Chinese Tongue Twisters

Let me give you an example of how difficult learning Chinese is.  Consider the following sentence: 

Sishisi zhi shi shizi chi sishisi zhi shi shizi

This means “44 stone lions eat 44 stone lice.” To my ear, every single one of these syllables and words sounds exactly the same, but they’re all different. As another example, I give you this:

Ma ma.

This means “curse horse.” To get it to mean “curse “ you say “ma” with a downward tone.  To get it to mean “horse” you say it in a curved tone, down then up.  Here’s another one.

Mama qi ma, ma man, mama ma ma.

This means “Mommy rides a horse.  The horse is slow.  Mommy curses the horse.”

Yes, I am actually trying to learn this language.  And, yes, it’s as hard as it looks.

It must have been a good 20 years ago that I read that Chinese only had a very few actual distinct vocal sounds, but they were all modified by pitch and tone to an amazing extent, and you needed to pick up on the sometimes very subtle distinctions.  In other words, Chinese is a total bitch to learn if you don’t already speak a tonal language.  Other languages uses tone and pitch to convey meaning to the word, not create the word itself.

If you’ve ever watched the Chinese language station on cable you get a pretty good idea of the actual sing-song sound. 

Chinese, on the other hand, consider English a bitch to learn because it is, to them, nearly monotone, the sentence structure is messed up, contains loan words from dozens of other languages, numerous synonyms and homonyms, has sounds not found in their native language (there are a few dozen sounds infants can make - by the time they are 6 they can only make the ones they use in speaking) and it strings together syllables like crazy to make words rather than just using two or three.