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A comment on A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages. Parent comment

Re:A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to ... by khedoros1 on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:28AM (#15822128)
Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can be safely ignored).

I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.

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Re:A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to ... by martalist on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:33AM (#15822145)
> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word

True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.

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