Actually, the tones in Chinese are not the huge barrier that they are made out to be. It only takes a couple of lessons to learn how to speak and recognize the tones.
When you learn new vocabulary, a good students would memorize the tones. But it’s really no more onerous that memorizing the gender of a noun. In any case, a lazy student like me could get away without even that. I just rely on muscle memory. You just have to remember when repeating a word to repeat not only the sounds, but the way it is said. I couldn’t tell you the tones on 90% of the words that I use, but I get it right most of the time and usually don’t have too many problems making myself understood.
A bigger problem is the abundance of homonyms and compound words can make it difficult to pick out the general drift of a conversation if you don’t know the context. All long Chinese words are made out of short words with independent meanings. For example, a washing machine is a “wash clothes machine.” Each of these small words sounds like a dozen other small words. So if you are only picking out snatches of conversation, it’s really easy to get lost and event think they are talking about something else entirely.
And of course the written language is a problem. Learning to read and write Chinese is a totally separate skill from learning how to speak it. It’s basically learning a different language- indeed, you could learn to read and write fluently without ever being able to speak a word of Chinese. And it’s tough to learn a language when you can’t really use written material to improve your vocabulary, etc.
No, the particular slang/dialect is not that unintelligible… Let me just put it this way…
The more “vulgar/street/uneducated/nonformal” slang/vocabulary they use, the more unintelligible it’ll be for someone who is not local. The more formal/standard the vocabulary is, the differences disappear. Says a native Spanish speaker from Puerto Rico who has friends from all over Latin America and has visited some countries.
Catalan, Galician, and Basque are all languages in Spain that are not the same as Spanish. Catalan even has its own dialects, even more weird to me (native Spanish speaker) than just plain Catalan.
It is the same in English, after all… The English I was taught thanks to PBS nowhere resembled what I got from the guy behind the bus wheel in Gainesville, FL. Lord, I didn’t understand it 8 years ago, I may only understand about a third of it now… And I’m sure if you put someone from deep South and take them to wherever accent Snatch was from, they wouldn’t be able to “get” each other.
So… reading again your last line. It IS the same as German.
Heck… I remember in Mallorca they had their dialect of Catalan (mallorquín), and the buses and others had two languages, Catalán and mallorquín. :smack: My Spanish was worth nothing when I got lost using the bus system since I didn’t know where to get off. The driver was not very helpful either.
It was slightly weird and interesting being in my “madre patria” in the place of my ancestors (that’s why I went to Mallorca), and my language (Spanish) was the “foreign” one. And I liked it that they had material printed out in catalán and mallorquín.
Well, then English accents are difficult too, given the wide spectrum they encompass! English is my second language, and I can understand (From best to worst):
General American accent (Mountain)
Britsh standard (less good, although my school lessons were officially geared towards BE)
African English has a very strong accent and is hard for me
Indian English is hard to impossible for me to understand
(I’ve heard very little Canadian or Australian, but it sounds similar to general American for me).
We had a thread some time ago where several Spanish speakers (of Spain- Spanish) told about their experiences with the South American dialects, and the consensus was: you could read of course all Mexican etc., and understand if the other speaker spoke a bit slower than rapid-fire, and took care to avoid words with different meanings (see BE vs AE e.g. fag), and special words that only existed in one dialect.
When the natives talked rapid-fire in their dialect, the visitor was usually lost, but if the natives were willing to cooperate (which they usually were), communication was no problem.
It’s similar with German, too: High German spoken with a slight accent will be understood all across Germany and Austria, but if a speaker of Low German tries to talk to a native from deep Bavarian Forest or from Swabia, communication is difficult.
I didn’t mean it in the linguistic sense, but in the vocabulary and general grammatic sense. When learning Latin /Italian / French*, the grammatic differences between those as Romanic languages and German as Germanic languages were invisible to me: both types used several cases for nouns, flected the verbs, had grammatical genders. The difference between English and German grammar we had problems with was the famous gerund - the -ing verb - and the “If” sentence construction, how the tenses worked in the two parts of the sentence.
