Chinese - English, Figuring Out Mistakes

[cranky_laowai]

@joesax

[quote=“Dragonbones”]Learners of Chinese seem to think that if they’re only a ‘little’ off with their pronunciation, Taiwanese should be able to guess what they meant. They don’t realize that the ‘little’ discrepancy between, say, tang1 and tang2 is as major to the Taiwanese ear as the difference between ‘soup’ and ‘sugar’ in English. You can’t ask the waiter for ‘soup’ and expect to get sugar, now, can you? [/quote]I know what you mean, but I disagree that “tang1” and “tang2” are perceived as completely different in the sense that soup and sugar are. Two reasons for this: the first, more important one is the popularity of puns and wordplays which often link words whose sound differs in tone only. The second reason is that despite the difficulties reported on threads such as this, it seems that those westerners whose Mandarin is “fluent” (in a narrow sense) but whose tones are rubbish, still manage to make themselves understood most of the time.

My take is that tones are undoubtedly important (of course) – but not as important as other elements of pronunciation, such as vowel and consonant sounds. Look, for example, at this page on Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations and the recent thread in this forum on [url=Characters pronounced differently in Taiwan and China - #3 by Taffy pronounced differently in Taiwan and China[/url]. The differences are predominantly in tone, which indicates a greater flexibility with tone than with initials or finals.

I haven’t seen any academic studies on this, though. Does anyone know of any?