Many years ago A friend of mine was studying Mandarin. One night we went to a very nice Chinese restaurants in Minneapolis called the Village Wok. My friend and I are both of Irish extraction-about as white as you can get. My friend, Tommy, tried to order in Mandarin to the young Asian waiter. Young man going to couple times and said I beg your pardon sir. Tommy tried again and once again the young waiter said Sir I’m sorry I don’t understand you. Tom asked the young waiter if he was using the wrong tone in Mandarin, to which the young man replied“I couldn’t tell you sir I’m from Vietnam.”

Cantonese: What about the tones, when singing? Mandarin: f*** the tones

I read that perfect pitch is much more frequent among speakers of tonal languages.

vietnamese words meaning with diferent tones hai=two hái=to gather (e.g. fruits or flowers) hài=comedy hải=sea hãi= to freak out hại=harmful

Actually, Vietnamese has 6 tones, generally: accute (sắc), grave (huyền), short bouncing (hỏi), long bouncing (ngã), dipping tone (nặng) and no tonal (ngang). Moreover, the pronounciation of these tones is different between north, south and especially central dialects :D

The interesting things is that as a native speaker of mandarin (which is a tonal language), it’s still quite hard to recognize the tone of other tonal languages (e.g. the difference between high and low tone in Cantonese)

hihi im learning mandarin and its funny when people make mistakes with tones. one of my classmates was talking and they said dǎ xuéshēng instead of dàxuéshēng and i seriously could not figure out why they were talking about beating up a student.

My native language is a Bantu language called "Sango" and I lowkey didn't even realize it was tonal until someone brought it up. When you grow up with a tonal language its just so normal that you don't even think about it, I guess. (but like stop saying that we're singing)

Thanks for mentioning our Dįnę́ language! :) My people's language, Navajo, has five tones: high, low, mid, rising and falling. As a fluent, native speaker I hear them all. Though, linguists say it has only four but that is not true.

It’s so weird to discover something so simple and yet so profound, that you have never heard of before but millions of people use in their daily lives

Just in case you want hilarity in Cantonese: The word hɐi in different tones: 1: A vulgar word for the female reproductive system 2: "At" 6: "To be" Japanese doesn't have tones so when they loaned hɐi6 along with other Chinese words they pronounced most of them as tone 1., and you know what happens... Every Japanese learning classroom with teenagers or maybe even children in Hong Kong comes with a few chuckles from the back seat at the first few lessons.

I went to a Cantonese-speaking Chinese school in my childhood days and dropped out after three years. It was all immersion and rote memorization. They never discussed the concept of tones and that there are six of them. If a student pronounced a word with the wrong tone, he would just be corrected by telling him to mimic what the teacher is saying. Another thing they never explained to me in Chinese school is that spoken Cantonese does not always use the same words that are used in the written form of the language.

One thing that I have always wondered- How do people actually *sing* in tonal languages? Obviously the Chinese, Vietnamese, Somalians, Hausa, and so on and so forth- These people have real vocal music. But how do they sing if the notes will change the meaning?

The Indo-European language family interestingly does have one tonal language: Punjabi (including closely related languages of Dogri and Lahnda, which are dialects relative to Punjabi). There are several other Indo-European languages with pitch accent (such as Swedish and the Baltic languages) but Punjabi is the only language that has full phonemic tones - three of them to be exact.

This is a reason singers are often not lyricists in Hong Kong. Filling a song with a set amount of syllables that rhyme and have cohesive meaning is one thing, but adding tones into consideration makes writing Cantonese lyrics challenging.

I speak Vietnamese and no, nobody ever considered it to be anywhere close to "singing". When we add a tone to a vowel, we consider it to be a whole different vowel, that's how we're taught when we're young, we don't think of it as one vowel with diffrent tones we consider them different individual vowels. like e and ê are considered to be different vowels.