There was never a huge gap in understanding the grammar as compared to Turkish, which is agglutanive (add particles to the word to make it long, instead of flecting the verb) or Finnish, which has about 20 different cases to indicate that not only a book is on the table, but also that the book is moving onto the table.
Or Greek, which despite the loanwords still has a very different vocabulary, and a third voice, the medial, besides active and passive (though I find it an interesting concept).
Okay, I don’t really speak French (yet - I’ve been meaning to learn it, too), but from what I’ve picked up about it.
Well, that is news to me. I admit I don’t speak Russian, but I’ve always heard that the Slavic languages are even closer related to each other - that is, less divergence of vocabulary, which makes learning new ones on top easier - than the Romanic languages, where pronounciation between French, Spanish and Italian is very different from the Latin root word (although you can still guess some if you see it written).
That normal people speak slang and use grammar sloppily is not a feature special to Russians or speakers of Slavic languages, it happens in every language because of daily life. That’s why you should complement immersion - talking with real people, listening to movies - with real literature and official study books, and vice versa. Using only study books leaves you deficient when talking to the man on the street; talking only with people on the street leaves you deficient when writing a letter (that often happens to bilingual children: they hear the second language spoken, but don’t read or write in it, and are suprised how difficult it is to learn to get right.)
This. It is ridiculous. You know that ‘marklar’ episode of South Park? It’s just like that. The language didn’t used to have so many homonyms (back when the words were multi-syllabic). Then everyone just got so cool, that they’d say the beginning or end of a word but not the whole thing. They literally Fonzied the language to death.
My experience with the Northern and Western Slavic languages is, I admit, somewhat limited, but this seems true based on my experience of the South Slavic languages, which are all so similar that it seems more accurate to me to describe them as a continuum rather than as distinct languages. Bulgarian and Macedonian are so similar that their split is more political than linguistic (which is even more the case with the split between Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, which are, really, the same language, although I will admit I can understand Serbian the best of all these, then Bosnian, and Croatian the worst). They are all definitely more similar than, say, Spanish and French.
Since you have first-hand experience with Bulgarian, could you venture a guess of how much that is due to borrowing under the communist regime, and the forced learning of Russian as second language in school, and how many similarities were already there in the root? (The Soviets used the “Pan-Slavic” idea partly to try and propagate their communist empire, but from what I’ve heard, the people in the satellite states were not pleased with the Big Brother Soviet application of it).
Well, first of all, Bulgarians are apparently the only nationality in Eastern Europe that actually seem to genuinely like the Russians. Russia freed Bulgaria from foreign occupation TWICE (once in the 1880s, when their warring with the Ottomans eventually resulted in Bulgaria’s independence, and again when the Red Army kicked the Nazis out), so Russians and the Russian language are still held in pretty high esteem in Bulgaria. Russian is still commonly taught in Bulgarian schools, which I gather is not the case in a lot of other former communist countries.
It’s hard for me to gauge accurately how much Russian there is in Bulgarian, to be honest. There are definitely a lot of words in common, but I’m not sure how much of it is a result of borrowing and how much is because they’re fairly closely related Slavic languages. So far in my study of Russian, I haven’t come across anything that makes me think “OH, this is where the Bulgarian word comes from!”, it’s more like “hm, this is the same word as it is in Bulgarian, but pronounced a little differently.” (Although Bulgarian and Russian both use the Cyrillic alphabet, they don’t have the same orthography, so words that are spelled the same can be pronounced slightly differently. The word родители means “parents” in both languages, but in Bulgarian it’s pronounced “roditeli” and in Russian it’s pronounced “raditeli”. I fuck this stuff up a lot.)
