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Easier to Make Mistakes in Mandarin? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4779 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes  Speaks: Russian | Message 1 of 16 12 March 2012 at 1:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What's amazing about Mandarin is that it has a total of only 400 monosyllabic sounds, which is very few, and all of it's words are a combination of one or more of these sounds, and that these monosyllabic sounds all sound quite similar to each other. Also, if one of these sounds ends with a consonant, it ends with either "n", "ng", or "nr". And that's it.
So it would seem on the surface that it would be a very easy language to learn, aside from the tones and the Hanzi, because there are so few possible combinations of sounds or syllables to learn. However, my guess is that the very limited number of monosyllabic sounds makes it much more difficult for learners to understand Mandarin speakers, because the words are all so similar, therefore confusing the listener. In other languages, the range of sounds is much broader, reducing the possibility of false friends. With regard to the tones, a beginner can probably mimic them correctly if it is just a single tone by itself. The real trick is to spontaneously say an entire sentence which may have 30 tones, and have them all flow in sequence, one after the other, without starting and stopping. For a beginner, that can be a bumpy ride. I really admire anyone who even tries to tackle The World's Most Difficult Language For English Speakers. Trying to make sense of the tones, as a speaker or a listener, must bring real pain to the brain. Edited by tanya b on 12 March 2012 at 5:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 16 12 March 2012 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Me, too! But I'm pretty sure that's not Mandarin. At the very least, Cantonese is more difficult, seeing as you have to learn two (and a half) sets of grammar and vocabulary, many more characters have double readings, and you have to deal with more tones. As tonal languages go, Mandarin's like "tonal light". And don't even get me started on availibility of materials. And Cantonese is not half as difficult as Taiwanese. Not only does it have eight tones (twice as many as Mandarin), but every tone changes depending on the tone of the syllable that follows it. Except if it's the last syllable of an utterance (and linguists can't even agree of what counts as an utterance). Add to this the fact that Taiwanese has like five different romanization systems and nobody can agree on how to write even basic words in chinese characters, meaning reading a book in Taiwanese is a challenge even for a native. By comparison, Mandarin is like Spanish. Seriously, Mandarin isn't even close to being TWMDLFES. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 16 12 March 2012 at 9:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@tanya b
I think you may be overstating it a little bit. Most Mandarin morphemes are monosyllabic, but many words are disyllabic or more. They are often conflated but I must emphasize: characters ≠ words. There may be more homonyms than in other languages, but I'm sure it's not as bad as the nightmarish version you have built up in your head. :) @ari I'll give you the mess of competing romanization systems (even though most of the ones in use are basically POJ or slight modifications thereof). But Taiwanese doesn't have eight tones anymore—tone two has long ago merged with tone six. Also, two of the remaining ones are stopped tones with similar contour to other ones. So counting tones we have seven but in just five unique contours. Comparing that with Cantonese, which has nine tones/six tones contours, the number itself doesn't seem that bad! I agree that Taiwanese Minnan tone sandhi is indeed crazy and while less scary now that I've internalized it (somewhat), it is still the craziest and coolest thing I've ever had to learn phonology-wise. However I must make a correction in that the tone does not change in general depending on the syllable that follows it. It changes to one and only one other tone (except for tone eight which has two possibilities) when it is not the last syllable of an utterance. That is each tone has an isolation tone and a modified tone, expressing the former utterance-finally and the latter otherwise. For example the word Bân-lâm-gú （閩南語）, which has the underlying tone sequence 5-5-2 becomes 7-7-2. Note that all the fives changed to threes and that the change has nothing to do with the tone of the following syllable: all fives change to sevens when in non-final position. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 16 12 March 2012 at 9:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for your corrections, egill! I haven't studied Hokkien, though I just got a coworker from Fujian, so maybe I'll try to steal some lessons. I don't want to hijack the thread, but if you know any good resources, maybe you could message me?
As for the tone changes, Wikipedia says that both the fourth and the eighth tones change depending on the following syllable.
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4679 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 5 of 16 12 March 2012 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hasn't Japanse like 46 syllables only? That must be a lot harder than Mandarin then! ;-)
(Well, I surely do believe that Japanese is harder, but not for that reason) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6644 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 16 12 March 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Japanese has 46 kana (times 2 for hiragana and katakana), but modifications to the kana can create a larger number than that. I don't have Japanese installed at work, but for example: There is a kana for the syllable for "ka", but you can create the syllable "kya" using "ki" plus a "ya" printed about half the size, right next to it. Then there are the syllables that can be voiced with the two tick marks written on the side, and the "H" row which can be converted to "B" using the tick marks and "P" using a small circle. On top of that, there's a syllable final "-n" kana that also extends the possible number of syllables.
I have no idea what the number is, but it thankfully turns out to be more than 46, especially considering Japanese's lack of tones to differentiate words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4679 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 7 of 16 12 March 2012 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Oh, yes, I completely forgot that point, thanks for correcting. That's probably still far below 400 anyway.
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| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 8 of 16 13 March 2012 at 12:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually, it's around 1500 syllables. And there aren't too many homophones, as most words are longer than one syllable.
Can you explain it in more detail? Why do you need two sets of grammar and vocabulary?
I haven't studied Taiwanese, but I remember reading about the sandhi. IIRC it could be easily described as a tone change on the last syllable, with all other syllables unaltered. Dictionaries use the changed tone, because that's how the words sound when they're pronounced separately and these "sandhi rules" are merely the reversal of the final syllable change. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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