Chinese intonation

Chinese is a tonal language, which means the meaning of a word changes according to the intonation. But what's the overall result? Does this mean what Chinese people always have the same intonation, whether they are angry or happy? How does sentence intonation vary? It looks like it can't vary.

If so, Chinese must be the least musical language in the world, forcing you to speak like robots and making it impossible to maintain intelligibility when singing.

Pitch value does change according to situation, and syllabic stress definitely adds another layer of information. So, it does vary.

But you are right on the "least musical" part of tonal languages. Intelligibility in songs is achieved by matching musical tones to the speech tones. If there is mismatch, un-intelligibility happens. Northern Chinese languages like Mandarin definitely is on the lower-end of the intelligibility spectrum. It's sad but true, for other languages, songs are made to be listened to. But for Mandarin, songs are made to be watched. If you listen to a Mandarin song without previously having read the lyrics/subtitle, chances are that you will only understand a small fraction of the words.

I still remember when I was a child, a friend of my father loved a Chinese (Mandarin) song so much that he asked us kids to translate for him. We listened to the song over 50 times and still could not figure out 1/2 of the words.

English songs may be confusing at times. But Spanish songs? You just need to listen to them twice and you'll get all the words.

I did have friends working in voice recognition software. They said that among the best-known languages in the word, the clearest language for voice recognition was Italian. Then came Spanish. I don't need to tell you where Chinese stood, do I? :)

Maybe they use volume? That could explain why Chinese people always seem to be screaming.

indo Sat Sep 05, 2009 11:37 pm GMT
Maybe they use volume? That could explain why Chinese people always seem to be screaming.
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This repugnant turd is imagining himself to be humorous, but he is just a born loser who has a constant compulsion to insult other people to compensate for his own woeful inadequacy!

>>Northern Chinese languages like Mandarin definitely is on the lower-end of the intelligibility spectrum. It's sad but true, for other languages, songs are made to be listened to. But for Mandarin, songs are made to be watched. If you listen to a Mandarin song without previously having read the lyrics/subtitle, chances are that you will only understand a small fraction of the words.<<

I'm not a Mandarin native, but I also find lyrics hard to understand, especially those in songs by Jay Chou. People like his lyrics simply because it's so difficult to comprehend. I can't speak for natives, but you can ask natives.

I'm really a Cantonese native. Cantonese songs MUST conform to the tones and there is very little flexibility, making lyrics composing very difficult, at least this is what most famous musicians claim (all being natives). Older songs tend to have shorter lyrics and articulate words more clearly, but I too find it hard to understand lyrics as a native. I do have to read the lyrics for most songs.

Well, in fact, I told foreigners all the time that, to speak Cantonese or Mandarin properly, you must be speaking in fixed tones, otherwise you'd butcher all the syllables. Cantonese is even less flexible than Mandarin. We speak almost exactly as it is for everybody, and so I think we have very few intonation patterns. Except vocal differences, male and female speech tend to be rather similar.

A question for Xie or other Chinese speakers.

Your mother tongue is Cantonese and you study several languages. According to a webpage for Anglos, the most difficult major languages are Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.

In your opinion, which are the most difficult?


Thanks in advance.

the clearest language for voice recognition was Italian

It depends on the type of song. I'm Italian and I cannot understand a single word in an Italian song from an opera!

To Xie:

I've just found an odd thing, hong kong singers usually sing their songs in cantonese pronunciation, but it seems like the lyrics are written in mandarin, if it were written in cantonese, those songs wouldn't be sung that way, that's to say, cantonese lyrics use mandarin (literary?) form and cantonese pronunciation. But in minnanese (taiwanese) songs, the lyrics are written in dialect form, and of course, sung in minnanese pronunciation.

ZZZ:
A question for Xie or other Chinese speakers.
According to a webpage for Anglos, the most difficult major languages are Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. In your opinion, which are the most difficult?
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IMHO, the most difficult Chinese dialect should be Minnanese (Taiwanese), and Cantonese is a bit easier than it. Of course, since I'm native Mandarin speaker, Mandarin is the easiest one for me. As to the foreign languages you mentioned above, I think perhaps Korean is slightly harder than Japanese in some respects, if I'm not much biased.

Thanks, Tionghoa,

but if you consider also English and Spanish, in theory easy languages, are they easier than Cantonese (or Japanese) or not?

>>In your opinion, which are the most difficult?<<

Unfortunately, I can't tell. The most difficult languages we know are usually determined from an Anglophone perspective, so the East Asian ones and Arabic would be the most difficult. But in practice, I suspect that some other Asian languages are just as difficult. Some are even more so, given no relation at all to the average Indo-European languages. Let's say... would you think Georgian is easier than Chinese/Arabic? All of them are unrelated to English, but what's more, while you can always find Chinese people everywhere in the world (and in Myanmar and North Korea!), and tens of millions of Arab speakers everywhere in the middle East, Georgian may probably be limited to just one country in the Caucasus.

