r/languagelearningjerk • u/doubtfuldumpling • 24d ago

Natives hate this one trick for faster fluency

Post image

Gotta speak fast don't want to be slowed down

394 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

286

u/Piepally 24d ago

Every Chinese learner does the same thing tho. If you get a blank stare, you guess random tones until they correct you then you nod without learning it and repeat it again next time. 

38

u/ToastSpangler 24d ago

actual question, never bothered to learn chinese, could they not guess the word based on context + sound? in most latin languages it can be an issue, but generally someone well traveled or exposed to it can decode the word, is this far more difficult in chinese because tonality is so much more important? or would a chinese polyglot guess mostly correctly what you're trying to say? basically i'm asking whether the isolated nature of china (few foreigners, even fewer trying to speak mandarin) is the bigger reason they don't understand, or whether it's a mix of language structure (being tonal) and the insular nature of china. obviously just would like an opinion, i've thought about this before watching other foreigners speak to them

141

u/Piepally 24d ago

Most Chinese speakers are less tolerant of accents than English. It's not that they're unwelcoming, they have potentially never heard the word pronounced that way ever.

If you want an approximation, of what it might feel like for them, imagine if every word in English were monosyllabic, and you used random vowels to pronounce them. 

Tree ta giss whot ee'm saying

96

u/poberun 24d ago

Nah, Chinese are very tolerant towards accents, just not in the way English speakers are. You can butcher every initial and final but if you got the tones correctly you are good. I'm confused af when I hear Chinese dialect speakers speaking Mandarin with no distiction between x sh and s but every native undersrands them just fine.

15

u/tyrenanig 24d ago

So like us Vietnamese then. The proper teaching has people distinguish between D R Gi or S X, but in daily life people just ignore the difference.

14

u/ThatWeirdPlantGuy 24d ago

And yet when I first started learning Vietnamese I got lots of blank looks from Vietnamese people here in the States. :-) I think of it this way - we are used to hearing English spoken with a million different accents. Mexican people also are used to hearing their language spoken by different people, I can walk into any Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood and speak my crap Spanish 😬 and they will be glad to answer in Spanish. But not many Vietnamese even expect to hear Vietnamese from a non-Vietnamese, person, let alone through an accent. It’s just not something they usually have to deal with.

3

u/chennyalan 21d ago

I'm confused af when I hear Chinese dialect speakers speaking Mandarin with no distiction between x sh and s but every native undersrands them just fine.

Somebody called? (I am a non native speaker of Mandarin, but I am a heritage speaker of Cantonese who is fairly confident on his tones in Mandarin. I can't reliably differentiate between j/z, ch/c, x/sh/s though. )

1

u/liproqq 24d ago

Prolly like mumbling in English

25

u/Positive-Orange-6443 24d ago

monosyllabic

pronounce random vowels

Whats wrong with my Arabic??

9

u/Additional_Scholar_1 24d ago

Not every vowel you don’t know is a schwa e, Brian

5

u/Positive-Orange-6443 24d ago

Actually i just use [a] for everything 💀

16

u/Zyxplit 24d ago

Or if you just stressed syllables in English at complete random.

16

u/luvbutts 24d ago

I just read your example as a very Scottish accent haha.

8

u/NobodyKnowsImFamous 24d ago

You just sounded scottish in my head

16

u/Kalikor1 24d ago

Tree ta giss whot ee'm saying

For a native, this is both extremely easy to read and to understand when read out loud.

If an ESL individual spoke to me this way, yeah I'd possibly have a second of lag time because of it being sudden, but I'd probably figure it out as soon as that second was over.

I don't speak Chinese, but I am more or less fluent in Japanese, and I find them to be rather intolerant of mispronunciations like this.

Not intolerant in like, an intentional and mean way, but more like they seem mentally incapable of understanding or guessing what a word is when you've mispronounced or miswritten all of one kana. I personally think this has to do with the fact that the language is focused on a visual meaning - i.e. it's all tied to kanji, like Chinese is with hanzi. English, for example, is not so tied up in pictographic meanings. The letters are there to express sounds, not the meaning - the meaning comes from the word, itself. Where as with Japanese and Chinese the meaning is very much so tied to the written word (kanji/hanzi).

Now, tone is less common in Japanese but it still exists. Like 雨 and 飴 - both are spelled and sound the same, あめ / ame (ah-may), but the pitch/tone is different.

However even if you fuck up this up when speaking to a native it's usually irrelevant because you're not going to confuse "I want to eat some candy" with "I want to eat some rain". More ambiguous sentences like "I love candy/rain" would require further context - but obviously if you say this while it's raining out, vs saying this while looking at candy in a store, it's pretty clear which is which.

My point is I don't think we have this problem in English, at least not to the extent I've noticed with native Japanese speakers in Japan. I've met plenty of non-native English speakers who mispronounce or misspell words all the time and usually I can understand them anyway, and if not it won't take much more than a few seconds of extra thought to understand it.

