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Comment by o_class_star | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do they struggle to speak fluently even if the tonal language is their first language?

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I grew up in Hong Kong and speak Cantonese as my first language, which is one of the most brutally strict languages in terms of tones. 9 tones, some very similar, words that have the same sound but different tones can have very different meanings, sometimes ones that make the situation embarrassing or make you sound like you're swearing (in a formal situation). Kids in school like to mock you endlessly if you even accidentally say a word in the wrong tone that means something different (especially if it sounds close to swearing words).

With all that pretext in mind -- having grown up there until I was 13, I had never met any native speaker in HK who couldn't pronounce words in correct tones. Not a single person.

Cantonese and other East Asian tonal languages are, more specifically, contour tonal languages; the distinctions between the different tones are based on the change in the tone through the syllable (rising vs. falling, etc.), rather than absolute pitch. This may be easy enough for tone-deaf people to deal with. However, there are other tonal languages, e.g. in Africa, which make use of absolute pitch distinctions.

I researched this a while back, and it turns out that while they can't hear tones (if you play minimal pairs in isolation, they won't be able to hear the difference), they still understand people and reproduce them correctly when they speak. They can also be trained to recognize recognize the difference. There's really no such thing as tone deafness.

Tone deafness is when you sing something badly, people make fun of you, and you stop trying to sing. Not an option when you speak a tonal language, instead you just learn pitch without realizing you're learning pitch, just operating from "feelings" and what "sounds right," which is of course based on an enormous amount of lifetime feedback.

It's like how actual blindsight (when the eyes or their connections to the brain are actually damaged or destroyed) is unrecognized echolocation. We are not aware of our own conscious experience, or the processes we go through to reach some of then conclusions we reach.

That is not true. I know person who cant tell piano keys from each other almost as far as an octave. She cant tell whether you you have hit one or two at the same time. She cant tell whether you have hit different one you you play two keys consecutively. She does hear well.

That is tone deafness and it has zero to do with singing. Tone deafness is not measured by having people sing.

Isn't there a theory that native speakers of tonal languages are better at music because they're better at recognizing tones?

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