Why does Chinese sound like gibberish some times?

[hedwards]

I think getting too hung up on the term "studying" is counterproductive in most cases. You might need to periodically look up new grammatical structures to practice, but there's no good reason to cloister oneself up until one has completed their penance.

 

In addition to the reasons that people have mentioned, be aware that sometimes people's intonation pattern is just off for one reason or another. Being so close to Shanghai, it might be that they're not native speakers and tha their intonation pattern is off because of that. Or you're not quite in sync with their pattern. Both will render any language less comprehensible for even native speakers. But, native speakers do have a bit of an advantage in that their vocab and collection of recognized structures is likely to be large enough to handle a bit of that.

[querido]

I'm grateful for the generally more vigorous enunciation of Cantonese, compared to Mandarin. I enjoy it both as a listener and as a speaker.

[skylee]

Re #22, when I read “generally more vigorous enunciation of Cantonese", the word "鏗鏘" came up in my mind.

[Manuel]

Not sure the vigour is an intrinsic quality of the language. In every language there will be people who speak in a way your brain finds soothing and/or pleasant, and people whose tone of voice your brain can't stand. I say "your brain" because perceived "niceness" will vary among listeners.

[querido]

To skylee:

I wish you could hear it as I do. To me it sounds - in comparison to Mandarin - fleshy and sensual. It draws me to the speaker's lips, and I am rewarded, because they are moving. And, endearingly, to me, it's suggestive of  openness and sincerity, maybe like a child overemphasizing words in a pledge or a poem. More than once my tutor's daughter (a native speaker) said to me, as I was listening to her parents talk, that "they aren't fighting". That's how some people describe it, but I never thought they were fighting. It sounded like they were exchanging thoughts uninhibitedly, not under a veil of reservation.

 

Above all, maybe, is that the mouth is left open at the ends of sentences more often in Cantonese. I can't explain why this is amusing and endearing to me.

 

*

 

But my previous post was just about intelligibility. Intelligibility. And I said "generally", not "intrinsically".

[Demonic_Duck]

The meanings of "generally" and "intrinsically" aren't in opposition, they refer to two completely separate concepts.

[querido]

I know that. I made no claim about intrinsicality nor about any relationship between muscular effort and the pleasantness of the resulting sound. Thank you Manuel and Demonic_Duck.

 

*

 

I said "fleshy". Yes, I can hear the lips moving (generally speaking, moreso than with Mandarin). I said "sensual", but what I really wanted to say was closer to alluring (depending upon the speaker of course :-)); as the lips move more, more of the face moves more, more of the time, and with the mouth so often staying open, and with a sound coming out that sounds like a sincere interest in the answer to the question that was just asked, or a sincere reinforcement of a statement that was just made, or a plea for acknowledgment or sympathy with something just said, yeah, I feel like a whole person is engaging with me. Not always, but often, I feel like the whole feigned politesse thing is stripped off. It feels great to me. I do know why it's endearing to me but the story would get too long. Yes, I know that part of this is just a cross-cultural impression, that the Cantonese speaker is not really being more open - at least not to the extent that it seems to me - than the Mandarin speaker. Mmm, don't care. 

 

The topic was intelligibility. I tried to point out in a delicate way that Cantonese tends to involve the lips more and that I was greatly aided by this! Now I've said more about larger-scale effects. Of course it's all just my opinion. 

[Manuel]

Sounds as though one could get aroused by the mere sound of Cantonese

[AdamD]

Speech recognition still kills me. Through advice on this forum, tips from friends and my own introspection, I've put it down to these:

 

- Inexperience. Duh, I know, but I've simply not listened to enough natural speech. Recently I've been rectifying that with TV shows, and I've just organised tutoring in December specifically for my listening skills, but I know it's going to take a long time.

 

- Not speaking enough. Speaking is a big step towards listening comprehension. I know that my reading skills are good because I've done a lot of writing (both pencil and keyboard), so it follows that speaking more will help me.

 

- Vocabulary. There are still too many words I don't know. You can't beat yourself up for not knowing something you don't know.

 

- Not letting the language centre of my brain do its job. This one is hard to explain. Only recently I realised that I recognise individual words and dwell on them, rather than trying to understand whole sentences the way our brains are supposed to. If I let go and try to do that, I usually have a better time understanding what's being said.

 

The other big thing I learned is that loads of native English speakers struggle to understand spoken Chinese, and loads of native Chinese speakers struggle to understand spoken English.