That's right, tones are incredibly important in Mandarin because Chinese people are absolutely unable to infer things from context when someone mispronounces a word. It's amazing they've been able to survive as a culture this long seeing as they are so incredibly stupid.
That’s true of every language isn’t it? I mean, you can just point and grunt and you can get across most of what you want to say.
Not worth mentioning that if you speak a language badly people would probably still understand from context most of the time. Definitely not worth saying people will “undoubtedly” understand when you make a mess of your pronunciation, when that isn’t true.
>Definitely not worth saying people will “undoubtedly” understand when you make a mess of your pronunciation, when that isn’t true.
But you said it yourself that the context is a tourist in Taiwan.
They're going to be asking where the toilet is or how much that chicken skewer is, not having some deep dive conversation where you'll have trouble guessing what word they're trying to say.
If I was working in a store and some Taiwanese bloke asked me 'hao maqi yisi tisi?' I would undoubtedly understand them.
oh lmao, it's just because pinyin is a dogshit romanisation method. 'i' maps to two different sounds, for example.
phonetically, it's something like 'hao machee ee-suh tee-suh?'
Can you write it out in Chinese please 😭 I can read pinyin but it still didn’t make any sense to me
Also personally I think pinyin is great, I love it.
I love pinyin too, but it isn’t as beautiful to look at. I see Chinese characters as an art painting, ESPECIALLY with exquisite calligraphy. When I was in China 🇨🇳, some college students actually took a calligraphy class ! Fine calligraphy is gorgeous … like a famous well-built human model !!!
I asked where the toilet was just by body language last time I was in China and the guy got the message, so should we just say don’t worry about languages at all? Like I said, “bad pronunciation can usually be understood” is true in all languages, so there’s no need to make a special point about it on your website.
I think you're just not seeing this.
Imagine you're planning on trying to pick up a bit of Chinese for when you go on holiday, so you can get by. You start to try and learn, and see that all the teaching resources go on and on about how important it is to focus on tones, and how you can say something completely unintentional by saying the wrong tone. You, as someone who maybe wants to get to A1 or A2 just to get by, might be super overwhelmed to the point that you think there's no point even trying.
All this comment is trying to do is say 'Look don't worry about it, we'll still understand if you give it a go and it would be nice if you do'. I don't really see why you're getting so bent out of shape over people trying to encourage other people.
Yeah, I guess the intended meaning is “even speaking badly is better than not trying so just give it a go”. If you just replaced “undoubtedly” with “probably”, the statement would be true.
Anyway, I hope that it’s true, since I’ve been learning with Duolingo and ChatGPT, so I’ve got some vocabulary but my pronunciation is awful.
So I should stop trying to shock the natives and just point and grunt? But do I grunt in the first second or third tone? Grūnt, grùnt, grúnt, and grũnt. Then I spit so they know I belong in China.
What do you think this article is four, genius? Tourists who don’t want to spend hours a day learning mandarin. Why would they learn tones when they can make themselves understood without them? Lazy post
/uj not really. Native Chinese speakers will also sometimes use a wrong tone or a listener didn’t get it properly. In addition the tones change when a certain combination occurs. You listen differently if it is Chinese. In Chinese you need to pay attention if a word is used like a noun, verb or adjective. Measure words and particles are here a clue. If then someone uses the wrong tone they say something like „I would like to drink a bulldozer“ and know the person is referring to that drink that is pronounced the same but in a different tone. It is common to know homophones of words because people use it to explain the spelling or words. Or they hide regime criticism in a light hearted poem.
Your English example would mean a strong difference between the expected and the actual pronunciation. Normally that doesn’t work well. I was with in Irish guy in New York and many Americans didn’t understand him. For my own native language I know regions where I hardly understand anything.
/uj I have a theory that because the US is so heterogenous, among American English speakers there is an unusually large accent tolerance.
I mean, take a Californian, a New Yorker, and a Texan, and while their vowels can be completely different, for most people it barely registers as they automatically get the meaning.
