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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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) ?

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.

How about this example, "bring me the má

má http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3

vs.

"Bring me the mǎ"

mǎ http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3

One will get you some hemp, the other a horse.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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???

"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.

I recommend reading The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue

Each little area of England used to have its own spellings. Heck Shakespeare didn't even spell his own surname consistently! Eventually (1700's IIRC) things started to go national such as dictionaries and newspapers which did start leading to consistency, as well as simplification over a period of about 30 years. However sometimes the consistency came before the simplification. Consequently English has some words from before simplification and most from after. We just see these as exceptions and quirks. Bryson covers this stuff well, and is a very amusing and informative writer. (And there are those who quibble with his content.)

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.

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.

most non-native English speakers don't distinguish between peek, peak, pick...to them it all sounds the same and gets pronounced similarly...while I have spoken English almost all my life. I generally struggle with such words, which accentuates my accent...so you are not alone:)

"peek, peak"

I'm a native speaker of English and I was unaware there was any difference in pronunciation between these two words. Unless you mean the difference is between those two and 'pick'?

there is a very subtle difference..it might also depend on your regional accent..."peek" is pronounced with a slight stretching of the 'e' sound, ie pe..ek, where as "peak" is pronounced without...

now try piece,peace and piss :)

As another native speaker, no, there is no difference. "peek" and "peak" are both pronounced identically \ˈpēk\ They are homophones. Pick is pronounced \ˈpik\.

Piece and peace are also homophones and pronounced identically \ˈpēs\ while piss is pronounced \'pis\.

Apparently you have trouble distinguishing between ē and i sounds but there are only two different sounds in those word triplets, not three.

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.

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'...

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.

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.

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