This may be as exciting as you’d assumed…
Anyone ever encountered the “thick tongue” thing in Chinese people?
I had to judge a pronunciation contest recently and a few candidates were cut slack by the chinese panelists because they had “thick tongues”.
I thought they sounded a bit garbled and was going to mark them accordingly, but several other panelists leaned over to ensure that I was aware of this “syndrome”.
Huh?!?
Get a bunch of foriegners and a bunch of Taiwanese together someday and measure the circumferance of their tongues. Until this has been done with a large enough sample claims like that are nonsense. It’s nonsense anyway and inteferes with what progress might otherwise be possible. Teach them the basic positions of the speech organs for each sound and then get them to mimic animated conversation. Or do the mimicing first so they know why they have to study pronunciation.