Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that. As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unable to hear tonal differences that changed the meaning of words during my short attempt at learning Chinese. Made me glad I had the good fortune to be born in the country that was 'first to internet'.
It's true. If you grow up in a single language environment, you basically train your brain to slot almost all spoken language into the sounds you use for your language. So if your language has 30 phonemes, all language you hear gets slotted into those 30 phonological slots. e.g. "collar" and "caller" have subtly different sounding vowels, and you have a "recognition" slot for each vowel sound so you can tell them apart. But some dialects of English pronounce the two vowels the same and thus speakers of that dialect only have a single phonological slot. Even if you pronounce them in your dialect, they actually process the sounds the same and hear the same sound.
But there's "space" between the slots, and the further a pronunciation is from that slot the more recognizable it is as a unique sound that person without that slot can hear.
The problem of course comes when speakers of a language use phonology that sounds close to what you use, but is subtly different and that difference has a crucial meaning, the tones in Chinese for example. Another great one is the vowel length. In English two vowels of the same pronunciation, but different lengths are the same. But in Japanese they can be different. This also happens with consonants, Korean has a "stressed" consonant system that non-Korean speakers literally can't hear because a "k" and a "k" with a stress end up int the same phonological slot. Or an "s" made with your tongue behind you back teeth is a different "s" than one made with your tongue between your teeth.
This also works its way into pronunciation, we train certain muscle groups, from our chest and neck to our face and mouth to pronounce certain sounds certain ways. And learning to use different sounds (even if you can recognize them as different) sometimes is not enough to try mimicking the sound, but to actually retrain your muscle groups to use them like a native speaker would.
You can develop these additional slots and recognize differences with lots and lots of careful practice. But it's painfully and frustratingly hard.
My advice to anyone who wants to learn Mandarin, especially with respect the tonal aspect, should start as young as possible (i.e., don't make a deliberate decision to put off learning the language until later). I started at age 21, and my impression (from observing other learners over the past 25 years) is that most people who begin much later than that have an especially hard time recognizing and reproducing the tones.
If the Chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor using their ideographs, they wouldn't have used it, and only when alphabetic (or abjad or abugida) language users invented it would it start to get used.
Just like when the Chinese invented printing back around 1000 AD, but didn't use it much. Only when Europeans invented printing with movable types around 1500 AD did printing start to get used.
I can also relate to this; it took me a while to hear the differences and even longer to speak the differences. While I'm far from perfect, the more exposure to the language I've been getting the more I've started to notice these intricate details.
I can only imagine the same goes for other languages too i.e. Once the basics are mastered you can start really diving into the language.
Those are differences in emphasis (DIgest vs diGEST). Tonal differences in Mandarin are more subtle. The same syllable is emphasized, but the "shaping" of the pronunciation is changed.
Also note that OP stated that he or she couldn't distinguish between Mandarin tones, not tonal differences in general. This is not difficult to believe, as your ear becomes trained to recognize differences in your native language and ignore slight differences in pronunciation that don't affect the meaning.
Those tonal shifts are a lot more obvious than the ones in Chinese. Despite being a "heritage speaker" of Mandarin, I still sometimes confuse words with the same pronunciation but different tones. I remember my mother once asked me to bring her the "bēizi" (cup) and I instead brought her the "bèizi" (blanket). The difference between the two is quite subtle. Chinese speakers rely on context as much as tonality to distinguish similar-sounding words.
My mother once asked me to bring her a pin, and instead I brought her a pen. Are tones more problematic than homophones (and accent-induced homophones) ?
Yes. In Mandarin, there's a much smaller set of sounds than in English. There are many, many words which sound exactly the same -- same pronunciation, same tone, different hanzi -- before you even get into the issue of same pronunciation, same tones. Hence the reliance on context.
That's the first line of a classic Chinese couplet (duìlián). The second line usually goes: Niūniū qiān niú， niú niù， niūniū níng niú. It translates to "little girl leads along the cow, the cow is stubborn, the little girl pinches the cow".
I had no idea. Even as an ABC who still speaks semi-competently, I'm having trouble figuring out Niūniū, niù, and, níng. What are the characters? Isn't pinch 捏?
妞妞牵牛，牛拗，妞妞拧牛。妞 means girl, 妞妞 is a common name for little girls; 拗 has two different pronunciations, ao and niu; the ao pronunciation is usually used as a verb for bending something, while the niu pronunciation is usually an adjective for stubbornness. I guess 拧 is better translated as to wring or to squeeze and twist, but you get the idea.
As a non-native English speaker, until recently I didn't know ee and i sounded different, eg: bee and bit. Someone explained to me that there are something like 30 vowel sounds in English. Y u no 1 letter = 1 sound???
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary" -- James Nicoll
Each little area of England used to have its own spellings. Heck Shakespeare didn't even spell his own surname consistently! Eventually (1700's IIRC) things started to go national such as dictionaries and newspapers which did start leading to consistency, as well as simplification over a period of about 30 years. However sometimes the consistency came before the simplification. Consequently English has some words from before simplification and most from after. We just see these as exceptions and quirks. Bryson covers this stuff well, and is a very amusing and informative writer. (And there are those who quibble with his content.)
English is actually a mixture of Anglo-Saxon (i.e., "real" English), Norman French (i.e., French as spoken by Danes), ordinary French, several Celtic tongues, various Scandinavian languages/dialects, Latin, Greek, German, and (more recently) everything from Yiddish to Mandarin.
If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.
This is exactly why I refer to native English speakers as "sesquilingual".
That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think.
I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go.
Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
most non-native English speakers don't distinguish between
peek, peak, pick...to them it all sounds the same and gets pronounced similarly...while I have spoken English almost all my life. I generally struggle with such words, which accentuates my accent...so you are not alone:)
I'm a native speaker of English and I was unaware there was any difference in pronunciation between these two words. Unless you mean the difference is between those two and 'pick'?
there is a very subtle difference..it might also depend on your regional accent..."peek" is pronounced with a slight stretching of the 'e' sound, ie pe..ek, where as "peak" is pronounced without...
As another native speaker, no, there is no difference.
"peek" and "peak" are both pronounced identically \ˈpēk\
They are homophones.
Pick is pronounced \ˈpik\.
Piece and peace are also homophones and pronounced identically \ˈpēs\ while piss is pronounced \'pis\.
Apparently you have trouble distinguishing between ē and i sounds but there are only two different sounds in those word triplets, not three.
It's been well documented that around 8-10 months, infants lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that do not meaningfully contrast in their linguistic environment. An English speaker can certainly hear the tones, and may even be able to pick out different tones in isolation, but it takes significant training to be able to interpret them as contrastive as opposed to inflectional, etc.
The more subtle ones I was unable to pick up on. To me, when people spoke, it sounded monotone, especially on those audio exercise sounds played over speakers. I don't have a problem picking up on the tonal differences in English, because the difference is quite a bit more pronounced to me.
EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
English uses question tags - you make you voice go up at the end of the sentence you know?
Chinese uses little words like 呢 to indicate a question. Or you can just use correct Chinese grammar for questions - "He said what" or "Who said that" or "This is how much". Tones are used for emphasis (emphasising the tone emphasises the word), but not for questions.
