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Friday, 19th April 2024

Irish Born Chinese

Learning a language

Created Friday, 4th June 2004, 21:41 by whykay
(NOTE: This is a migrated article from the old IBC blog)

Boingboing’s link to “Learning Mandarin is hard for native English speakers” rings true for Cantonese as well. A little inflexion and wrong intonation can cause a smile or a stern look… or just amusing laughter. I am probably very lucky to be able to tell the difference, but for folks learning to speak the language, it’s all down to practice. :)
Even saying some expression depending on the tone can give the wrong impressions. All from experience for all you newbies I suppose.