Hi Bluejay,
I sure could have used your help in editing/coaching my Chinese video-travelogue recently.
If you recall a brief, earlier discussion we had, I visited China this past Spring. I visited Beijing, Guizhou Province and Xinjiang Province. Of course they all spoke different languages. But mostly regarding Mandarin Chinese language . . .
For my video, when re-creating Chinese dialog over-dubs, although I try my best to imitate the names of the cities and sounds of the language, I surely fall flat. A simple example is "hello". Is it NEE-ha or NEE-how? Hearing Chinese pronounce this word, I am simply unable to discern. To my ears it is a blend of two vowels. (don't even mention the difficulty of learning rising and falling pitch variations) I believe the French language also has vowels that are near impossible for my ears to ascertain and then voice. I thought for a long time, this inability of mine to hear properly was some hearing impairment on my account. However, awhile back, I read a research paper that said because a young child isn't exposed to certain language sounds, when the child gets older its brain doesn't have the necessary pre-requisite information to hear the sound correctly and then imitate. This might explain why Chinese people have a near impossible time to pronounce "L"s?
Anyways, I find different cultures and languages pretty damn interesting. Since you can speak Chinese, I was wondering if you can expand/confirm any of my thoughts above.
I know this is off-topic so I won't ask a lot of return questions.
drone
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