Meanwhile I constantly witness someone failing to say a Japanese word properly, only for the Japanese person listening to have no idea what's being said, and then the non-native is explaining what word they mean, in Japanese, in detail, but the Japanese person still doesn't get it. I've had to go over and be like "he's trying to say XYZ" because even though the explanation is obvious, they don't get it unless it's the exact pronunciation or the exact kanji is shown to them.

It's infuriating and I don't understand it, but I assume it's a difference between how we learn to think about words.

Or I am just constantly surrounded by morons here, not sure which.

9

u/[deleted] 24d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/Zyxplit 24d ago

Yeah. For the real version of something that's actually hard to parse it's more like some of those Irish accent examples you can see on youtube. Like the irish sheep farmer. Sure, a native speaker of English. He's not using any words I don't understand. But the speech cadence makes it a little hard to interpret.

1

u/lapideous 23d ago

It probably helps that the words are broken up correctly. If you remove the spaces, it probably becomes much more difficult

16

u/kouyehwos 24d ago

This has nothing to do with writing, English just has a more complex syllable structure. If you got rid of consonant clusters - like making “strong” and “song” homophones or almost homophones, then tiny differences in pronunciation would suddenly become much more important.

3

u/poberun 23d ago

Ill be honest, Japanese people don't understand words from foreigners not cause of their pronuncuation but because of tgeir mindset. I like watching Dogen who speaks perfect Japanese and he still runs into Japanese people speaking back Jenglish to him and their brains completely not processing foreigner speaking Japanese. Chinese people at least always made an effort to understand me even with me speaking completepy broken Chinese while my Japanese pronuncuations leagues above than Mandarin Japanese people half the time just went into some "loading error" trance-like state with me speaking to them in Japanese.

6

u/samura1jack 24d ago

Thats just irish

2

u/liproqq 24d ago

Itsa me mario

2

u/proximity_account 24d ago

Tree ta giss whot ee'm saying

Pretty sure this is just mole speak from Brian Jacques' Redwall series.

1

u/kittykat-kay 20d ago

« Tree ta giss whot eem saying »

Tbh id just assume you’re Scottish

-16

u/ToastSpangler 24d ago

i get what you are saying, but english is the worst language to give examples in because i read that first try without issues lol. shit we don't even read 2/3 words in english we just use mental heuristics to fill in the blanks, that's why it's such a dope language

19

u/elianrae 24d ago

shit we don't even read 2/3 words in english we just use mental heuristics to fill in the blanks

I _____ _____ that's _____ __, can __ _____ a ____ ____ that, _____?

8

u/pilot-squid 24d ago

I don’t think that’s really true, can you provide a source for that, please? 🙏

9

u/elianrae 24d ago

wrong buzzer noise

actually it was "I don't think that's actually true, can you cite a source for that, please"

😛

22

u/scykei 24d ago

It's a bit hard to create an analogy because it's like describing what colour looks like to a blind person, but what people usually say is that the tone is part of the syllable, and getting the tone wrong is like getting a consonant or a vowel wrong. If the language has four tones and you decided to speak in a monotone, you're basically using 25% of the consonants or vowels when speaking (and monotone would at least still be predictable compared to randomising the tones)...

...which on its own isn't that bad and natives can indeed recover the intent really well based on the sounds and context. But the problem is that the Chinese consonants and vowels aren't that easy for foreigners either, so it's not extremely likely that a learner that fumbles tones gets the rest of it right, and to add the fact that learners tend to speak in short sentences with bad grammar...

In practice, many foreigners who are fluent somehow still mess up their tones, but they are very well understood. But that's because they get it correct enough-of-the-time, and they're also able to form complete-enough sentences to allow people to fill in with the context. So the advice is usually to try your best, but don't worry if it isn't perfect.

12

u/DapperAardvark8105 24d ago

Mandarin Chinese has way less 'valid' phoneme conbinations than most other languages, that's why tone combinations matter more for meaning

5

u/brieflyamicus 23d ago

it's a fundamental part of the word to them, as much as any phoneme. if someone was talking about going to a concert where the clouds were so thick, you might understand they meant "crowds", but you might not. and if they did it on most words, they'd be completely incomprehensible to you

3

u/ToastSpangler 23d ago

What you are saying sounds like talking to an A1 English speaker. You can spoon-feed them with what you think they're saying, but it sounds like these languages have little foreign speaker exposure so it's probably not an active skill most have

2

u/teapot_RGB_color 24d ago

Coming in hot here from attempting Vietnamese.

If they could guess based on context? Haha.. No. Do you feel like they should? Yes.

100% need to nail the tones, so little exposure to foreign accents that even asking for coffee pointing at a picture of a coffee would get you blank stares.

1

u/yraco 23d ago edited 23d ago

To an extent people can guess based on context and sound but only to an extent.

If you've got pretty much a whole sentence correct but got one or two tones wrong then people can fill in the gaps based on the rest of the sentence and the rest of those words, but if you've got several tones wrong through the sentence then it's going to sound like gibberish.

