We all know the stereotype of the Chinese speaker who can not tell r from l. What spoken sounds (phonemes) in Chinese would an English speaker (American or others) likely screw up?
Most of 'em. Specifically:
The word ‘long’ (pronounced in second tone, means dragon) is not pronounced like the english word long. It’s more like “low” plus “ng” but everyone butchers it.
The difference between qi and chi (soft ‘ch’ and hard ‘ch’) is hard for westerners to hear, much less pronounce. Same for xi and si.
The biggest problem westerners have with Chinese is the tones (4 tones in Mandarin, 7 tones in Cantonese). I’ll use the notation xi1 means xi pronounced in first tone:
ma1 mama
ma2 hemp (also a family name)
ma3 horse
ma4 curse
ma the “interrogative particle” (makes a statement into a question)
So ma1 ma4 ma2 de ma3 ma means “Is mother cursing Ma’s horse?”
Oh, and the ‘r’ (as in ‘ren’ = person) is difficult as well. In fact, my friends say I still don’t have it.
B’s, D’s, and G’s are really hard for English speakers as well because they are not voiced in Mandarin. They are just unasperated P, T, and K’s. I can’t even really hear it but fortunately I don’t think its terribly important. I also murdered my rounded ee’s like in yu or yuan half the time. I also have no idea how the heck anyone pronounces the word kongr but neither do most Chinese.
[hijack]I read the “phonemes” in the thread titles as “pheronomes” and had a major WTF moment. I’ll go away now.[/hijack]
Ditto what NoCoolUserName said, but I think the “r” is just impossible. When I lived in Beijing, I got a fair amount of complements on my accent, and even once in a while that look: “THAT came out of the mouth of a white boy?” (Well, only a few occasions, but that was still cool.)
Especially in the local Beijing dialect, the R is pronounced so differently than we are used to. It’s kind of hard to explain, but instead of sounding like that “errrrr…” when you don’t know how to answer a question (English pronunciation), the Beijing R sort of comes from the chest or the back of the throat (never could figure that out exactly), and sounds more a combination of a good impression of a bear going “grrr” and that a deeper version of the whistle-y sound that George Jetson’s flying car makes. Sort of.
Consequently, I can’t for the life of me pronounce “lao tou’r,” a term for an old man.
But the one thing non-Chinese speaking anglophones do that bugs me is call the city “bay-zhing” (zhing like in, uh, Zhirinovsky, the Russian fascist politician) when it is pronouced pretty much like it is spelled: “bay-jing.” (jing like in “jingle.”)
WAG- Most of them. Generally, if a word has many variant spellings when transliterated into English, there is no exact equivalent its phonemes. Remember in the eighties when the papers couldn’t agree on how to spell Quaddafi/Kaddafi/Gaddafi/Khadafi/etc?
I’ve seen variant spellings for most transliterated Chinese words- lung/long, tsing/sing/xing, etc.
Hijack Since This Thread Attracts Folks Who Know Chinese*
*More properly those who know Mandarin and/or Cantonese
I received a package from my folks yesterday. Among other things it contained a paper packet. The packet is labele almost entirely in what I assume is Cantonese(The characters look like Chinese to me and one of the few bits of English is “Canton China”). There are two English labels though. One says “Bittakshing-tan”. The other says “Lau bittakshing”. The packet contains a small, flattened flask, about an inch/ 2.2 cm long. The flask is filled with silver-colored balls. I’ve tried googling bittakshing without success. Searching for takshing revealed only that many restaurants and apartment buildings have that name. Can anybody tell me what this stuff is?
Grr, bloody hamsters ate my post and I forgot to save it. Here goes again:
The Cantonese phoneme I had the most problems with was the vowel sound for “soi” (as in “water”). You almost have to make a gulping sound while pronouncing it, and it took me about 2 years before I got it right.
This is almost certainly likely due to the two different transileration systems, Wade-Giles and Pinyin.
The characters will just be “Chinese”, since there’s no distinction between dialects when writing, though the PRC uses simplified characters, while places like Hong Kong use old-style characters, and some of the phraseology is different. The transliteration looks to me like a Pinyin version of Mandarin, though. While Canton (Guangzhou) is indeed the capital of the Cantonese-speaking part of China, the official language is still Mandarin. I don’t know Mandarin, unfortunately, but I’d bet the Roman characters are the name of the factory and/or company.
As for the contents of the flask, Chinese medicine is often delivered as tiny little balls that you gulp down out of a phial. One time when I had laryngitis, my colleagues went out and got me some traditional medicine, which was lots of little black balls in phials. I took one phial, then checked the ingredients: powdered rhino horn and pearl. :rolleyes: Nice.
Or maybe they’re just cake decorations… 
Well, it’s not pinyin, and it doesn’t look like Wade-Giles, and it really doesn’t sound like Mandarin in any case, so I’m pretty confident that those words are not Mandarin. My first thought is that those words sound like Thai or Lao, but that’s a WAG. And I know nothing about Southern Chinese dialects at all (that is, other than the Cantonese that’s already been ruled out), so I’m of very little help.
That sounds like it might be silica gel, which is packed with things to prevent them from getting wet. It is usually labeled “do not eat.”
Tones are one thing. Most people from a non tonal language have a helluva time. excluding tones from the discussion.
There is a “u” sound that’s brutal. In Pinyin, “lu” versus “lu” (with an umlat over the u) really throws people off.
the other pinyin equivalent that kills everyone studying Mandarin at first is “xi”, “ci”, “si” and can extend to “shi”
If you go into Shanghaiese, “cow” or nu, and “woman” or nu are pretty indistinguishable.
As pointed out earlier, the Beijing “r” and the end of a word can be cruel, especially if it is a very light sound. Eg, to play aka “wanr” versus “war”.
Jimmm, I don’t know what the hell that transliteration system is. It’s not wade giles, yale, pinyin or the funky form used previously in Taiwan. The words are the same, just one has “lau” which I guess is “lao” or “old”. I’m guessing you’ve got malay mixed up there or something. It sure isn’t any of the standard or even less standard romanization systems.
Definitely not silica gel. The balls are much larger and the texture is different. The balls have a faint aroma vaguely like potpourri. I asked my mother about the flask. She told me that the seller informed her they were mints. Clearly, I need to put the packet on a scanner and post the pics somewhere.
Clearly, you need to eat one!