[ecshafer]

Anyone that is a native European language speaker that hasn't tried to learn Chinese or some other tonal language, its really hard to understand how hard it is. The tones can really be very subtle, and your ear is not fine tuned to them. So you think you are saying it right, but native speakers have no idea what you are saying.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The tones are really not as difficult as people make them out to be.

90% of the effort in learning any language is just learning massive amounts of vocabulary.

Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones. Then, you spend years learning vocabulary.

The two things that make Chinese difficult are:

1. The lack of shared vocabulary with Indo-European languages (this obviously doesn't apply if your native language is something with more shared vocabulary with Chinese).

2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

‡. The same goes for grammar issues (like declension and conjugation) that people always complain about when learning Indo-European languages. These are the very basics that you learn early on. Most of the real effort is in learning vocab.

[dtm987654123]

>Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones.

Disagree slightly with this- pronouncing the tones individually and getting to the point where you can be understood isn't too hard (well still hard), but combining them when speaking more quickly is more challenging, especially if you want it to flow nicely, and adding emphasis while maintaining the tones. Not that it's mandatory if you just want to understand/be understood, it depends on one's goals.

It's a common misconception that it's enough just to learn the tones and move on and it's very hard to find teachers who are able to help with more advanced pronunciation

[DiogenesKynikos]

I fully agree that a lot of the difficulty with the tones is in pronouncing them at pace, and in internalizing how they interact with one another.

However, this is still something that happens very early on when learning Chinese, and it takes nowhere near the same amount of invested time as learning thousands of vocabulary terms.

[calf]

Yours is the first comment I strongly agree with; as a multilingual/bicultural Asian American, children don't have this supposed difficulty hearing tones.

Most of it is passively paying attention. It should not be a struggle, it's one of those the more you struggle and overintellectualize the less time you are focusing on paying attention and letting your hearing ability do its work it was evolved to do.

The other thing is this whole emphasis on accents is misdirected. Teachers do not place this excessive emphasis on accents, it is people who want to sound "authentic" which is not a very wise goal of language learning in the first place.

I do think that learning music can help a little, especially a sonically complex instrument like violin and the like.

(caveat: I'm way oversimplifying on my Saturday afternoon, but that's my tentative views on this that I would try to argue for.)

[DiogenesKynikos]

I agree on not over-intellectualizing the tones.

I've seen people struggle to pronounce a word when I explicitly tell them what tones it contains, but then pronounce it perfectly when I ask them to just imitate me.

But I disagree about accents. One of the major flaws in most foreign language education, in my opinion, is that pronunciation is not emphasized heavily enough at the beginning. Being able to pronounce the basic sounds correctly has a huge impact on how native speakers perceive your language skills, even if you're not very advanced in the language.

[thaumasiotes]

> Being able to pronounce the basic sounds correctly has a huge impact on how native speakers perceive your language skills, even if you're not very advanced in the language.

That's true, but it counsels against trying to develop better pronunciation early.

If you sound like a native despite having just started to learn the language, people will naturally conclude that you are mentally retarded.

[DiogenesKynikos]

That's better than locking in a strong accent the rest of your life. Once you learn to speak a language, it's very difficult to fix your accent.

[thaumasiotes]

There are two problems with this:

(1) It doesn't get any more difficult to fix your accent. But most people won't, because there's virtually no benefit to doing it.

This is related to

(2) Once you learn to speak a language, you're not at any risk of people thinking that you can't speak it, even if you speak with a strong accent.

[snicky]

> 2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

This is an interesting observation. Another one that I sometimes mention to my friends who didn't have an occasion to learn Chinese before is that in this language speaking, reading and writing are actually 3 separate components. You can read characters without knowing how to write them properly or even remembering them entirely. Lots of my Taiwanese acquaintances forget how to write certain characters, because nowadays most of the text they write is in bopomofo on their phones. Bopomofo represents sounds, so basically knowing how an expression sounds and being able to read the character (pick it from a set of given characters for the chosen sound) is enough to "write" it.

[Sxubas]

Your comment is written as it learning a language was not a subjective experience, which could not be further from the actual thing

[DiogenesKynikos]

Learning 10,000 words is objectively more difficult than getting used to tones.

You can get used to the tones in a relatively short amount of time. If you are in an immersive environment for a month or two, you will end up wondering how it is that anyone can't hear the tones.

In contrast, there is simply no way to memorize thousands of words in that timeframe.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Agree. It’s really hard. It also explains why a lot of people born in China tend to make serious pronunciation errors when speaking English or German. They are used to focus on different things than us westerners.

It took me very long time to really understand how impersonating tone is in Chinese.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing Indo-European languages is that Chinese has a very limited set of syllables, and they always follow the pattern (consonant) + vowel + (nasal/rhotic consonant), with possibly one of the consonants being dropped.