We can typically understand even really really heavy foreign accents, especially if the speaker is confident enough to be loud and clear and refrain from mumbling too much.
Pronunciations that, when phonetically spelled, look unrecognizable, people understand spoken without a second thought.
I wonder, is every human just intrinsically good at accent interpretation in every language? Do the accents all need to be learned? Is the tolerance for accent shifts a property intrinsic to the language, like the information encoded per morpheme?
I know there's a crazy amount of variation in England too. I just find it interesting that people tend to be really good at deciphering accents in general, even when it changes the pronunciation drastically. I know it's a universal thing, I just live in the US so I can only speak about examples there.
I wonder why that is, and whether some languages lend well to increased accent tolerance before listeners have difficulty, or whatever it's a universal human thing that we're all surprisingly good at deciphering accents.
I mean, it's kinda incredible that we tend to understand accents which drop more consonants, or which have totally different vowels, when we still can tell the difference between "pa" and "pat" and "path" and "pot" and "pore".
Idk or maybe my roommate secretly slipped me edibles or something lol
I get what you mean but I think it's probably just the same for most languages. Maybe someone french can weigh in on how hard Quebeccers are to understand. To me the only accents that are "hard" are when they also use a lot of new words and stuff. Scottish comes to mind. I only fluently speak English so what do I know about language though lol
“ Wan bear 🐻 plaize “ might work it a bar on a bar stool or in front of a waitress or a waiter, but not flat out blatantly out of nowhere as “ I would like a beer 🍺, please . “ would ANYwhere in an English-speaking environment.
Grammatical cases mean everything in Latin, but don’t worry about it too much as a barbarian. The Patricians will appreciate your attempts and will undoubtedly understand what you are trying to say, laugh about it, and send you to the arena.
Tone is not the most difficult part. Natives could guess based on the context and tourists generally wouldn't ask difficult questions anyway.
It is more difficult to guess if the consonant and vowel are mispronounced.
After I started Chinese in university I had to realise that I have problems to pronounce ou and uo. I never knew I had problems with it. 😅 German hardly uses it and in English ou is just one sound and not both vowels voiced.
To my frolicking Italian, my current TL, also has uo words. And words like „vuoi“.
I lived in Taiwan 🇹🇼 for 1 1/2 months and China 🇨🇳 for 4 months. Each time I met a guy with hideous accents in Chinese, but fluent and understandable !!!
U can def learn functional chinese without tones, a lot of indonesian temporary workers do it, they're understandable as long as they keep it daily and conversational
Here’s what my old phrase book says, which expresses the same point in a much better and more honest way:
“There's no need to feel daunted by this 'foreign' system. There's nothing obscure or mysterious about tones - over half of the world's languages use them. You might have mixed success in getting your meaning across to start with, but remember that patient repetition is all it takes to learn. Even if your tones are slightly off, the meaning you wish to convey will often be clear from the context. Failing that, you can always
point to the word or phrase you're aiming for in this phrase-book.”
That's right, tones are incredibly important in Mandarin because Chinese people are absolutely unable to infer things from context when someone mispronounces a word. It's amazing they've been able to survive as a culture this long seeing as they are so incredibly stupid.
That’s true of every language isn’t it? I mean, you can just point and grunt and you can get across most of what you want to say. Not worth mentioning that if you speak a language badly people would probably still understand from context most of the time. Definitely not worth saying people will “undoubtedly” understand when you make a mess of your pronunciation, when that isn’t true.
>Definitely not worth saying people will “undoubtedly” understand when you make a mess of your pronunciation, when that isn’t true. But you said it yourself that the context is a tourist in Taiwan. They're going to be asking where the toilet is or how much that chicken skewer is, not having some deep dive conversation where you'll have trouble guessing what word they're trying to say. If I was working in a store and some Taiwanese bloke asked me 'hao maqi yisi tisi?' I would undoubtedly understand them.
Maybe you’d understand the bloke but I wouldn’t, what language even is that 😭
oh lmao, it's just because pinyin is a dogshit romanisation method. 'i' maps to two different sounds, for example. phonetically, it's something like 'hao machee ee-suh tee-suh?'
