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Tonal languages for a tin ear | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 25 of 30 23 September 2014 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||
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There is the singer from the US (Jerome White) who emigrated to Japan to pursue his singer career. Being
brought up as African American with a Japanese grandmother he used to sing traditional Japanese songs at her house every week. Jerome started learning Japanese at age 9 and eventually adopted the name JERO the Enka singer in his 20s. There are better reasons why people learn languages besides being easy or difficult. Some Asian languages tend to be difficult because of writing characters. If you are married to a family who are from that part of the world like Moses McCormick the polyglot who is married to a wife from Taiwan, he would be learning Mandarin. Vietnamese can be just as difficult as Chinese but the language uses the Latin alphabet but this is not the reason why people choose that language. The difficulty of learning Mandarin tones is a bit exaggerated. It is like learning French with different accents over the vowels and pronouncing them properly. Whether or not you are going to interact with Chinese people regularly is a bigger factor to learning Mandarin. 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 26 of 30 23 September 2014 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
Languages, like guitars, are a tool used to accomplish something. Loads of professional guitarists aren't particularly good at guitar at all, but play simple music while they sing because it gets the job done while giving off a good image. If necessary, they can hire a non-singing second professional guitarist to play the hard parts. Similarly, you don't have to be a poet in your L2, and maybe you even can't. But what's certain is that with some work, you can learn it well enough to get by and accompany you doing the other things you do well. People seem to love to complain about tones as the reason Mandarin is hard. I feel that in all but the most extreme cases, this is a poor excuse. Mandarin is hard, but mostly because it's opaque to speakers of European languages and the characters are hard to learn. There are some other secondary factors like homophones, tones, heavy use of idioms, and heavy use of archaic language. But then again there are also easy things about Mandarin, notably no inflection. Plus, non-tonal languages that are equally opaque to speakers of European languages can be just as difficult, for example Arabic or Korean. Korean isn't tonal, but hearing the difference between ᄌ/tɕ/, ᄎ/tɕʰ/, and ᄍ/t͈ɕ/ is arguably even harder. Yes, if your native language isn't tonal, it'll be a bit harder for you to learn a tonal language, all else being equal. But it's unlikely this is a big part of the reason Mandarin takes longer to learn than transparent European languages. Edited by robarb on 23 September 2014 at 9:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 27 of 30 23 September 2014 at 9:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Some don't even sing while they play power chords, haha...
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| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 28 of 30 23 September 2014 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4175 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 29 of 30 23 September 2014 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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There have got to be plenty of tone deaf Chinese people in the world who still speak the
language fluently. I think it's a bit of a mistake to assume that when you listen to a language, you're processing each individual sound and coming up with a meaning. In reality, you're processing complete utterances in context, and much of it is automatic, with only a couple of words carrying most of the meaning. Obviously if someone is saying a sentence the structure of which you've never heard before, it's going to be impossible to decipher that in real time. If they're using familiar phrases, then you're actually only listening for one or two things. 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 30 of 30 26 September 2014 at 5:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I was watching an online video by the polyglot Steve Kaufmann:
The Seven Secrets of Successful Language Learning: #2 Do What You Like To Do According to Steve, his second rule of language learning is that you have to enjoy what you do. Don't think of learning as achieving perfection because we would be learning new words & phrases even in English. Everybody have their way of learning. Some people like Steve enjoy reading a lot. Other people like Luca Lampariello like to translate. He would take an entire page out of Wikipedia and translate it from 1 language to another. You basically find an activity that you enjoy doing such as watching videos, movies, TV programs, listening to the radio, reading books, flashcards, etc. In the beginning don't expect to know everything. Everyday you pick up a few new words & phrases. You tackle the intonation problem the same way in French you learn to distinguish the pronunciations of accents over a vowel: è, é, ê & ë. Once you know how to say the accents correctly, every word that has the same accent would be pronounced the same way. In Mandarin Pinyin we have ē, é, ě, è & e (neutral without tone marking). The other Pinyin symbol is 2 dots over the ü to give a soft u sound in conjunction with other Pinyin tones: ǘ, ǚ, ǜ. You only see a soft u after the consonant l & n such as lǘ & nǘ. The way I use for improving on my listening is by watching a lot of videos. Every time I come across a word / phrase I don't understand I'd replay that section of the video to catch the pronunciation (what I think the word sounded like). Then I'd look up the word / phrase in an online dictionary with an audio button. I'd press the audio after to hear if this is the same word as the one on video. The thing I like about an online dictionary is that you can look up words phonetically just as easily as by entering characters. Before giving up completely, you just have to find a way that will work for you. Once you find a good formula, you will make progress. Edited by shk00design on 26 September 2014 at 5:28am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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