Argh, Chinese is waay to hard to speak quickly!! I swear Chinese is three times as hard for beginners than any normal language like Japanese or German. Since Chinese has tones, you have an entire extra dimension to think about. Coincidentally, it takes significantly longer to make out a sentence, which often has a totally different meaning.

Observe:

General Process:
German:
Idea -> English Idea -> English Sound Phrase -> Replace with German Sounds -> Shuffle German Sounds.

Chinese:
Idea -> English Idea -> Similar Chinese Idea -> Chinese Sounds -> Chinese Tones -> Shuffle Chinese Sounds & Tones.

Even that flow chart does not capture the sheer agony of trying to do something totally foreign to western languages–associate different concrete meanings to different tones. Our brains have been programmed since birth to use tone to communicate feeling and emotion–all the soft aspects of communication.

Hence if you ask “Do you want to go bowling?” and I answer “okay” with an upward tone, I am telling you I am excited to go bowling. If I answer “okay” with a drooping downward tone, I am merely accommodating you.

As a result, we go to China and find it difficult to remember the difference between “big” and “to hit”. But what about when Chinese people come over here?

If you have ever talked to someone who recently came over from China and thought that they either a.) sounded like a robot or b.) felt cold or c.) were tough to read emotionally, then you now know why. We are apt to not think about a tone until we make a sentence and assign meaning (questions always end up, etc). Chinese are apt to remember a specific tone for each word.–partly because Chinese trained them to think this way, but also because they will naturally associate the sound a word makes with a Chinese character with a similar meaning and sound.

So if a neutral OK (o1kay4), they will associate it with two characters that are pronounced o1 and kei4 and say it that way every time. It is hard to remember that o1kay2 means yes (excited), o1kay1 means yes (frustrated), o1kay3 means yes (reluctantly)…and do that with every single word!

This entry was posted on 2005-10-11 at 16:16 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.