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Tonal languages for a tin ear | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4490 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes  Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 17 of 30 20 September 2014 at 4:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Don't let an obsession on recognizing the tones bog down your learning or discourage you. Just keep
studying, interacting with native speakers and immersing yourself in native material. It may sound like indecipherable mess of sounds at first, but as month by month passes by you'll start to making it out little by little. There's light at the end of the tunnel, friend. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 18 of 30 21 September 2014 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
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The other day I was watching a Chinese show online 快乐汉语 (Happy Chinese Language) from several
years ago. Except for the hosts, the people in the show were students from other countries. These students are quite advanced in their Chinese and have mastered basic pronunciations. Instead of learning individual characters, you learn them in blocks of words. Supposed you enter the Pinyin: shouyinji you get 2 possibilities: 收音机 shōuyīnjī for radio or 收银机 shōuyínjī for a cash register. shijian you get different possibilities: 时间 shíjiān for time, 事件 shìjiàn for happenings & 世 间 shìjiān for world. xiangjiao you get 香蕉 xiāngjiāo for banana, 橡胶 xiàngjiāo for rubber & 相交 xiāngjiāo for crossover. At first you'd memorize these phonetically without the Chinese characters in blocks. Like in English you wouldn't memorize radio as separate sounds "ra", "di" and "o" but all 3 syllables together you'd learn "shōuyīnjī". There are certain sounds where you can have 2 or even 3 possibilities such as yuyan you can have 预言 yùyán for a prediction / prophecy and 寓言 yùyán for fable as Aesop's Fables. You basically have to go by the context of your sentence. On a page we can see 预言 has a different character as 寓言 but in a conversation both sound the same. In Chinese sentences are always written in 1 continuous line like: 我去看电影。You'd break the sentence the way you would in English: "I'm going to see a movie" and learn each character / block of characters as a complete word... like wǒ qù kān diànyǐng becomes wǒ (I the subject) qù (go the auxiliary verb) kān (see the verb) diànyǐng (movie noun, object of the verb). The word for movie you'd learn the 2 syllables diànyǐng together because these 2 form 1 idea. Edited by shk00design on 21 September 2014 at 5:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| theyweed Senior Member Poland Joined 3814 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English | Message 19 of 30 21 September 2014 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I've checked whether I'm tone deaf or not and the test result said that I'm not.
(here's the test: http://tonedeaftest.com/; of course I'm aware of the fact that such test will not replace a professional diagnosis). Interestingly, today I've almost decided to give up learning chinese as I had terrible efficacy when I strived to discrimate the tones using pleco. I didn't count it, but it oscillated between 45-60%. This undermines the result of the research that correlation between being a musically talented and being able to distinguish the tones correctly does exist. (of course we assume here that this test was reliable). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 20 of 30 22 September 2014 at 8:06am | IP Logged | ||
That's like quitting English because you can't hear the difference between "sit" and "seat." Hang in there! First, because you will learn to hear tones better over time. Second, because the more you master the language, the more context will help you pick out tones. If you don't give up, you will get it- at least good enough to understand people. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 21 of 30 22 September 2014 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Millions of people successfully learn Mandarin as a non-native language and they can't all have "musical" ears. I've never studied a tonal language but I wonder if it's just a pre-formulated excuse that some people have deep within to provide them with an easy get-out clause when the going gets tough, as it does with any language, even those in the same family as your native tongue. A bit like, oh you can't learn language X in land Y because everyone instantly replies in immaculate Z.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| theyweed Senior Member Poland Joined 3814 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English | Message 22 of 30 22 September 2014 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Nah, I perceive it as seeking sense in delving into activity being deprived of
indispensable paraphernalia needed to achieve success. Someone who's 160cm tall will never be able to make (do?) spectacular dunk. Of course 1/100M might be able to do this, but this is not the point. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 23 of 30 22 September 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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(Just lower the hoop.)
The average person can't expect to be able to play for the NBA one day, either. If you don't have all the necessary prerequisites no amount of training will help you there. The average person can however learn to use a second or third language reasonably well if they just spend enough time on it. It's more difficult when the language is very dissimilar to your own. Some aspects may be more difficult for some people than for others. For me, tonality makes a language more difficult. But we're not talking peak performance here, we're talking a level than hundreds of millions of native speakers use consistently everyday. Natural language is not a competition, it's cooperation. Edited by Bao on 22 September 2014 at 10:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 24 of 30 23 September 2014 at 2:04am | IP Logged | ||
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People often identify with the extreme end of a skill they perceive to be alien to them. They make statements
like "no matter how hard I practise guitar, I'll never be the next Eric Clapton". Well guess what, you don't have to be. Thousands of guitarists earn a living without being as good as the top guys and you don't even need to be at a professional level to express yourself well in a musical sense. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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