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Chinese takes more brain power? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 9 of 32 03 March 2012 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Whether you use one or both hemispheres has nothing to do with how much work the task requires.
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 10 of 32 03 March 2012 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Multilingualism also takes more brainpower than monolingualism... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 11 of 32 03 March 2012 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
There is intonation in English, so the right hemisphere is involved too. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kevin Hsu Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4739 days ago 60 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English, Mandarin*, Korean Studies: German | Message 12 of 32 04 March 2012 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't associate the sounds with the characters when I listen to Mandarin. I don't know
about other native speakers though. On a side note, I don't really notice a difference between the way I listen to English and the way I listen to Chinese... weird. Anyway, interesting topic! Are the researchers planning to look at it more closely? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6339 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 13 of 32 04 March 2012 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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How do they really conduct this study?
Like, how do they control the subjects so that they never think about their next year vacation? Stick a couple more words like "free" and "sex" in your passage and play it to your general English audience and I am damn sure that it will light up the right hemisphere of most male subjects like firework. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 14 of 32 05 March 2012 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
No one can feel or notice that their left or right hemisphere is working. You can only tell when you scan the brain. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 32 07 March 2012 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have only dealt systematically with Chinese during a few days in February, but my impression is that the problem in learning Chinese isn't the tones. They certainly use tones much more systematically than speakers of Western languages, but we have in Danish a thing called 'stød' (a weak glottal stop), and there are specific 'melodies' in Swedish and Norwegian which are like tones, but just for longer segments than one syllable at a time as in Chinese. Besides we have stress, and having stress in a language is not far from having a two-tone system. So the Chinese (and speakers of other tone languages) are much more systematic about modifying their basic sounds then we are, but the tonal phenomenon is known on a rudimentary basis even by speakers of Indoeuropean languages.
One specific thing I noticed is that Chinese doesn't sound like a ragged heap of rocks, but the little movements up and down where nicely integrated into something that even to my untrained ears sounded like a language which you could learn. If it wasn't for that writing system... I have problems even seeing all those small lines in a common Chinese book, and dictionaries are the worst offenders. Remembering where those lines should be is a separate task, which demands either photographic memory or - more likely - some kind of system. Before you have learnt that system you can't even look things up in a Chinese dictionary. Insofar Pinyin has indications of tones it would be the ideal companian writing system for your venture into Sinology - the problem is that the real Chinese write using the funny small signs and not Pinyin. So basically you need to work twice as hard to learn Chinese as to learn a language with an alphabet (with some leeway to compensate for silly spellings in the alphabet of that language - but Pinyin is supposed to be fairly loyal to the sounds of Mandarin). On the one hand you need to learn to somehow read Chinese and hear/pronounce the correct sounds of for instance Mandarin (but it could equally well be Hakka or Hokkien or whatever). And simultaneously you have to learn the meanings attached to thousands of more or less complicate drawings! On top of the problems with the writing system you have those pesky tones, but if you learn your words through pinyin plus listening then the tones aren't the most scary thing about Chinese for me. PS: The right half of the brain may not be where most language processing takes place in halfbrainers from the Western world, but even for us it has a role to play with things like swearwords and other exclamations. Edited by Iversen on 07 March 2012 at 4:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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