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Comment by duffyjp | Hacker News Reader

I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...

I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.

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In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.

Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)

>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar

It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.

Since the war, we have a lot of Ukrainians at our Flemish school. We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.

    > We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.

This is nice to hear. A real win.

Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?

Does "I'm just not going to be a dick to these people for ultimately trivial reasons" really need an explanatory framework in your world?

The GP wrote:

    > at our Flemish school

I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.

So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.

The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.

But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.

And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.

You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.

The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.

Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment

Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.

Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.

> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.

Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)

Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.

As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.

Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.

We have the same in dutch, but, surprise twist: it is often the dutch that get it wrong. And indeed, it is confusing, but then again, it is just a bit of noise injected into the bitstream and easily worked around once you attune to that particular speaker.

Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.

The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.

Why is this downvoted? This is a nice addition to the conversation. I see the same with Cantonese speakers. If you ask native speakers from Hongkong, Macao, and Guangdong, all of them will say "the other sounds weird"... but they work it out. And all three groups are happy to listen to a foreigner speak Canto (yes, there are a few). All will probably say: "Weird accent, but I understand what they are saying." Plus, Canto language communities probably exist in over 50 countries in the world. All of them will have slight tonal differences.

Says it’s overrated and non semantic… on authority of what? Being foreign to it and not knowing the language, naturally

Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.

Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.

Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.

It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?

Just remember, you can tune an instrument, but you can’t tuna fish.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Tune_a_Piano,_but_You_...> (originally by Groucho Marx: <https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kevin-cronin-reo-speedwagon-...>).

Or perhaps more HN-appropriate: <https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html>.

Eh, in a discussion about homophones, homonyms, and ambiguity, I prefer the variant, "you can tune a bass, but you can tuna fish".

Right up there with "fruit flies like a banana, but time flies like an arrow".

Strong agree

I correct my kids when they do mistakes, how else would they improve?

Calling people racist when they try to be helpful might say more about you than them.

I mean what I say and say what I mean is also something worth striving for.

Other adults aren't your kids, and it isn't your place to correct them, unless they ask for help.

As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people.

For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.

If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.

Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.

I mean there are widely spoken regional dialects that make no pitch distinction between the pronounciation of 橋 and 箸. You may get looked down on for not speaking the Queen's English (I mean standard Tokyo Japanese) but you are still speaking fully correct Japanese.

This is exactly why I say it is nothing but cultural/linguistic gatekeeping. Even natives between regions disagree on the "correct" way to pronouce these terms. This further proves to me how little Japanese varies throughout the country. It is freakishly regular for the size of Japan.

Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).

As a foreigner living in Japan, I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that it's not ethnocentrism, but that Japan is for the most part quite xenophobic, and racist. It's common to hear Japanese folks make fun of other people's accents in what should be obviously extremely inappropriate settings, like at work, for example. The fact that you consider this ethnocentrism furthers the point that xenophobia and racism is commonplace, and that you feel that it's on foreigners to accept it.

If you're nitpicking a foreigner's accent pitch, think about how it would make you feel if they nitpicked your english pronunciation. My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.

Yes, I also find it hilarious (in any culture) when someone is critical of a foreign speaker. Then when that person speaks a foreign language, usually their accent and style is so predictably awful that people are hiding under their desks. That is why I made the joke about asking natives: "So, how is your Thai... or German?" Those two languages are pretty rare to hear in Japan, especially for non-native speakers. It acts as the perfect monkeywrench in their gears.

    > My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.

Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.

> Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.

I disagree with this. I never want a stranger to give me a correction on my language skills. Unless they've been asked to help, they're being rude, even if they don't mean to be rude and even if they aren't being derogatory.

I go back to the point about "how would you feel if someone corrected your english pronunciation". Maybe they're doing it to be helpful. Maybe the rest of your pronunciation is pretty spot on, and they're helping you correct a single word. It's still embarrassing (and embarrassing someone is rude!). Maybe it isn't for you, but it is for most people.

I already have a teacher, and I've asked friends and family to correct me, but I don't want a stranger correcting me.

Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)

Kagoshima where there is no pitch accent is like a different language entirely though, and nearly unintelligible

Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.

That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".

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