On speaking Chinese...

[SckizoBoy]

I saw a couple posts on Favourite Word [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.273448-Favourite-Word?page=1] and it got me thinking about one of my pet peeves.

I'm a BBC and consequently a fluent speaker of Cantonese, and it amazes me just how many times people I have a faint acquaintance with will come up and say something completely random, and when greeted with my blank look say 'that was in Chinese'. Then *facepalm*, I have to rifle through my head for all eight intonations and relevant combinations and half a day later, I get what they were trying to say.

I'm sure some of you (whose first language is not English) have this problem where someone who doesn't speak your lingua franca gets pronunciation hideously wrong. If so, please tell...

Starting off with probably the most common Cantonese balls up (which is probably unfair as far as languages are concerned, since Cantonese is the most tonal-based language in existence... I think, please correct if wrong):

How are you? = Nee-how-maa (my ears bleed every time I hear that...)

It's 'nei(A)-ho(narrow-S)-ma(T)' damnit! (Cantonese is virtually impossible to transcribe into English, so I've added SATB tone levels.)

And so I don't seem a total hypocrite, I have a fair few Italian friends, and I've had to stop myself a few times since I pronounce everything in Italian with French pronunciation (it actually gets at me, a lot of the time).

 

[mr.mystery]

stick with mandarin...youll use it more. Cantonese is so very very difficult

 

[Vampire cat]

*cough*

Well the only thing I've learned concerning other nationalities speaking my language is that people of the USA can't do Norwegian for shit oO. People that say their ancestors were Norwegian and all will have a few things they can say, but it just doesn't sound right and if I'm not prepared for it there is no way I'll understand it >>.

 

[Trivun]

I tend to speak foreign languages with the wrong pronunciation, unless it's a language I've studied. However, this tends to only be syllabic languages, ones with a different alphabet to the standard Western one (so things like Cyrillic, or anything with loads of accents, like Scandinavian languages), and the like. I actually learned French and German at school, and Spanish for one brief short year (where I proved absolutely crap), so I can generally pronounce those three languages without too much trouble, though I rarely know what I'm saying. Anime means I can pronounce Japanese okay with a little practice too, though again I rarely know what I'm saying. English is my first language, by the way, being English myself.

To be fair, I am planning to learn Japanese, it's something I decided on a whim recently and today downloaded an iPod app to learn the basic Kana syllabaries, and their pronunciation. Hopefully I won't find it too difficult .

 

[SckizoBoy]

stick with mandarin...youll use it more. Cantonese is so very very difficult

I would, but no-one around me really knows it that well, with the possible exception of my mother. My entire extended family is effectively Hong Kong Chinese, so Cantonese is pretty much all we speak (leaving the husbands of two cousins uncomfortably twiddling their thumbs).

Personally, sod both forms of Chinese, I'd go for Japanese... even easier.

 

[Rylot]

I took Japanese for four years in high school and when I briefly took Korean at college my teacher commented that I had a Japanese accent. It was really hard not to use Japanese pronunciation for me.

 

[CrystalShadow]

It's not difficult to see why this happens.

I speak 2 languages fluently, and a third not that well, but there's just basic sounds that people can't pronounce, or worse still, don't recognise as distinct things.

English is not a tonal language at all. Neither are most European languages. As a result, it's unlikely Europeans trying to speak Cantonese will even notice when they're getting intonation horribly wrong.

A lot of the stereotypes about Asians speaking English come about for exactly the same reasons.
I don't know any Cantonese, but it's easy to demonstrate with some limited knowledge of Japanese...

The most common jokes are misusing plurals, and pronouncing words involving L and R incorrectly.

Well, from Japanese this follows quite naturally in that Japanese doesn't really have distinct plural and singular forms of words.

(How do you explain to someone the situations in which one form of a word applies and not another if their native language doesn't make such distinctions? Especially if you have to explain it using that language.)

Similarly, for foreigners studying Japanese, you quickly notice the romaji translations of the phonetic alphabet include a set of characters typically given as

Ra , Ri, Ru - But when you actually listen to the pronunciation of these characters by native speakers, you hear anything from La, to Ra, to something which can only be described as something inbetween.

How do you get someone to understand the difference in pronunciation of something like Road Vs Load, when compared to what they're accustomed to hearing, it seems like the same sound?


Then there's German... With the whole Der, Dem, Die, Das thing going on... I speak German, but not very well. But compared to English and Dutch, which are, officially closely related languages, it's quite confusing having 16 forms of what amounts to 'the'.

...
Mind you, the less said about anyone trying to pronounce the hard g sound in German & Dutch, or the rolling r...

Somehow, it's just very difficult to learn this stuff. (But clearly, the most difficult is learning to 'hear' distinctions in sounds that you are used to treating as being identical.)

 

[SeaCalMaster]

I'm a BBC

You're a British Broadcasting Corporation?

 

[mr.mystery]

Oh then that makes sense. If Hong Kong then that totally makes sense

 

[SckizoBoy]

You're a British Broadcasting Corporation?

Yes, I was wondering when some bright spark was going to pull that one... and yes, I am a nationally beloved institution (sic) that squanders everyone's hard earned licence fee on crap that no-one watches (BBC Parliament)!

 

[Scarim Coral]

You're a British Broadcasting Corporation?

It's short for British Born Chinese.

I'm too a BBC but I can't speak Chinese properly (also cantonese but I can understand some of it, just can't speak or write it). Despite of this I do got to admit it's annoying when others think they are saying it correctly but aren't.

 

[OtherSideofSky]

How are you? = Nee-how-maa (my ears bleed every time I hear that...)

It's 'nei(A)-ho(narrow-S)-ma(T)' damnit! (Cantonese is virtually impossible to transcribe into English, so I've added SATB tone levels.)

That sounds like they're trying to speak Mandarin, not Cantonese. The Mandarin pronunciation for that is ni(3)hao(3)ma (the numbers are for the tones, since I don't know how to type in pinyin).