Actually, traditional Thai has 6 tones but modern Thai now has only 5 because there were two sound that so close together and quite hard for non native. Also, the standard 5 tones are native to Bangkok and quite only the capital of Bangkok. You go away to another province then you fine 5 different tones for the same language. Some area even swap two or three tones from the standard Thai tones. Well, it's complicated even for Thai. Lol

After being alive 28 years, one suddenly comes in contact with the love its life. Filology joins together culture, sounds and language. If I would start my studies again I would enrole in this for sure. Thank you, whoever you are for allowing be to find this

In Serbian we have 6 tones. They are just written in books about the Serbian language, but not in usual writing. Most of the people just use them without knowing their existence: In stressed syllables we have: 1. the long rising tone (á) Example: the first “a” in tama (darkness) 2. the long falling tone (â) Example: the “a” in laž (lie) 3. the short rising tone (à) Example: the first “a” in pratilac (companion) 4. the short falling tone (ȁ) Example: the first “a” in žaba (frog) In unstressed syllables we have: 5. the short flat tone (a) Example: the second “a” in lagati (to lie) 6. the long flat tone (ā) Example: This tone is mostly used for the Genitive Plural. The last “a” of maraka (marks; this is the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina) One special thing: The tones also apply for the letter “R” because the letter is treated as a vowel.

Rising and falling pitch can also change the meaning of words in the *European* languages of Swedish and Norwegian. So it's not just a question of Asian and Native American tongues.

One could argue that English is just as much a tonal language as Mandarin, but in a different way. In Mandarin tones convey the semantics associated with a syllable, so that 马 (Mǎ) has a different meaning from 妈 (Mā), the former meaning horse, and the latter meaning mom. In English however, the tonality is expressed in a different way. A rising tone expresses a question, a falling tone expresses the end of a sentence, while a continued tone expresses continuity within the sentence. This form of tonality isn't _super_ important in English, as one can do without; but they do form contextual clues, and someone speaking without using these correctly could come across as foreign.

"Intonation" or "emphasis" might be better metaphors for how tonal languages work than "singing". Something that really helped me start to correctly produce and mentally process tones was a video from YoYo Chinese were the teacher compared Mandarin tones to English pragmatic tones. For example tone 1 is like saying "hi!", tone 2 is like a question "what?, tone 3 is like a disappointed "oh", and tone 4 is like an angry or emphatic "no!". It was helpful to learn that English has all four Mandarin tones but that they're not lexemic but suprasegmental/pragmatic.

I stopped learning Mandarin because it was impossible for me to mimic the sounds in a sentence. I usually ended up saying something completely different and nonsensical.

Having tried out mandarin (when i was hyper about china back in the day) this was one of the first things being taught. A challenge indeed.

Swedish: Ord English: Word

Just to add some points to this informative video: -How do tonal languages deal with singing? Generally, if there's a clash between the prescribed pitch in music and tone, musicality takes precedence. However, some languages value harmony between the two more than others. For example, in Cantonese, Hokkien, and Vietnamese songs, the pitch contour tends to match natural speech pretty well, while in Mandarin, tone is largely ignored in singing. -Tonal languages can still have sentential pitch. As linguist Y. R. Chao put it, “...The question has often been raised as to how Chinese can have sentence intonation if words have definite tones. The best answer is to compare syllabic tone and sentence intonation with small ripples riding on larger waves (though occasionally the ripples may be “larger” than the waves.)...” -It's not only vowels that carry tones. Some consonants can form syllables on their own and thus can carry tones in the absence of a vowel. M and N are common examples.

Can people please stop saying that speakers of tonal languages sing when they talk? They clearly don't, and it's not the right way to begin learning about tones. It might be a cute way to look at it, but in the end, it's just not true, and very misleading.

Some dialects of the Cantonese language in Guangxi or other areas may have 9~10 tones. And there are also many languages with 6~8 tones in the Southwestern part of China, spoken by minority ethnics like Bai, Hani people.

A little piece of trivia: At the start of the video, the word "word" is constructed by placing a w in front of the letters "ord". But in a way, you could say that it already said "word" on the screen before - just in another language. The Danish word for "word" is "ord".

