My colleague pointed this photograph by Sahil Anand yesterday, It amused me very much. Reminded me a little of this image of a Chinese restaurant that did the rounds on the internet 4 years ago.
via The Guardian.
My little confused world
My colleague pointed this photograph by Sahil Anand yesterday, It amused me very much. Reminded me a little of this image of a Chinese restaurant that did the rounds on the internet 4 years ago.
via The Guardian.
I have tried to learn Chinese, I spent a few months listening to audio lessons to try and get to grips with the language before going on holiday to Beijing a couple of years ago. It’s not an easy language to learn, grammatically it’s fairly simple, the difficulty is with the tones.
What to you or me might sound like one sound can actually be a falling rising tone, a rising tone a a falling tone or a flat tone. They all sound fairly similar to the untrained ear, or at least they do when someone is talking at full speed. I thought I had got the hang of the tones and gleefully tried to talk to people using my new found linguistic masters, but because I had no idea what I was doing not only could I not understand them they couldn’t understand me. The above poem consisting only of the syllable shi using various tones and contexts points this out beautifully…
That said English isn’t exactly the easiest language to learn if you aren’t a native speaker, I’ve seen this kicking about for the internet hundreds of times:
via reddit.com