Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Random thoughts
Akima:
--- Quote from: Omega Entity on 08 Jun 2012, 10:37 ---Is the actual way it's actually pronounced kind of like a 'Z' sound, but mixed with an 'Sh' sound?
--- End quote ---
No. The pinyin romanisation has no intuitive connection to what an English-speaker would expect the sound to be. Wade-Giles is no better; it represents the sound as ch. Consider the name of the famous Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai, which used to be romanised as Chou En-lai. People used to pronounce his surname "chow" (rhyming with cow). Now they often say "ʒow", where ʒ is the sound of the French-style j in Frère Jacques. The closest easy English pronunciation to the correct Standard Chinese is "Joe", but taking care to pronounce the o sound "purely", without dipping it so that "Joe" rhymes with "bow" as in bow and arrow.
Zh and J in pinyin are both pronounced in Standard Chinese somewhat like the letter J in English (never like the French J), but with the tongue placed differently. J is pronounced with the tongue forward behind the teeth. Zh is a "retroflex" initial, which means that it is pronounced with the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth. See this video on how to pronounce correctly the tennis-player Zheng Jie's name for more.
Edit: A missing comma can make all the difference...
Patrick:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 08 Jun 2012, 06:44 ---I think some people are actually simply incapable of imitating the sounds they hear, as opposed to making the sounds they are used to.
--- End quote ---
If you ever want confirmation, all you gotta do is ask.
Asterus:
... "WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED TO GEORGIA!?" is an awesome Washington line...
Papersatan:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 08 Jun 2012, 06:44 ---I think some people are actually simply incapable of imitating the sounds they hear, as opposed to making the sounds they are used to.
--- End quote ---
Many people are incapable of even hearing the sounds they are not used to. If your native language doesn't use a phoneme it can take a long time to even hear that the sound is different from one that you make. One of the steps in language tutoring is frequently just getting the student to hear the difference between the two sounds. I had to do this with my Chinese student and the sounds 'ss' and 'th'. She was unaware that she replaced "th" with "ss" (brosser instead of brother) and when I tested her we found that in unfamiliar words or words out of context she actually couldn't hear which sound I was making. She had very good reading skills, so she knew, theoretically, which sound words should be making, because she could spell them, but if I just said the word "myth" or "miss" she couldn't tell which one I had said.
You can't reliably make a sound until you can reliably differentiate it from other similar sounds.
Redball:
I hadn't thought much about the inability to hear the difference. But my Nashville-raised wife clearly couldn't hear the difference between pin and pen, although she got better at it in middle age.
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