1:20 I always have trouble in hearing tones, but that example was really perfect. Especially the staying one

There are even tonal Germanic languages. Norwegian/Swedish use contour tones. Luckily, we only have two tone patterns, so it is not too difficult. For example, the norwegian word for "the tank" is "tanken" with tone 1. And "the thought" is "tanken" with tone 2. It is a little complicated with Norwegian dialects tho, because we have two dialectal systems devided in to low-high vs high-low tonal dialects. Luckily, tone 1 and 2 for the high-low dialect is just a perfect inversion of the low-high tones. So tone 1 and 2 still follow the same principles, only mirrored.

Punjabi is the 2nd largest tonal language after Chinese. Here's an example: 1. Kāṛi = chain, loop of a chain 2. Kàṛi = curry (dish) 3. Kǎṛi = watch,clock So if you say: "Kàṛi te vela ki hoya?" (What's the time on the curry) which makes no sense You have to say: "Kǎṛi te vela ki hoya?" (What's the time on the watch)

*Advantages:* -Shorter and simpler words -The ability to discard inflections -Harmonious speeches *Disadvantages:* -It may sound awkward during conversation. -Singing may be more arduous since word tones can conflict with music tones. -Some words become obscene and offensive if their tone is not pronounced right. -Writing down the language would be a pain. Vietnamese for example, tend to have TOO many diacritics and it takes forever to write, both in handwriting and in typing.

I love tonal languages! Makes them so much more unique. Being a dorky choir kid in high school, i now love trying to learn tonal languages. Navajo is fascinating and I love how Chinese languages sound. This video makes me want to learn Cantonese more than mandarin now because of the complexity.

I love the Thai language I’m practicing it now and I’m getting really getting the hang of it.

Hokkien (a.k.a. Taiwanese) -which has 7-8 tones depending upon the dialect- was a challenge to learn because one you learn to identify and produce the tones, you get hit with the news of tonal sandhi. Tonal sandhi is when the tone of the first word in a compound word changes. This sounds daunting, but it works much like episiotomy in European languages as it aids the flow.

The very difficult part in Mandarin is that the tones of a word can change if they come after certain other tones or if they are part of a phrase. Also, there are five tones, including a soft tone. "Ma" can be in all five tones, meaning mom, numb, horse, scold; and it can be put at the end of a question.

In Vietnamese there are six but actually more than it because each regions has a unique way to make their tones

I know a lot of people think this but mandarin doesn't have four tones it actually has five ^^ the last tone is a short sort of neutral tone where you basically shorten the sound of the word you're saying.

Americans are confused because we always raise our voice when we ask a question.

The Cantonese news anchor on tv sounds like he’s always singing when he's reporting. Sometimes, I suddenly laugh when he’s talking because it really sounds like a song.

Technically there are 9 tones in Cantonese but the extra 3 are derivations of the other ones and are only slightly different.

No wonder people tell us Swedes it sounds like we are singing, we are practically singing our language 💖

If someone wonders why English is not considered a tonal language even though it has stress, tone and stress aren’t the same things. Stress is where you make a part of a word or sentence louder or more prominent, while pitch or tone is where you make a part of a word change in pitch, not in volume. For example Swedish has both stress and pitch. Depending on which part of a sentence you stress the sentence can mean different things. “VAD gjorde du igår?”, “WHAT did you do yesterday?”, emphasising what specific action someone did, is different from “Vad gjorde DU igår?”, What did YOU do yesterday?”, emphasising what a specific person did. When it comes to pitch the word can get another meaning depending on if you go from a lower tone to a higher tone, vice versa, or staying on the same tone. A word can have both pitch and stress! For example, if we let capitalised words represent emphasis, / represents going from lower to higher pitch and \ represents going from higher to lower pitch, “Den HELIGA and/en”, “The HOLY spirit”, emphasises that the spirit is holy, and since you go from lower to higher note in “anden” it means spirit, but if you instead say for example “Den heliga AND\EN”, “The holy DUCK”, you emphasise that it’s a duck, you don’t emphasise that the duck is holy, and because you go from a higher pitch to a lower pitch in “anden” it means duck, not spirit.