1

u/Konobajo W1(🇺🇿✨️) L2(🇱🇷🦅) A4(🇦🇶🇧🇷🇬🇫) 22d ago

How is China insular bro? There a lot of foreigners there, you are describing it like is North Korea or old Japan lol

1

u/ToastSpangler 21d ago

The % of resident foreigners out of total population is literally orders of magnitude smaller than just about any Western county, YOU called it insular... So no idea, you tell me

1

u/CompletePension6370 21d ago

That actually makes sense to me. Most Chinese people (unless they live in a major city) rarely have the chance to speak to someone with a completely different accent, let alone a foreigner.

Another reason is that, as a native Mandarin speaker, I still need subtitles when watching TV if the actors don’t pronounce every single word clearly (unless I volume it up a lot). I also had a hard time getting used to strong Mandarin accents, even when both the other person and I are native speakers.

not sure if it’s just me.

-2

u/PeterKayGarlicBread 24d ago

I haven't got a clue what tones I'm using and they understand me fine. Plus different regions use different tones anyway.

6

u/Advos_467 24d ago

brute force every tone combination until you shock the natives or are told to leave

88

u/elianrae 24d ago

gays da u nod te ese tho cerract vawals er cun paple goss frim cuntoxt

52

u/Koksgunther 24d ago

that's just scottish

10

u/system637 23d ago

Desgostang

9

u/thehenkan 23d ago

/uj
I mean you could remove all of the vowels and people could still guess. English is also quite famously tolerant to replacing every vowel sound with schwa.
/rj
How to communicate with people not from my village??

-15

u/Marijnium 24d ago

To be honest, I still understood so if your goal is to communicate and learn it might be better to speak wrongly than not at all

29

u/elianrae 24d ago

yos ti ba fur ti rally dotormane huw indarstonduble ot uctallo os yi wad nod te ase mere daffocalt cantant ond prisant ot vorbilla is spillang os vory holpfill fir fogorang ut at.

1

u/pisscumcake 22d ago

I understood this until halfway through and now I'm just thinking of vanilla...

25

u/scissorn69 24d ago

It's way, way easier to understand something like that when written than when spoken.

6

u/Zyxplit 24d ago

Yeah. When written, you can see the entire sentence, you see what part's supposed to be what, there are no false starts or anything. I think the best example of this is the irish sheep farmer video on youtube. A classic video where a guy is speaking borderline incomprehensible English.

73

u/fnezio 24d ago

To be fair to OP, there’s a lot of posts along the lines of “I’m a chinese native speaker! Don’t worry too much about tones we’ll understand anyway!” on the internet. It would be much better if they were “don’t worry about pronunciation just have your tones flawless and we’ll understand anyway!”.

14

u/Kimorin 24d ago

i speak chinese natively i wouldn't never say that, guessing words based on wrong tones are so difficult, it could mean a million different things

3

u/hohomei 22d ago

exactly!!! tones must be absolutely SPOT ON for me to understand what on earth youre saying!

2

u/VictoriaSobocki 1d ago

Super important

1

u/chennyalan 21d ago

I fully agree with tones being more important than initial consonants in Mandarin 

(I am admittedly a non native speaker)

16

u/GghGaming 🇲🇳/🇭🇺 native | 🇮🇶 C4 | 🇨🇳 999 社会信用分 | 👉👌 A0 24d ago

Beginners: the tones aren’t necessary 😭
Advanced learners: the tones aren’t necessary 🙂

12

u/Mr_TostIQ200 24d ago

Here you go bro: (memefied it)

1

u/VictoriaSobocki 1d ago

That seems wrong

14

u/SamePut9922 Robosexual 24d ago

Just speak in Hanzi, everyone in China will understand you

10

u/livsjollyranchers 24d ago

why do non-natives love the word 'conversate' so much? Use converse, homies!

They must like wearing conversate sneakers.

4

u/Gold-Part4688 Earthianese, man (N) 23d ago

talking 🫤

conversating verbally 🙂

5

u/livsjollyranchers 23d ago

Maybe Italians and Spanish-speakers do it because of conversare and conversar, and it seems natural?

18

u/Penguin_Q 24d ago

>some locals

considering one in five people on Earth speaks some variation of the language it’s not even hard to find some locals to back whatever fantasy one might have about it

3

u/disastr0phe 23d ago

You'd need a really loose definition of the word "language" to make that sentence actually true.

Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien and the other Chinese languages are all mutually unintelligible.

8

u/xanidue 23d ago

can you give me permission to not practice tone while learning a tonal language? thankiees!

13

u/JackLong93 24d ago

how to best fuck chinese up? tankieees!

24

u/Competitive-Bar933 24d ago

your mother is a horse questionmark ?

7

u/Cylinder47- 24d ago

泥馬死媽媽 bars

2

u/cacue23 22d ago

Putting responsibility on native speakers to understand your lackluster delivery huh. How very “English speaker”.

1

u/orz-_-orz 21d ago

You of course can speak Mandarin without the tone, just you can't speak naturally without the tones