The language that Bulgarian borrows from the MOST, I would say, is Turkish. There are huge numbers of Turkish loan words in Bulgarian, although it’s possible that it’s just more noticeable because Turkish and Bulgarian sound so different that they really stand out.
Near the end of that thread is a post in which Onomatopoeia describes setting all computer menus, etc, to Japanese, reading and IMing in Japanese, listening to Japanese music, etc, and basically filling the local environment with Japanese. I think this is what you should do no matter which language you pick. I read somewhere recently that ‘ten minutes every day is better then 70 minutes on Saturdays’, and I think I believe it now.
Originally Posted by even sven
“Actually, the tones in Chinese are not the huge barrier that they are made out to be. It only takes a couple of lessons to learn how to speak and recognize the tones.”
I disagree. Some English speakers are simply unable to get the concept of using tones consistently. I am an American and am fluent in Mandarin. I have a friend who is ethnic Chinese. She takes adult Chinese language courses. She is simply unable to use the tones. Her sentence cadence in Chinese is American rather than Chinese. It is difficult for me to be rude but I told her honestly that I thought she was wasting her time studying Chinese. She told that to her other adult Chinese language course students and they were horrified because she is considered one of the better students.
I wouldn’t call them mutually unintelligible (though Catalan, as we have already discussed, is another language.) I have a B.A. in Spanish and have had instructors from Puerto Rico to Spain. I have taught English in the U.S. and Mexico and I later got a job requiring Spanish. There I heard dialects from all over the world, from both rural and urban areas. Some, like Ecuadorian, were way easier than college Spanish, and some were quite difficult.
Now that I live on the east coast I find Cuban and Puerto Rican to be the most difficult dialects to parse. I’m going to be honest and say I find them frustratingly difficult and anxiety-provoking. Nevertheless, in the two years I worked at my job, I only found these dialects utterly impossible to understand a handful of times. Usually, with time and patience, we were able to communicate.
It’s not that the language structure itself is so different, it’s just pronounced differently and spoken rapid-fire. There are some vocabulary variations but in standard everyday form, those are pretty minor. You can get used to a new dialect pretty quickly, if you hear it consistently. (The problem is I never do hear it consistently.) I have improved somewhat by starting to watch Univision. If you can understand Univision, you can understand anything.
Also, slang figures into it big-time. I’m a fan of the Puerto-Rican reggaton band Calle 13. They probably use slang every other word–it’s like the American equivalent of gangster rap (in terms of how different it can be from standard.) I have figured out the meaning of roughly 50% of the lyrics. I once cornered a Puerto Rican and asked her to explain the lyrics to me. She could not. She was mystified by music in her own language.
Obviously I’m going to recommend Spanish. It is the most common 2nd language in the U.S. and is still growing. There is a vast abundance of learning materials at your disposal, including, depending on where you are geographically, Spanish language radio and television. My ability to speak Spanish has always given me a competitive edge when looking for jobs. I was hired first and paid more. Arguably my ability to speak Spanish helped me get into grad school. Not to mention the sheer joy of getting to connect with so many people you otherwise would not.
One of my favorite memories occurred on campus last month when two kids my age got into an elevator and the girl began talking about how the guy’s ass looked in the jeans he was wearing. They went on about it for quite a while, and then happened to glance back at me grinning. I live for those moments when people realize the gringa heard every word.
That obviously sounds like she is getting a bad education. Everyone can get tones. We use tones in English all the time (for emotion, indication question, etc.) Now she may have a sort of speech impediment where she needs to work with a voice coach to be able to say tones naturally, or she needs to have a more demanding teacher who calls her out on her poor use of them. For me, using Pimsleur on the computer with a microphone really helped. You can skip it back just a second and repeat the word again and again. By the hundredth time, you really start to understand how your own intonation is different from the speaker’s. (I suppose you can’t really expect a teacher, in a class, to do this with you, but the teacher should have the balls to be frank with you and tell you your pronunciation is bad. But, ballslessness is a problem with all instructors in America.)