Punjabi which is spoken in northern India, is also a very tonal language. The only tonal language in the Indo-Aryan group. It uses highs and lows when speaking aswell. For example Katt and Katt is spelled the same but have completely different meanings based on the tone you speak when sound the vowel. Kātt and kàtt or kòra and kōra are different words based on how you use the tone

In Sabah (north borneo), our language makes us show emphasis by lengthening the words and in a higher pitch. And we apply this even in English! For example, if we want to say "my hometown is really far away", we'd say "my hometown is faaaaar away". Not all English words roll off the tongue with it though.

many of my students speak Zomi, which is a Burmese dialect. When they repeat what I say, they say it in exactly the same tone. At first I thought they were being rude, but that's how their language is spoken. You're right...learning a tonal language is extremely difficult.

Let's not forget that it's not just in tone languages that people "sing" when they speak. There are also pitch accent languages, and to build any phrase or any word out of more than one syllable, they need a combination of tones, or tones on stressed syllables to make meaning. These languages don't pay attention to individual tones like Chinese languages or Thai but to differences in the pitch of the syllables of a word or phrase, or the pitch of stressed syllables relative to unstressed syllables. If the pitch accent is mobile, then it is possible for a combination of syllables to have different meanings according to the way it is intonated. Or a combination of syllables with one stress point may have different meanings according to whether the stressed syllable is uttered at a higher or lower tone than an unstressed syllable.

What do they do when they have to whisper?

This was entertaining and very informative! one of your better videos, good job!

I can speak French Vietnamese and English fluently , which makes any of the other languages easy to learn for me ! (I’ve learnt Japanese, Italian, Cantonese)

Who would like to hear a linguistic nightmare? A Contour tone, abjad, language which hasn't had a spelling reform in ages, along with 5 scripts, 4 of which you have to use in different contexts and learn 50 letters of, along with a fifth script with over 45,000 symbols, all referencing their pertaining material in cryptic ways.

Cantonese: Maai (mid-low rising) = Buy Maai (mid-low level) = Sell In stock market transactions, we prefer saying 'call' and 'put' rather than the Cantonese words.

I took Mandarin in College... half the 1st class was all about learning the tones. And I learned from a native speaker who only came to america a few years prior. Tones are certainly something that is always hard to pick up, and not using the right one can be MAJOR trouble. My favorite example of this is "Ma": I forget which tone means which off the top of my head, but one tone of "Ma" means Horse, one means Mother, one means Marijuana, and the flat tone is a particle for a question mark. You can only imagine what problems this can cause if you mess up the tones on this, I'm sure.

Mandarin third tone does not "go up" at the end, except in certain circumstances, like when emphasizing a word. The most regular way of pronouncing the third tone is as a low flat tone, contrasting with the high flat tone (first tone). Linguists call this the "half third tone," and I indicated above, it is very rare to use the "full third tone" with the fall-rise contour.

0:25 I noticed the graphics designer used Kanji/Hanja stroke order when making the checkboxes. Was that intentional?

Q: ไม้ใหม่ไหม้ไหม? A: ไม่, ไม้ใหม่ไม่ไหม้. ไม้ไม่ใหม่ไหม้.

What happens if you are singing and you want to sing the higher 'ha' lower then it is?

I think what really makes it hard for westerns et al to learn tonal languages is that they've been told thousands of times that it's like singing, that it sounds musical, or that tones are like notes or pitches. Even in videos like this that tries to clarify the difference between register tones and contour tones on the one hand but still floods us with the old analogies on the other hand. I recommend watching the videos by Stu Jay Raj who explains tone as throat control. He speaks great Thai and Mandarin and pretty good Vietnamese and Cantonese. Here's a linguistics paper by a Vietnamese Canadian titles "Vietnamese tone: Tone is not pitch" for those inclined to read technical stuff. I've tried to teach myself a bit of Mandarin, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese in my travels and the only tone that strikes me as "musical" or "sing song" is the high level "tone 1" in Mandarin. It's probably better to compare tones to vowels than to consonants, since consonants have definite locations inside the mouth whereas both vowels and tones are relative.

