logoalt Hacker News

somenameformetoday at 5:26 AM0 repliesview on HN

Somehow this makes me think of the differences between tonal and inflective languages. Learning a tonal language can be brutal for a person who's used to expressing emotion/inflections through tone, and there is nothing more frustrating than trying to speak to somebody when saying a word phonetically correct but in a slightly wrong tune and, to them, what you're saying is completely incoherent.

The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.