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by khedoros1 3123 days ago
Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can be safely ignored).

I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.

1 comments

> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word

True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.