I Simply Do Not Have The Ear For Asian Languages.

[MrCoffee]

I can't distinguish tones AT ALL. I'm never gonna learn Mandarin.

[buddhamama]

1. i am crushed

i liked you up till now.

[MrCoffee]

2. you're gonna make fun of my disability?

are you series?!?


maybe i'll give Farsi a try. is it a tonal language?

[buddhamama]

4. indeed i am

seriously. you're unable to speak Mandarin. That's HUGH !

Farsi's cool. it would restore my faith in your loserness.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. They're not really like musical notes--they're contours

Tone 1 is just holding the pitch steady. It's hard for English-speakers to do that at the end of a sentence, because we want to drop our pitch.

Tone 2 is like the English questioning intonation.

Tone 3 is low and swooping. It's the first one most English speakers learn to recognize.

Tone 4 is the way you end a sentence when you're angry.

The cure for that is intensive LISTENING (the thing that language students slack off on the most).

Have someone demonstrate them to you in slow, exaggerated form. Learn to imitate them. Then listen to your textbook tapes until you have them memorized. Go see Chinese-language movies when they come to town. If you have digital cable, watch the Chinese-language soap operas on AZN.

It helps to read aloud while moving your head to trace the tone markings.

By the way, not all Asian languages are tonal. Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, the Filipino languages, the languages of India, and Mongolian are not.

[MrCoffee]

5. MrsCoffee speaks Mandarin...I've been wearing tapes out...and still no luck.

something is broken in me and i just can't "hear" them at all. MrsCoffee doesn't understand what's wrong with me, and i don't understand what she's talking about when she points out the differences.

Honestly, I'm ruining tapes from listening. I have a pretty good handle on German, and my Spanish is ok, so I'm not totally language deficient. It's just the tones in Mandarin are incomprehenisble to me.

[dpbrown]

6. You've got to think of sentences like long words...

...then you'll get it.

El' * e * va' * tor

zhè shì shénmē lù

It's all about the flow. Concentrate on one word at a time and you'll never get it.

[malmapus]

7. I found Mandarin easier to pick up, Cantonese is what got me

Wish I even tried the other dialects my ex spoke (she spoke 5 lol). But I picked up on Mandarin the quickest.