Awesome video! Since you made a video about languages that rely on tone, it would be really cool if you did one on languages that have no tone at all; signed languages. Signed languages are as varied and interesting as spoken language, but many people remain unaware that they even exist. American Sign Language even has several writing systems that in no way resemble written English. Just a thought! Hope you consider it :) Love your work!

Some European languages are semi-tonal. I speak Serbo-Croatian, which has four "pitches" for accent: low rising, low falling, short rising, and short falling. This means that the word "mali" changes meaning based on what pitch you give it. It can either mean "small," or the country Mali.

Is this channel associated with LangFocus? I'm new to this channel, but I already love it!

Catch: Mandarin has a secret fifth tone. It's true, people. The fifth tone is airy, like when you speak 妈妈 (Mā ma, or mother) Notice how the second 'ma' does not have a tone on top. This kind of airy tone is found where the same character repeats twice to make a phrase. (sometimes)

I just wanna add that the term 'register' is sometimes also used to refer to a suprasegmental feature that combines tone and vowel phonation. Here it is not clear if it is the tone or the phonation type that is the defining feature and these two features do not occur independently. In Veitnamese, for example, the rising tone occurs with creaky voice or a glottal stop in the middle of the vowel and the low tone with breathy voice. This is invariable hence it makes sense to just consider them a bundle of features that forms a complex feature called register. There are also languages where that have both vowel phonation type and tone and use them independently of each other giving as a hypothetical example a syllable with high tone and modal voice vs a high tone syllable in creaky voice and so on.

I'm Thai and in Thai, there is a different length in tone for example กา is with a long aah so gaah while กะ is shorter so gah

I went to a farm. They produce produce. They wouldn't take our trash. They refuse refuse. I went to the studio to record a record.

Thai is my language and it's stupidly hard. คาว kaao = fishy ข่าว kaao = news ข้าว kaao = rice ขาว kaao = white เข่า kao = knees เข้า kao = to enter เค้า kao = he/she, him/her (spoken language) เขา kao = he/she, him/her (written language)

Changes in tone may not change the meanings of English words, but they can change the meaning of statements.

Hi I'm a native Cantonese speaker 😂😂 I think my language works perfectly well

I seriously appreciate the work you do to make these videos for us. There so awesome to listen to and watch! Keep up the great work! An aside - I'm making a constructed language with five tones and a few tone "shapes", so this video was a plus!

When I started learning Chinese I used music to get the tones right. I would literally play the tones with my guitar and sing them. Now people think I'm a native speaker whenever they listen to me on the phone or if they don't see my so obviously not Chinese face 😂

There was a language (I can't remember which) and it actually developed tones from glottal stops. Apparently they only had glottal stops in between vowels, and that caused an extra syllable. The speakers of the language didn't like this extra syllable and then merged the two vowel sounds together. As a result, some words sounded the same when spoken, so to differentiate the words, the words that previously had a glottal stop now had a rising tone.

Well ppl say my mother tongue Minnan(in Taiwan) has eight tones and a very complex tone sandhi system, but i just speak this language naturally with my family all my life even without knowing them tho

Burmese, thai, vietnamese, etc

Well, you could argue that in "tonal languages" you just have more vocals, which are sub-categories of our "broader-defined" vocals

Gotta say that you are an incredible teacher! It's always fun watching your videos, and I always learn so much. Thank you!

Helps to hear Mandarin and try to copy what you hear. It's very easy once you get the hang of it, and it's no difficult to remember which word has what tone, until you reach things like 老师， 老是， 老实 which are all pronounced "lao shi" with different tones (one being "teacher", next being "always", and last one being "honest") meaning that you can write 老师老是老实, meaning "The teacher is always honest", however it isn't much difficult form remembering which "there" or "their" to use, as well as "to" "too" and "two"; actually it is much easier, because with the writing system comes the meaning so it is very easy to not get mixed up between them all.

