Correct
The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)
The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)
Did you put an inordinate amount of time in or do you think your methodology was just that good?
I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.
IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.
...Gough also took aim at Sir Winton Turbull when the rural MP shouted: 'I am a Country member'. Whitlam quickly responded with 'I remember', which earned an applause from both sides of the house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowel...
For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly.
Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sounds like Spanish to something like 15-20 in English (depending on the dialect), it's hard to keep track of them all and pronounce them correctly [1], especially since English orthography hinders rather than helps you, whereas dipthongs in Spanish are pronounced exactly as they're rendered (e.g. cauda is like ca-u-da spoken fast).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Spanish
Your example would be /kau̯.da/, with the a and u merging into a single syllable diphthong.
No matter how you cut it, English's vowel phonology is much more complicated than Spanish or Japanese. One misconception that native English speakers have is they think their language is simple to pronounce, when it really isn't.
Glad you mention this. I don't think most native English speakers are aware how complex English phonetics are. There are subtleties that only native speakers can distinguish. That is why many not-native speakers mispronounce some sounds. It is not that we are dummy. Our brain is just unable to hear (and produce) the exact sound.
I'd put English at around Russian difficulty, hard, but easy to get going. English also has the advantage of having a simple character set (less letters than Russian, French, etc) and English also has a ton of cultural artefacts (songs, movies, etc) to sink your teeth into.
My problem with Russian (unlike say, French, which I've also studied) is that I can't even find music to listen to that's anywhere close in production value to English and there are a couple of good movies (Leviathan, for example) but you can only watch them so many times. I don't know of a single Russian TV show that is anywhere close to HBO or Netflix quality. I'd love a recommendation though if someone here knows of one.
Regarding movies, you can always go for a huge layer of Soviet films. They take some using to I suppose, but then the supply is endless.
A native English speaker, I have always been perplexed by the tendency of foreigners to use "the" incorrectly. A space ship orbits "the Earth" but not "the Mars", for example. But then I tried to find a guide to using "the"...it is one of our most mysterious words.
As for filler words in English: I totally agree it's madness. The word "set" has like 20 definitions. But you can mess them up and people will still understand you. "I break into car" (the way a Russian learning English would say it) vs "I'll break into the car" are both understood the same; whereas in Chinese if I mess up a (to my ears minor) tone, the information is completely lost.
Mistaken tonality is more like saying "tree" instead of "three".
Tonality is another feature of a speech sound like aspiration or voicing. Although it is not easy for English speakers, there no reason in principle to single it out as especially difficult.
The toughest phoneme is th (ð/θ)
Compare this with the nasal vowels in romance languages and some of them have very subtle differences https://soundcloud.com/brian-8962868/vent-vin-sans-sain-rang...
As an American I find it very difficult to under British, Irish, and Australian accents. The inflections really throw me off. But the remedy is easy--ask the speaker to slow down. When they speak slowly, I don't need to rely on inflection. (Except in Cork, Ireland. My Spanish is horrible, but I found it easier to converse with people in Guadalajara, Mexico than in Cork, Ireland. At the bus station in Cork I didn't understand a single word coming out of the clerk's mouth. I know she was speaking English--and not Irish--but beyond that I was clueless.)
Likewise, when I've traveled in Asia and South America, understanding somebody with only basic English skills is relatively easy as long as they speak slowly. As long as I can identify the stream of words, I can reconstruct meaning with high fidelity. English grants huge freedoms in terms of inflection, word order, and grammar. Lurk on any linguistics forum and you quickly learn that it's _really_ difficult to commit a bone fide, uncontestable, error in English. Most of the rules in English are basically regional preferences. I suspect that half of what is taught in ESL classes aren't rules, per se, but merely an attempt at the formalization of the contemporary American English accent (i.e. television speech). The added structure missing from the vague rules of English aids the process of instruction. Much the same can be said for English instruction in primary and secondary school in America.
By contrast, after 15 years of hearing Cantonese on a regular basis I still can't make heads or tails of it. I learned some Korean phrases while on the plane; I still have trouble saying Happy New Year in Cantonese.
It's really difficult for people who have a good ear for tones (whether or not they're musically inclined) to understand what it's like for the rest of us. Many people don't even realize they have a good ear for it, probably because they nonetheless had to work hard at it. But the objective research suggests that if you're a native English speaker who picked up a tonal language, you're not normal, no matter how hard you had to work at it.
One thing I have learned in my cross-cultural experience is that Americans, British, and to some extent Australians heavily abuse sarcasm and cultural references.[1] It's only relatively recently that I've realized how sarcastic I can be (which is less sarcastic than many Americans), and how much confusion and miscommunication it has caused with foreign borne co-workers, friends, and family. And maybe part of the reason Americans rely on sarcasm and cultural references so much is because it's difficult to reliably encode signals in English speech. Emphasizing certain syllables, for instance, often only works regionally. The manner in which a New Yorker draws out a vowel to signal emotional content might actually be the normal mode of articulation in the Deep South. And so almost all Americans, even ones who don't abuse sarcasm, have become adept at recognizing secondary meaning based purely on the word content of speech, not the manner in which it is spoken.
[1] I suspect Germany and maybe even France might be similar in that regard. I doubt the phenomenon is unique to Anglophone countries; it's probably partly a function of modern Western culture. But the nature of English probably plays a part, too. Anyone care to confirm or contest?