Chinese does not have clusters of consonants like "rst" in "first." The closest thing in Chinese phonology to "first" would be something like "fi-re-se-te." If you grow up never pronouncing consonant clusters, they are incredibly difficult to learn.

This is all related to the existence of tones, but tones are not the direct reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing words like "first." Tone provides one additional way of differentiating syllables, so Chinese can get away with having far fewer syllables than non-tonal languages. You essentially get 4-5 different versions of every syllable.

[samus]

> This is all related to the existence of tones, but tones are not the direct reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing words like "first."

Actually they kind of are. The tonal system of modern Chinese dialects developed from voiced initial constants of syllables. Old Chinese (Han dynasty and older) might not have been a tonal language altogether. Many linguists think that they developed from final consonants that have since disappeared, and before that happened, yes, Chinese would have had (some) consonant clusters. But still nothing like essentially free-form syllables like other language families.

[DiogenesKynikos]

I said that the tones are not the direct reason.

They're indirectly related to the difficulty Chinese native speakers have with learning to pronounce Indo-European languages, in that the tones developed as Chinese syllables became more simple and restricted.

[cvhc]

As a native Mandarin speaker, I always think the most difficult feature in English (and a few other European languages, like French) are the rich vowels. Like done vs down, beat vs bit, trailing dark l vs -ou/-u sound, and frequent vowel reduction in speech. Even worse, different English dialects randomly shift vowels (maybe like how Mandarin dialects use different tones). Neither my ear nor my mouth is tuned. From Wikipedia "English phonology":

> The number of vowels is subject to greater variation; in the system presented on this page there are 20–25 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 19–21 in Australian English.

Native English speakers, if they are not teachers, tend to underestimate the challenge. I see YouTube videos that the western Chinese learner hypothesizes Spanish is most difficult for Chinese to learn because of the RR consonant -- I learned Spanish casually for a few years and I disagree. RR is difficult to pronounce, but I can clearly hear it and I won't confuse it with a different sound. In contrast to English, Spanish vowels are so easy.

[Sxubas]

Spanish is such a blessing as mispronouncing a word rarely changes the meaning.

Whereas in Chinese or to a lesser degree English, you have to very mindful on how you pronounce stuff.

As a native Spanish speaker the thing I dread the most is grammar and the absurd amount of verbal times there are. Even native speakers don't speak with perfect grammar.

[cyberax]

I'm a native Russian speaker, and I decided to learn Mandarin, because it's linguistically almost the opposite of Russian.

I had no problems with tone pronunciation, but tone recognition was indeed much trickier. I still often get lost when listening to fast speech although I can follow formal speech (news) usually without problems.

[barrell]

I recently started learning a tonal language, and so far have not struggled too much wrt tones when everything is slow. There was an original strangeness and refusal for my vocal cords to want to work that way, but probably only for the first month or so.

At least, this is the case for slow text. Once the text is sped up it’s amazing how my brain just stops processing that information. Both listening and speaking.

I’m sure this will come with practice and time but for now I find it fascinating

[thenthenthen]

Euro speaker here, no problem with recognising tones but speaking them…:/

[cyberax]

Are you studying a language with contour tones or with high/mid tone distinction? I tried to study a bit of Thai, and the high/mid tone distinction was a complete show-stopper for me.

[laurieg]

For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.

My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.

The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.

The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.

Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.

[ronyeh]

> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3.

I’m wondering if we can find good examples to teach the Mandarin tones. I think two or three syllable words are best because it illustrates the contour of the tones.

[thaumasiotes]

Pitch levels are important enough in English that native speakers spontaneously develop ways to write them down, even though the standard written language has no way to indicate them.

However, they operate at the level of the sentence rather than the individual word, which sets up a conflict if an English speaker wants to learn Chinese.

The most common uses of pitch in English are to annotate the grammatical structure of a sentence, making it clear which words belong together in larger phrases, and to mark yes/no questions.

English does have one clear example of lexical tone, the "I don't know" word, which is pronounced very similarly to the Mandarin pinyin éēě. (If pronounced with the mouth open. With the mouth closed, it would be more like 嗯嗯嗯 in the same 2-1-3 tone sequence.)

[ronyeh]

That’s also a great example. I’m gonna write these down so I can illustrate tones to my native English speaking friends.

You can also say “I DON’T KNOW!” in a 1-1-4 tone sequence.

[danparsonson]

Wholeheartedly (or maybe downheartedly?) agree with this - sometimes I try to say the simplest things and people just stare at me like I'm speaking Martian. Which I suppose I might as well be! One of my big problems is implicit use of tones for things like expressing uncertainty; that's a very difficult habit to get out of.

[bunderbunder]

Another one that I wish I had realized sooner is that, contrary to the impression teachers tend to convey, tones aren’t just a pitch contour thing. There are also intensity and cadence elements. Native speakers can fairly accurately recognize tones in recordings that have had all the pitch contour autotuned out.

[dionian]

its critical because without proper tonal enunciation the words can be ambiguous.