Punjabi is the only tonal language in Indo-Europeon language cateogory.

Would be nice to have some examples up in this video as well.

To add to the four tones of Mandarin -- / V \ If a two-word phrase has both the third tone, the first word will adopt the second tone So V V becomes / V Such as the phrase "president" 總統 This rule is called 三聲變調

Just like "tomten" and "tomten". Two different words in Swedish depending on where you set the tone at the end.

that's... not how it works at all. please stop comparing tonal languages to singing. it's just... it does not work like that. If it is then all english speakers are singing when they ask questions because they raise the tone of the last vowel

The singing analogy for tones in language, it reminds me of this one video wherein a guy does a guitar cover of the "Steamed Hams" clip from The Simpsons, matching the rising and falling tones in the speech with the notes on his guitar.

I just realized that the words bønner and bønder in norwegian are only distinguished by tone when spoken. The first is high-low-high and the second is low-high

There is a mistake in your narrative: 'So speaking a word in the wrong tone in one of these languages can sound as bad as putting a "k" where it doesn't belong'. The linguistic community generally agrees that consonants carry more semantic significance than do vowels and tones. In light of this, it would have been more accurate to say "...can sound as bad as putting an 'a' where it doesn't belong'; for example, confusing 'cat' with 'cot'. We can observe this reality when considering Chinese cross-topolectal relationships; the tonal realisations (though not the categories) are all over the map and the vowels are often different yet related, whilst the consonants seldom change radically (at most, a consonant may change to a related one).

Tone seems to me like it makes a language unnecessarily complicated. I know people have embarrassing stories of them trying to learn a tonal language, and with the slightest mispronunciation or wrong tone, it turns out they accidentally said a curse word. Why would a language evolve that way, that the difference between a normal word and a curse word is their tone? It seems unnecessarily complicated to me, and hard for non-tonal language speakers to grasp.

I bet that really fucks with the way people sing those languages.

I have Chinese as a first language (but I basically got rid of the accent in English due to schooling, got rid of it in like 2nd grade). So, once I met an American dude trying to learn Chinese, and it was REALLY hard to keep up with his speech. Not because he spoke quickly, I can deal with that. It's because he doesn't use any tones on his vowels. It took a long time for me to figure out his context, not that I thought he was saying the wrong words but because I didn't think he was saying anything at all. My little sister used to make a joke when we drove past horses, mǎ, and mom, mā. "ma ma ma ma", so my mom couldn't figure out what she was talking about. Through context, it's "mom, horses!" but it takes a while to figure out if you're in normal conversation.

your videos are so awesome

I have a feeling that the tonal system is a nuisance when you actually sing. I find it very hard to pick up words from Mandarin lyrics when they're sung because the tunes in which the words are sung mess up the original tone of the words and make them unintelligible

2:07 it depends on the language. In Mandarin, this is true. In Japanese and Cherokee, tone does not carry that much weight.

Never had it explained so simply. Fantastic!

@nativlang Why does noone think of say Norwegian when talking about tonal languages?

I'm learning Cantonese and OH....MY.......GOSH!!!!!! O.o at first I thought the tones would be hard but now I'm getting the hang of it that I have some favorite tones lol XD I think the most embarrassing thing I did was mess up the work hai6. Which means "yes". I said it too high which means "vagina" :O

the only tonal language i speak (look, technically it is in most dialects!) is swedish. it has a 2nd tone for some words so you can distinguish them in speech. the distinction is lost in finland swedish, though.

I am well to see the video offering Cantonese subtitle, what's an impressive surprise!

Wait so are tonal languages the equivalent of “aRe ToNaL lAnGuAgEs ThE eQuiValEnT oF” this?

Lets not forget the Scandinavian languages and their singing.

Why am I just seeing this channel? Subscribed instantly!

Tones actually change the meaning of something. Drastically