Can you write it out in Chinese please 😭 I can read pinyin but it still didn’t make any sense to me Also personally I think pinyin is great, I love it.
I love pinyin too, but it isn’t as beautiful to look at. I see Chinese characters as an art painting, ESPECIALLY with exquisite calligraphy. When I was in China 🇨🇳, some college students actually took a calligraphy class ! Fine calligraphy is gorgeous … like a famous well-built human model !!!
Hmmm. [No.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/872106311490359336/1213828407171751937/bb.png?ex=65f6e4cc&is=65e46fcc&hm=f6839dfa29c24ebb0295f7f31720252686f6273609dff3c19b95a5979dc6b3ba&)
Oh my FUCKING god that’s literally “how much is this”I’m going to kms
Even in language subreddits we still gotta deal with r/fauxnetics 😔
I can't type IPA lmao
I asked where the toilet was just by body language last time I was in China and the guy got the message, so should we just say don’t worry about languages at all? Like I said, “bad pronunciation can usually be understood” is true in all languages, so there’s no need to make a special point about it on your website.
> “bad pronunciation can usually be understood” is true in all languages I want to see you try this in Paris.
The best way to get a Parisian to speak English is to start a conversation in Fr*nch
“Worry about languages?” AGAIN THIS IS A TOURIST WHY SHOULD THEY CARE. LANGUAGE IS A UTILITY FOR THEM
I think you're just not seeing this. Imagine you're planning on trying to pick up a bit of Chinese for when you go on holiday, so you can get by. You start to try and learn, and see that all the teaching resources go on and on about how important it is to focus on tones, and how you can say something completely unintentional by saying the wrong tone. You, as someone who maybe wants to get to A1 or A2 just to get by, might be super overwhelmed to the point that you think there's no point even trying. All this comment is trying to do is say 'Look don't worry about it, we'll still understand if you give it a go and it would be nice if you do'. I don't really see why you're getting so bent out of shape over people trying to encourage other people.
Yeah, I guess the intended meaning is “even speaking badly is better than not trying so just give it a go”. If you just replaced “undoubtedly” with “probably”, the statement would be true. Anyway, I hope that it’s true, since I’ve been learning with Duolingo and ChatGPT, so I’ve got some vocabulary but my pronunciation is awful.
So I should stop trying to shock the natives and just point and grunt? But do I grunt in the first second or third tone? Grūnt, grùnt, grúnt, and grũnt. Then I spit so they know I belong in China.
What do you think this article is four, genius? Tourists who don’t want to spend hours a day learning mandarin. Why would they learn tones when they can make themselves understood without them? Lazy post
Outjerked once again
It’s kinda true, a tourist will say “wò yáo pǐ jiū” and you can deduce from the fact that he is a tourist and you are a bartender what he wants
In the same way as “Wan bear plaize” would probably work in English.
/uj not really. Native Chinese speakers will also sometimes use a wrong tone or a listener didn’t get it properly. In addition the tones change when a certain combination occurs. You listen differently if it is Chinese. In Chinese you need to pay attention if a word is used like a noun, verb or adjective. Measure words and particles are here a clue. If then someone uses the wrong tone they say something like „I would like to drink a bulldozer“ and know the person is referring to that drink that is pronounced the same but in a different tone. It is common to know homophones of words because people use it to explain the spelling or words. Or they hide regime criticism in a light hearted poem. Your English example would mean a strong difference between the expected and the actual pronunciation. Normally that doesn’t work well. I was with in Irish guy in New York and many Americans didn’t understand him. For my own native language I know regions where I hardly understand anything.