Arabic is relatively unknown and, just like among the Anglophones, it has a reputation of being difficult, although very few know how difficult it is.

Japanese isn't straightforward for the Chinese either. Only the writing systems are quite transparent. Other than that, we just have to learn from scratch. Japanese and Korean both have a lot of Chinese vocabulary, but while they serve as good memory hooks, it doesn't help much. In general, Chinese learners I met said that they have extensive honorifics, making everything more complicated, unlike in Chinese where there is at least no grammatical honorifics.

I once tried to learn some Japanese. Yes, I could recognize Japanese writing very quickly as a Chinese native myself, but other than that I just have to learn like everybody else. I'd only have advantages in both learning the scripts and most Sino-Japanese/Korean vocab. However, the most native Japanese/Korean words, I suspect, would be nothing like Chinese. The average Chinese know English only and, just for this reason, I even suspect people could start with German just as easily as Japanese.

All in all, Japanese and Korean should stay somewhere in grade 1 or grade 2- in the FSI scale for Chinese speakers (which doesn't exist; I made it up). However, Arabic would be just as high (grade 4) as in the Anglophone standards, simply because it's unrelated to Chinese.

Just as what Lomb said about the Hungarians, I'd say the Chinese also have a very long linguistic radius. They speak Chinese, well, while Chinese shares a lot of cultural and even linguistic affinity with Japanese and Korean, they only count as two languages - well, this is still better than Hungarian with close to no close relatives other than Finnish and Estonian which may be more remote. To learn English, German, French, Russian, and almost all languages beyond East Asia, we have a rather long linguistic radius. They're all going to be rather difficult for us, more so than the average North Americans, Europeans, Africans, Latinos, etc, a majority of which who speak at least one European language natively.

ZZZ:
Thanks, but if you consider also English and Spanish, in theory easy languages, are they easier than Cantonese (or Japanese) or not?

You're welcome! Personally I think English is easier, because I've learned it for some years, but I don't know whether Spanish is very easy or not, maybe not, I guess it's easy for those who speak Romance langauges. In fact, Cantonese and Japanese are not so hard as you imagined, as long as you really want to learn either of them and then you spend your time and energy on learning it as a target.

>>hong kong singers usually sing their songs in cantonese pronunciation, but it seems like the lyrics are written in mandarin, if it were written in cantonese, those songs wouldn't be sung that way, that's to say, cantonese lyrics use mandarin (literary?) form and cantonese pronunciation<<

I think Hong Kong producers try to make their products easier to sell by providing subtitles in standard Chinese, especially in films, so that other Chinese can standard them. The result is they make learning Cantonese even more difficult. Except a dozen of films that intend to write Cantonese subtitles, almost all films I've seen in my life are all in "Mandarin" subtitles and you can't guess at all what is being spoken unless you can hear it.

In songs... well, Hong Kong used to be place for Shanghai singers to sing Mandarin songs, but Cantonese gradually replaced Mandarin as the dominant language in the pop culture. Yet, they still maintain a tradition of singing with standard Chinese lyrics. If you add some obvious Cantonese function words, the audiences would probably find them very odd in the song. This is generally avoided.

That said, as you may know already, they do insert a lot of Cantonese colloquialisms from time to time into Canto-pop songs. Sometimes they write such bad lyrics that I can tell this must be written sloppily by a Hongkonger...

"They're all going to be rather difficult for us, more so than the average North Americans, Europeans, Africans, Latinos, etc, a majority of which who speak at least one European language natively."

"The average Chinese know English only and, just for this reason, I even suspect people could start with German just as easily as Japanese."


Well, that is interesting, thank you.

Anyway, Africans don't speak an European language as native. They speak it as second language, like you.

It is obvious that you have not an European language as native, but you study English. So, you can study not only German, but French or Spanish too (almost half of the English vocabulary has Latin roots).

Even Americans consider Spanish (Latin language) easier than German (Germanic group). That's strange.

It is interesting your example. When you know English, the difficulty of German and Japanese are similar. So, I guess that the most difficult for you can be Arabic (neither European nor East Asian language).

To ZZZ

So far, I've just known a little about German, French, and Italian, no doubt German seems like the hardest of the three in appearance, maybe it's a false impression which makes people feel that Italian, Spanish, or French are certainly easier to learn than German (perhaps it doesn't turn out to be that way as people estimated). Of course, from the viewpoint of both Chinese and westerners, no doubt the most difficult language might be Arabic (MSA and various dialects), because I got somewhat frustrated when I read Arabic course books and learned to write Arabic script correctly. Maybe it's a nightmare for Chinese, Europeans, or Americans to learn Arabic as an important task.