6 ms·

> 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 yo

> 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
- 13y ago
readymade 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.

> 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
13y ago

readymade 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.