> [1] I suspect Germany and maybe even France might be similar in that regard. I doubt the phenomenon is unique to Anglophone countries; it's probably partly a function of modern Western culture. But the nature of English probably plays a part, too. Anyone care to confirm or contest?
The British make more use of sarcasm or irony than the Germans on average, I think this is were the stereotype that Germans have no humour originates. Still sarcasm is used here quite a lot, too, the Germans just have a harder time witching contexts. I have read an interview with a British guy living in Germany once (unfortunately forgot who it was) and he noticed in Germany, humour almost always is presented by some sort of a clown, so the audience can switch easier.
It can be difficult to tell how much of a cue (or "clown" as you mention) is required/necessary for the joke to be understood. For example, even American comedians often deliver the punch-line in an overt/exaggerated way.
I've noticed (possibly broader) Chinese and Dutch humour depends much more on slapstick and stereotypes. Of course I probably wouldn't even register the more subtle humor from those cultures.
I've often wondered if there are unique (semantic & syntactic) qualities of the English language that lend themselves to more to particular kinds of (deadpan or sarcastic) humour, such as semantic ambiguity (cf. double entendres), variations in phrasing & tone), etc.
Even the German language can be abused for a similar purpose, as the following quote from [2] illustrates:
> Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text.
This is only partially true. A speech therapist could train you to hear and make those sounds. The training is usually called accent reduction.
first is to notice the difference of the pronunciation for foreign languages, I believe same as music singer, for word "Porshe", french will read "e" as "ei", English just mute, German says in the middle, but that's hard for me to memorize it in the middle, Chinese has same sound as "ei". Brain is not getting use to the iconic differences of the sound.
second is to correct pronounce the sound, pronunciation of "th" took me one week to practice, because Chinese does not have "th", only "s", that's why lots of Chinese says "sank you" instead of "thank you", that muscle to pronounce that is simply not trained since was born.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Register_to...
In Chinese, a different tone actually is a valid word with its own meaning, so it's a bit harder for you to get your point across.
Half of Korean vocabulary is Chinese, with pronunciation based on ancient Chinese pronunciation, but Korean has no tones and their writing system has recently become more or less completely phonetic. Disambiguation is still not a huge problem for them.
Source: took two years of Mandarin and lived in Taiwan for a few months
- more consistent (no confusing between the two sounds for "u" for example).
- better IMEs - you can filter characters by tone, impossible to do with Google Pinyin for example.
- can be used to type Simplified and Traditional
- no interference/preconceptions from other languages written in the latin alphabet.
Arabic has some marks and different start/middle/end forms but it is simpler
It's an "artificial" alphabet, meaning that it wasn't born organically over hundreds of years but created by a group of koreans. It's very simple by design, as it was created to allow the general populace to write and read (until then they were using some kind of chinese dialect, too complicated for those in the working class).
Case in point: http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-t...
Source: my korean teacher back when I did a year of study in korea. So I might be fuzzy on some details.
>>Arabic [has] different start/middle/end forms [...]
As far as I'm aware, Korean doesn't have different characters (forms) for the same sound, and doesn't omit vowels in the same manner that written Arabic does sometimes.
However, in the grand scheme of things, China has invested too much culturally, traditionally and publicly to walk away from their (relatively recently) simplified writing system and language.
(Reply biased a little based on my own experience reading both languages, but still should be pretty factually correct for most)
Also, converting spoken Korean into text can be tricky for non native speakers (e.g. 맛 is pronounced 'Mat' although the spelling would indicate 'Mas')
Latin America -> computadora
Spain -> ordenador
That's all well and good, but phoentic implies the other way around too. After hearing a word, you'll have to be able to write it. For instance, "kill", "sand", and the "shark" word in the phrase "shark" all have exactly the same tonal pronunciation, but with completely different ways of writing it.
And don't get me started on traditional vs. simplified.
Note that the last one, 鯊 is composed of two components 沙 and 魚.
So the top component is the phonetic hint and the bottom is semantic, as 魚 means "fish". Many characters for types of "fish" (I use "fish" loosely as things like whales 鯨魚 are considered fish) use the fish radical, as the characters are called when used as a component of a character.
鯉魚 carp the 里 is phonetic 鮑魚 abalone 包 is phonetic
Of course, this is just a small sampling and there are plenty of things that are inconsistent. I typically just use it as a mnemonic.
And to the point of tones, I leave 傻 [sha3], which means stupid.
Without any context, or meaning, you should be able to write a word just by hearing it. Similarly, without any context or meaning, by seeing a word, you should be able to pronounce it.
Now, of course it's a sliding scale.
But I think Chinese is on one end of the scale, where if you're just given the phenome shā without context or meaning, it's literally impossible to figure out how to write the word.
In English and all romance languages, you can try to spell it somewhat, and then give it to a native reader to see what it means. This helps a lot when you're reading subtitles for television programs or listening to the radio. If you're reading subtitles, you can sorta figure out what matches up to what. If you're listening to the radio, you can make a best guess on how to spell a word and ask somebody what it means.
That said, as a native-English-speaking Chinese learner I don't find the tones of standard Mandarin to be particularly hard (Hokkien, on the other hand…). Standard Mandarin phonology is also pretty easy (some parts are tricky for native English speakers like contrasting aspiration but not voice (English is the opposite), but overall it's not terribly complex).
"Yes!" "Yes?" "Yes..."
Actually, the mess that is English orthography is hardly more "manageable" than Chinese script. There are loads of phonetic elements in Chinese characters.