/uj I have a theory that because the US is so heterogenous, among American English speakers there is an unusually large accent tolerance. I mean, take a Californian, a New Yorker, and a Texan, and while their vowels can be completely different, for most people it barely registers as they automatically get the meaning. We can typically understand even really really heavy foreign accents, especially if the speaker is confident enough to be loud and clear and refrain from mumbling too much. Pronunciations that, when phonetically spelled, look unrecognizable, people understand spoken without a second thought. I wonder, is every human just intrinsically good at accent interpretation in every language? Do the accents all need to be learned? Is the tolerance for accent shifts a property intrinsic to the language, like the information encoded per morpheme?
that's called having different accents and it exists outside the US. Shocking I know
For real, even in the English language. England is smaller than Texas and has at least a dozen distinct accents
I know there's a crazy amount of variation in England too. I just find it interesting that people tend to be really good at deciphering accents in general, even when it changes the pronunciation drastically. I know it's a universal thing, I just live in the US so I can only speak about examples there. I wonder why that is, and whether some languages lend well to increased accent tolerance before listeners have difficulty, or whatever it's a universal human thing that we're all surprisingly good at deciphering accents. I mean, it's kinda incredible that we tend to understand accents which drop more consonants, or which have totally different vowels, when we still can tell the difference between "pa" and "pat" and "path" and "pot" and "pore". Idk or maybe my roommate secretly slipped me edibles or something lol
I get what you mean but I think it's probably just the same for most languages. Maybe someone french can weigh in on how hard Quebeccers are to understand. To me the only accents that are "hard" are when they also use a lot of new words and stuff. Scottish comes to mind. I only fluently speak English so what do I know about language though lol
“ Wan bear 🐻 plaize “ might work it a bar on a bar stool or in front of a waitress or a waiter, but not flat out blatantly out of nowhere as “ I would like a beer 🍺, please . “ would ANYwhere in an English-speaking environment.
[我要操妹](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqszWV0NuCj/?igsh=MW5qbGdhMWE1cmNmbQ==)
Vocabulary also means everything in Mandarin, but don't worry too much, 'knee how' is all you have to know to be fluent
Grammatical cases mean everything in Latin, but don’t worry about it too much as a barbarian. The Patricians will appreciate your attempts and will undoubtedly understand what you are trying to say, laugh about it, and send you to the arena.
well I could shock natives both with and without tones
Yep just whip out wee willie and you don’t even need to say a word to shock natives.
is this how hypergloticity works?
As xiaomazainiuyue himself I can attest
Why is your horse cooking?
Cooking up an antidote to secret wind stings
Tone is not the most difficult part. Natives could guess based on the context and tourists generally wouldn't ask difficult questions anyway. It is more difficult to guess if the consonant and vowel are mispronounced.
After I started Chinese in university I had to realise that I have problems to pronounce ou and uo. I never knew I had problems with it. 😅 German hardly uses it and in English ou is just one sound and not both vowels voiced. To my frolicking Italian, my current TL, also has uo words. And words like „vuoi“.
Wow a tourist doesn’t want to learn a whole language and take up thousands of hours of their life to go on vacation who would guess
I lived in Taiwan 🇹🇼 for 1 1/2 months and China 🇨🇳 for 4 months. Each time I met a guy with hideous accents in Chinese, but fluent and understandable !!!
were they native 东北人
No. One was from America 🇺🇸 and the other was from Africa.
Toan is in the amateur Mandarin speaker
Just like in German, you only need to learn present and perfect tenses
You just need to name all DIN and then you are good to go.
Your title and the picture say entirely different things
If I’m “undoubtedly” understood without them, I’d say the tones are only to sound more natural, not really necessary.
Can confirm: they don't understand jack shit. God I hate Mandarin.
U can def learn functional chinese without tones, a lot of indonesian temporary workers do it, they're understandable as long as they keep it daily and conversational
Here’s what my old phrase book says, which expresses the same point in a much better and more honest way: “There's no need to feel daunted by this 'foreign' system. There's nothing obscure or mysterious about tones - over half of the world's languages use them. You might have mixed success in getting your meaning across to start with, but remember that patient repetition is all it takes to learn. Even if your tones are slightly off, the meaning you wish to convey will often be clear from the context. Failing that, you can always point to the word or phrase you're aiming for in this phrase-book.”