First, the
zh, ch, and sh sounds
in Mandarin are all pronounced with the tongue in the same place, just as the sounds “j,” “ch,” and “sh” in English are all pronounced with the tongue in the same place. Try saying those English sounds (just the consonants) in a row. You don’t have to move your tongue to do it.
Why does Mandarin sound so bad?
The reason of this comes from the fact of Chinese tones. … When the pitch is high and flat, the speaker sounds high voiced, although in English, people also talk with flat tone, but that tone can be low, so Chinese people sound like they
raise their voice very easily
.
What sound does a Mandarin make?
First, the
zh, ch, and sh sounds
in Mandarin are all pronounced with the tongue in the same place, just as the sounds “j,” “ch,” and “sh” in English are all pronounced with the tongue in the same place. Try saying those English sounds (just the consonants) in a row. You don’t have to move your tongue to do it.
Do Cantonese and Mandarin sound similar?
While they are
both tonal languages
(where different tones give different meanings to the same sound), the number of tones is different. Mandarin has only four tones per sound, while Cantonese has at least six (and can have up to nine). Mandarin and Cantonese even have different vowels and consonants.
How do you describe Mandarin tones?
Mandarin is a tonal language, which means the pitch or intonation in which a sound is spoken affects the meaning. For example, if you say tāng with a high tone it means ‘soup’, but táng with a rising tone means ‘sugar’. In Mandarin Chinese, there are
four basic pitched tones
and a fifth neutral (toneless) tone.
Is Mandarin hard to learn?
Mandarin Chinese
Interestingly,
the hardest language to learn
is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. … But writing isn’t the only difficult part of learning Mandarin. The tonal nature of the language makes speaking it very hard as well.
Why do Chinese say R instead of L?
The /l/ can only appear syllable-initially while the /r/ appears syllable-finally. This means that a
Chinese speaker would have more trouble with an /l/ sound at the end of a word
and also with an /r/ sound at the beginning of a word.
What is the least attractive language?
Vietnamese
took the top spot as the world’s least attractive language, with the site claiming (rather harshly) that it “sounds like a duck being brutalized.” Somali came next, followed by Chinese and Turkish (apparently due to its lack of melody and monotonic sound).
What does Mandarin sound like to foreigners?
After ten years with the language,
Mandarin just sounds like words
. It’s hard to clearly remember when the information was just noise. But when it comes to Cantonese, everything goes back to square one. Cantonese sounds to me like a flock of geese because of the way the tones are structured.
What is the best sounding language?
According to the TOPTENS.com (rating was made on the basis of votes casted by users from more than 150 countries)
Italian
is recognized as the best sounding language, the second place goes to French and the Bronze worthily belongs to Spanish.
Should I learn Cantonese or Mandarin first?
It doesn’t really matter which you learn first
. Just know that Mandarin is useful throughout the entire mainland, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore while Cantonese is useful in basically just Hong Kong. Sure there are parts of Guangdong that speak it, but it functions more as a local dialect.
Can you understand Cantonese if you speak Mandarin?
No, they are completely different languages. Although Cantonese and Mandarin have many similarities, they are not mutually intelligible. This means that, presuming one has no significant exposure or training,
a speaker of Mandarin will understand little to nothing of Cantonese and vice-versa
.
What is the hardest language to learn?
- Mandarin. Number of native speakers: 1.2 billion. …
- Icelandic. Number of native speakers: 330,000. …
- 3. Japanese. Number of native speakers: 122 million. …
- Hungarian. Number of native speakers: 13 million. …
- Korean. …
- Arabic. …
- Finnish. …
- Polish.
What are the 4 Mandarin tones?
As mentioned, there are mainly four tonal categories written in pinyin:
high, rising, falling-rising and falling
. Examples can be seen in the chart below. Initially, when listening to examples of the four tones of Mandarin they might sound quite similar to you.
What do you think is the importance of tones in Mandarin?
In Mandarin Chinese tones are
used to distinguish words from each other in the same way that consonant and vowel combinations are in English
. Correct tonal pronunciation is therefore essential as is the ability to distinguish tones when listening.
Why does Mandarin have tones?
In Chinese, the reason for having tones is quite simple –
there are far fewer variations in sounds (about 400) than
in most other languages (such as English, which has approximately 12 000), and so tones are used to distinguish otherwise identical ones.
