Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Tonal languages for a tin ear

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
30 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
shk00design
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4203 days ago

747 posts - 1123 votes 
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

 
 Message 25 of 30
23 September 2014 at 2:33am | IP Logged 
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 4818 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 
beano wrote:
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.



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 4466 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 
Some don't even sing while they play power chords, haha...
1 person has voted this message useful



vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4531 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 
robarb wrote:
Korean isn't tonal, but hearing the difference between ᄌ/tɕ/, ᄎ/tɕʰ/, and ᄍ/t͈ɕ/ is arguably even harder.
Then it might actually be good for some that, according to some linguists, Korean initial consonant distinctions are making way to tonal distinctions. Young people in (South) Korea might be making the distinction between the three kinds of initial consonant phonemes differently: ᄌ - [tɕʰ] followed by a low tone vowel, ᄎ - [tɕʰ] followed by a high tone vowel, ᄍ - [tɕ] followed by a high tone vowel. Admittedly I haven't had much exposure to natural spoken Korean of either old or young speakers, but as far as I can tell this analysis does seem to describe the pronunciation of the Talk To Me In Korean teachers better than the traditional description.
2 persons have voted this message useful



I'm With Stupid
Senior Member
Vietnam
Joined 3932 days ago

165 posts - 349 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Vietnamese

 
 Message 29 of 30
23 September 2014 at 8:38pm | IP Logged 
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 4203 days ago

747 posts - 1123 votes 
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

 
 Message 30 of 30
26 September 2014 at 5:20am | IP Logged 
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 &
.

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



This discussion contains 30 messages over 4 pages: << Prev 1 2 3

If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.6250 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.