[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.

[DiogenesKynikos]

It does actually get much more difficult to fix your accent as you improve in a language. You have to significantly regress, slowing down your speech and taking pains to say everything correctly. You can lock in a good accent early on with much less effort.

There's really no risk in having too good of an accent early on. People will assume you're more advanced than you are, but once you tell them you're learning, they'll simply be impressed by your lack of an accent. There are worse things that could happen.

[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.