Food Tones

[liuzhou]

Like many other languages, Mandarin Chinese is tonal. This means that each syllable is assigned one of five tones. Other syllables with otherwise the same pronunciation will often have different tones.

 

These tones are important. Get the tone wrong and you change the meaning. This can be embarrassing in that while you intend saying something inconsequential, you actually come out with something shocking or amusing.

 

One that I hope is deliberate (I know it isnt) is food related.

 

Bell peppers, the most pointless vegetable ever are, in Mandarin 甜椒 (tián jiāo). The first syllable, tián, has a rising tone while the second has a high flat tone.

 

Accidentally change both tones to falling then rising and you've changed the meaning to the verb 'to lick feet', something more flavourful!

 

 

There are many more food related examples which I will put here as I come across them.

 

 

 

 

[MaryIsobel]

34 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

Like many other languages, Mandarin Chinese is tonal. This means that each syllable is assigned one of five tones. Other syllables with otherwise the same pronunciation will often have different tones.

 

These tones are important. Get the tone wrong and you change the meaning. This can be embarrassing in that while you intend saying something inconsequential, you actually come out with something shocking or amusing.

 

One that I hope is deliberate (I know it isnt) is food related.

 

Bell peppers, the most pointless vegetable ever are, in Mandarin 甜椒 (tián jiāo). The first syllable, tián, has a rising tone while the second has a high flat tone.

 

Accidentally change both tones to falling then rising and you've changed the meaning to the verb 'to lick feet', something more flavourful!

 

 

There are many more food related examples which I will put here as I come across them.

 

 

 

 

Interesting - being the linguist that you are, in your opinion, what is the most difficult language for an English speaking person to learn? I know a little bit of Spanish and have high school (minimal )French. The hardest thing to me in both those languages is the fact that nouns are male or female and there is no logical way to know which is which. I have a weird fascination with medical terms and find Latin to make a lot of sense - a few root words and medical terms become easy to understand.

[FauxPas]

I'm not @liuzhouand I'm certainly not a linguist but I would say of course any character-based language is difficult for reading and writing while tonal is also tricky for speaking. If you spend time with someone from China, you'll probably pick up a few phrases or words, but try and write them or read them? And accurately reproduce the correct tonal note? 

 

Of course, anything with a different alphabet will be a similar situation. Not sure Russian would be very easy. 

 

Also Finnish and Estonian are very strange languages. I think they would be extremely tough to learn. I know people from both countries and they have tried to explain elements of the language to me, much of which logic is completely baffling. 

[liuzhou]

Russian is certainly not easy but I learned the alphabet in one day.

 

Chinese requires memorising 3000 characters to be basically literate. University graduates will know around double that. 

 

Chinese is very difficult to learn particularly because of the tones, but also the grammar is very different. 

 

It is generally agreed that Vietnamese is one of the most difficult for European language speakers.

 

The easiest for all speakers are languages which are closely related, so other European languages for English speakers.

 

As for gender, most languages have gender differations. Old English did.  Chinese doesn't.

 

Latin has three genders as do many. Kivunjo - an African language - has 16.

Edited 1 hour ago by liuzhou (log)