question. Or you can just use correct Chinese grammar for questions - "He said what" or "Who said that" or "This is how much". Tones are used for emphasis (emphasising the tone emphasises the word), but not for questions.

paupino_masano 12y ago

I can also relate to this; it took me a while to hear the differences and even longer to speak the differences. While I'm far from perfect, the more exposure to the language I've been getting the more I've started to notice these intricate details. I can only imagine the same goes for other languages too i.e. Once the basics are mastered you can start really diving into the language. Edit: Grammar

alwaysdoit 12y ago

Not just first to internet--first to keyboard. If the chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor, computers would look VERY different.

vorg 12y ago
If the Chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor using their ideographs, they wouldn't have used it, and only when alphabetic (or abjad or abugida) language users invented it would it start to get used. Just like when the Chinese invented printing back around 1000 AD, but didn't use it much. Only when Europeans invented printing with movable types around 1500 AD did printing start to get used.

bane 12y ago

It's true. If you grow up in a single language environment, you basically train your brain to slot almost all spoken language into the sounds you use for your language. So if your language has 30 phonemes, all language you hear gets slotted into those 30 phonological slots. e.g. "collar" and "caller" have subtly different sounding vowels, and you have a "recognition" slot for each vowel sound so you can tell them apart. But some dialects of English pronounce the two vowels the same and thus speakers of that dialect only have a single phonological slot. Even if you pronounce them in your dialect, they actually process the sounds the same and hear the same sound. But there's "space" between the slots, and the further a pronunciation is from that slot the more recognizable it is as a unique sound that person without that slot can hear. The problem of course comes when speakers of a language use phonology that sounds close to what you use, but is subtly different and that difference has a crucial meaning, the tones in Chinese for example. Another great one is the vowel length. In English two vowels of the same pronunciation, but different lengths are the same. But in Japanese they can be different. This also happens with consonants, Korean has a "stressed" consonant system that non-Korean speakers literally can't hear because a "k" and a "k" with a stress end up int the same phonological slot. Or an "s" made with your tongue behind you back teeth is a different "s" than one made with your tongue between your teeth. This also works its way into pronunciation, we train certain muscle groups, from our chest and neck to our face and mouth to pronounce certain sounds certain ways. And learning to use different sounds (even if you can recognize them as different) sometimes is not enough to try mimicking the sound, but to actually retrain your muscle groups to use them like a native speaker would. You can develop these additional slots and recognize differences with lots and lots of careful practice. But it's painfully and frustratingly hard.

housel 12y ago

My advice to anyone who wants to learn Mandarin, especially with respect the tonal aspect, should start as young as possible (i.e., don't make a deliberate decision to put off learning the language until later). I started at age 21, and my impression (from observing other learners over the past 25 years) is that most people who begin much later than that have an especially hard time recognizing and reproducing the tones.

natch 12y ago

Can you hear the difference between the word "digest" in "Reader's Digest" and the word "digest" in "digest your food"?

zhemao 12y ago
Those are differences in emphasis (DIgest vs diGEST). Tonal differences in Mandarin are more subtle. The same syllable is emphasized, but the "shaping" of the pronunciation is changed. Also note that OP stated that he or she couldn't distinguish between Mandarin tones, not tonal differences in general. This is not difficult to believe, as your ear becomes trained to recognize differences in your native language and ignore slight differences in pronunciation that don't affect the meaning.
- natch 12y ago
  No, neither is necessarily any more or less subtle than the other. It all depends on the speaker, their dialect and accent, and the situation.