Those Dreaded Tones

Of course one of the first things people fear about learning Cantonese (or Thai or Navajo or any tonal language) is The Tones.

The Tones are very scary and terrible. One could work very hard to learn how to say "It's very nice to meet you" and instead say "Your face look like a horse's backside." At least that is the fear.

To be fair, it is a perfectly legitimate fear.  Now to my knowledge, you can't mess up "Nice to meet you" enough to make it into "You look like a horse" (and Hong Kong people don't seem to say "nice to meet you" very much anyway). But you can make some other equally funny mistakes. 

Let's start off with some simple ones. Sunday and Monday. 星期日 sing1 kei4 jat6 and 星期一 sing1 kei4 jat1. Pretty basic, right? Silly, Sunday uses tone 6 and Monday tone 1. And then there's "tea" 茶 caa4 and "fork" 叉 caa1. They're just a tone difference away from being the same word. If you're in a restaurant, you could legitimately get a fork when you just wanted a piping hot cup of Earl Gray.

Now let's look at some more amusing examples. "Hungry" 肚餓 tou5 ngo6 and "diarrhea" 肚屙 tou5 o1 are also uncomfortably similar. My first Cantonese teacher, in order to help us remember, told us that when you eat the food goes DOWN into your stomach but if you have diarrhea you have to jump UP from your chair to go to the bathroom. Not entirely accurate since in the bathroom the food...anyway, at least it's a helpful memory device. Although my dictionary doesn't confirm this, I have been told that 靚仔 leng3 zai5 (tone 3) is "handsome guy" but leng1 zai5 (tone 1) is "little boy." Be sure not to mess that one up if you're trying to hit on someone! 

These stories are fun and all, but I actually don't think making mistakes in tonal languages are all that much different between non-tonal languages. Yes, tones add another element that can be tricky, but you can make plenty of mistakes in non-tonal languages. 

English, for example. Once I had coworker who kept yelling at me to bring the "pork." Since we didn't have any pork in the whole building, I was perplexed...until I noticed her frantically motioning to the silverware drawer. In her defense, there is no f-sound in her language. As a teacher, I've had to bite my tongue, grit my teeth, and dig my fingernails into my palms to keep from laughing at mistakes that cropped up every day. Laughing at your students' mistakes is probably not very professional. 

But sometimes I just can't hold it in. Once I was having dessert with a friend who kept pronouncing "peanuts" like a part of the male anatomy. I wish I could say that I poker-faced it and nicely corrected him like I try to do with my students. But instead I laughed until tears were dripping into my ice cream. Have you ever laughed so much that you really can't stop? Yeah....I'm a bad friend. 

So I guess I have two points. First, you can butcher just about any language, and it doesn't have to be tonal. Even though English isn't a tonal language, we have a lot of words that might as well be. Have you ever tried to teach someone the difference between "back" and "bag" (and I'm talking about natural, quick speech, not those hyper-enunciated learning videos)? Or for that matter, "can" versus "can't" in the American accent. Tones are a breeze compared to that, right? 

My other point is that you have to be comfortable with being laughed at. I'm laughed at all the time. And as a person who has laughed at (or at least wanted to laugh at) others, I get it; I'm sure I sound funny. Kids are the worst. They don't care about being polite. They'll just ask you why you sound weird and laugh at you when you mess up. But at least they're honest! 

If you're going to try to learn Cantonese and are still wondering about the whole tone thing, I'd say don't worry too much. Yes, they're important, but context often helps. And if not, then at least you'll have a fun story to tell later about calling your little sister a plum. 

But seriously, just do tone drills. When I first started learning, I didn't have a good grasp on the tones, and a lot of people didn't understand me very well. I decided to do tone drills five times a day for a month, and guess what? I got much better! Now I can almost always tell which tone a person is saying, which makes it easy to write down notes or replicate words. It may sound annoying, but just bite the bullet and do it! As a side note, those little numbers next to the funny italic letters are tone numbers. If you learn how to read Jyutping (a Cantonese romanization system in which the "j" is pronounced like a "y") then you too can pronounce the Canto words I sometimes write on this blog, even if you can't read characters (yet). 

As to Cantonese having 9 or 11 or 13 or 57 tones (or whatever the number is now), you really only have to learn 6. Practically all Cantonese teachers agree that 6 is enough to say everything. There is an optional 7th if you really want, but that can always be said in one of the other tones and is fading from use anyway. I'm not an overachiever, so I just let that one go. As to why there are so many other "tones," that's a debate for linguists about what is or isn't a tone. I don't need any more of you falling asleep reading this post, so we will just forget the other 3 or 5 or 7 tones or pronunciations or sounds whatever they are and move on.

Finally, just look at speaking Cantonese like singing. Just like singing, you have to hit the right note (tone) in order to perform accurately. In singing, certain words are sung higher and lower than other words, and you learn that at the same time that you're learning the lyrics. In Cantonese, you are just learning the "tune" at the same time you are learning the word. 

Singing isn't so dreadful, is it? Now please go make up a song about being hungry and then getting diarrhea. That's the kind of memory device I'd like.