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A question regarding tonal languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 9 of 17 27 October 2009 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've noticed this when studying Korean. Korean is non-tonal and doesn't have syllable stress for words, yet it's quite obvious that they do stress specific parts of a sentence or phrase consistently (and not just for questions). However, that said, I later listened to some of the FSI audio files and noted that those speakers sounded completely monotone in comparison to what I hear in Pimsleur and in videos from Korean TV. So either they were intentionally speaking in monotone in the FSI courses or the language's speech patterns have notably changed in the past 40 years. Edited by Warp3 on 27 October 2009 at 4:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6317 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 10 of 17 27 October 2009 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So how does this affect Taiwanese typing in Zhuyin Fuhao, where they need to know the tone of every word? If they are unaware of them in speech, does this not make it more difficult to type correctly?
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| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5575 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 17 27 October 2009 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Does Zhuyin Fuhao input really require tones? I use pinyin input, which doesn't make use of tones at all. But in any case it'd be no different than remembering which way an English word is spelled when you are writing it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 17 27 October 2009 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's not just tones and it's not just stress.
Some English speakers will swear blind that there's a difference between -or (doctor) and -er (driver), or between -ent & -ant, -ence & -ance etc. I used to. I also couldn't tell you the tune to the third line of a song without singing or humming the first and second lines. In my brain, the line is part of the tune and has no meaningful existance outside of it. I suppose the same goes for the constituent sounds of a word.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5999 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 13 of 17 27 October 2009 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Find a Cantonese + Mandarin speaker in Guangzhou. They will gladly tell you what the tones are for any word in Mandarin, but will (in a few of my experiences) go so far as to tell you there are no numbers or ways of describing the tones in Cantonese other than to imitation what they are saying. I once tried to hire a tutor for Cantonese and she insisted there was no way to "transcribe" like Pinyin with tones -- and so it would take a lot more lessons because I would have to depend on imitation of her speech. Of course she wasn't smart enough to realize this was a limitation of education and if her grade school taught her tones numbers and a phonetic system for Cantonese just like it did for Mandarin, she'd think it no less esoteric than her plain vanilla impression of Mandarin.
As for further proof: go to a random city in China and ask a native speaker how many tones their native dialect has. They will make a random guess which rarely corresponds with what linguists would say -- so that tells you a lot I think! You can't be too explicitly aware of the tones if you don't even know how many they are. One guy from Wuhan told me that his native tongue was really easy -- just speak Mandarin with every syllable converted to the 2nd tone!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kevin Hsu Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4739 days ago 60 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English, Mandarin*, Korean Studies: German | Message 14 of 17 12 December 2011 at 2:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry sbout the fact that I'm commenting on an old thread. However I feel the need to share my experience about this topic. As a native speaker of Mandarin, telling which tone a sound is in is very easy for me. However, I know some other native speakers who have difficulty distinquishing between the tones but have no trouble speaking fluently as well. So I believe that this really depends from person to person.
@maaku: Zhu Yin Fu Hao input does require one to know the tone of the character that they are typing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4978 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 15 of 17 13 December 2011 at 12:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd say its totally true for Norwegian as far I can tell. We dont depend on tones so much as some other languages, but, an foregin learner not using tones, sounds not natural as example(but will be understood, no issues with that!), but: Most Norwegians, could not out of the blue just tell we got tones, and would not know the tones of anything without trying to speak the tone for every word, and I'm 100% certain, many would not be able to get all tones right if they "thought" about it, but would speak them correctly when not thinking about it, and also hear it when spoken wrongly.
More: As an example, I once told my Boss in a conversation I just found out, Norwegian is an tonal language, he actually argued against it, telling "my dialect at least do not have tones" (Østland dialect). In short, if you goes on the streets here and ask someone "if word X got tone 1 or 2?", you could get the reply people from north or west use one, people from east norway always speak everything in the other tone, and then continue to speak the tone system perfectly, not understanding the question at all. Most people unfortunately would think you asked about dialect differences between northern/west and east norway if asked about "tones", not tonal word contours. What most people don't realize, is all dialects of norway who GOT tones, all uses the same pairs of tones, a word in tone 1 or 2 is always the same, whatever dialect. :p Id say it don't matter for us anyway, an example, noone got issues undertanding native speaker from Finnmark, and they lack tones. Or people who live in the area around Bergen. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jarvis1000 Diglot Groupie United States want2speakthai.com Joined 4889 days ago 74 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English*, Thai Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 17 13 December 2011 at 2:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I am not native, but I learned Thai while living in Thailand. The tones just become part of the word. Not unlike in English we say "a Chair and an apple." We know the rule is that when the noun starts with a verb we say "an" and not "a", but when we are talking, we don't analyze the word and determine before hand if it has a vowel or not. We just speak it. It is part of the natural rythm of the sentence. To be honest I didn't even know that was a rule in English till I was 20!!! I had gone 20 years of my life speaking English without knowing the rule for a or an. That is what Tones are like. Eventually words, that are spelled the same yet have different tones, don't even sound like the same word. This is my experience with Tonal languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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