[rollinDyno]

I use hearing aids and always have trouble discerning tones, this is my only gripe with learning chinese and it is hindering me.

I have learned english and have got rid of my thick accent by imitating how other people speak, I should be able to do that with mandarin. I can just learn the pronunciation of the characters and adapt my accent as I speak. Why is there such a stress on memorising the tone for every character?

E.g. most people will remember which syllable to stress in a word after vocalising the word, but when learning mandaring people add the tone to their flashcards and are expected to have a more direct conneciton.

[bayesian_horse]

The more vocabulary you learn, the more you will find similar syllables with different tones.

In general, the "standardized" language tries to avoid this problem by encouraging the use of compound words where one syllable might do. That's why pinyin without tone numbers, for example in a chat, can actually be understood quite well. But with a larger universe of potential words, for example subject specific terms, it's hard or impossible without the tones, and at some point even tones don't work and you need the characters.

Chinese is a language with very low redundancy and very high information content per phoneme. If a listener misses one phoneme, be it through noise or whatever, the chance is higher to miss all the information, as compared to, say English or Spanish, where you can often delete whole syllables or multiple letters without losing the information.

I've heard hearing aids are really bad at distinguishing frequencies and locations. I don't know why exactly, but you might want to research that subject further. You might want to choose your next hearing aid for better "Chinese performance".

The Human ear does a Fourier transformation [extremely rough explanation] by sending the sound through a helix. Along that tube, sensing hairs are triggered by different frequencies. Depending on the hearing aids, that process can be mangled up.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The analogy I've heard is that failing to distinguish between tones is like failing to distinguish between "dock" and "duck" in English. Using the wrong tone is a lot closer to saying the wrong word than saying the right word in a thick accent.

[thaumasiotes]

The analogy to dock/duck seems fair, but I don't see why you don't want to call that an accent. Vowel troubles of that kind are a major feature of thick accents. Staying in the Chinese context, someone saying "fourth" in a thick Mandarin accent will actually say "force". (Depending on how thick; they'll probably say something more like "four-suh".) That's not because they're saying the wrong word -- they know what fourth means; they just can't say it.

In context, this kind of thing isn't a problem because a speaker with a heavy accent applies their own sound changes in a systematic way. It's very easy, as the listener, to learn their accent and adjust to it... if they're coming out with otherwise normal speech. As a foreign language learner, you probably have a thick accent _and_ you also can't form a normal sentence, so context can't provide the support it normally would for your odd pronunciation.

(If "dock" and "duck" were actually pronounced identically, that would cause no problems, in the same way that the identical pronunciation of "bow" (archery) and "bow" (decorative knot in a ribbon) causes no problems. That's most of why it doesn't matter if someone's accent causes them to pronounce some words as other words.)

[SpicyLemonZest]

As you say, a fluent English speaker with a thick Mandarin accent will understand and often hear the distinction between "fourth" and "force". They just can't easily produce /θ/ in their own speech. If someone's flashcards said both words have the same pronunciation, even if they know it's important to "adapt your accent as you speak", I'd definitely say they're learning incorrect pronunciation.

[thaumasiotes]

Sure, and looking up, I think the answer to the implicit question "Why are we supposed to memorize word tone in Mandarin when we don't need to memorize word stress in English?" is "You do need to memorize word stress in English. The details are up to you, but it's not optional."

But here, what I'm really asking is:

What's the difference between "saying the wrong word" and "saying the right word in a thick accent"? In my eyes, those appear to be the same thing, so I don't see how anything could be more like one than the other.

[SpicyLemonZest]

If someone said "strawBERry", for example, I would identify that as unambiguously being the right word. There is a canonically correct stress, and native speakers will notice when you get it wrong, but I wouldn't think for a second they might be talking about some other food I didn't know the word for. Even with the words where stress does carry meaning (content, object, etc.), I would identify them as a single word where context changes the pronunciation and meaning rather than two different words that happen to be written the same way.

[thaumasiotes]

> Even with the words where stress does carry meaning (content, object, etc.), I would identify them as a single word where context changes the pronunciation and meaning rather than two different words that happen to be written the same way.

Ah, this is where we disagree. In my view, the fact that strawBERry doesn't exist is just a coincidence. It's helpful in resolving what somebody meant by strawBERry, but not meaningful. The structure of English is compatible with a word pronounced strawBERry that means "barstool".

When I was a teacher in an English immersion school, I once asked a student if classes would be happening during a... holiday? I forgot why I thought they might not.

Anyway, the question was whether classes would be happening, and the student understood me correctly and responded "poss", leaving me confused.

He meant that classes were suspended, and he meant to say "pause", and he was aggrieved that the difference between the /z/ in "pause" and the /s/ in *poss meant so much to me when he thought it should be unimportant. But it was unimportant. The real problem was that the single word "pause" is not a valid response to that question in idiomatic American English. If it had been, I would have had no trouble understanding -- after all, there is no word "poss" to get in the way.

I see tone and stress the same way. Consonant choice / tone / stress are all parts of the word, and changing them gets you a different word.

[mdturnerphys]

Ignoring the tone when learning a tonal language is equivalent to ignoring something like vowel differences or final consonants in a non-tonal language.

[yorwba]

That's a fitting comparison considering that tones in Chinese and neighboring languages like Vietnamese may have developed from final consonants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology#Tones_an...