Fidel Posted August 1, 2002 Author Report Share Posted August 1, 2002 I notice myself imitating the female intonation and pitch too. I speak with quite a low male tone of voice so it must be to do with intonation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haltest Posted August 2, 2002 Report Share Posted August 2, 2002 Its not just speaking like a woman, they can also tell if you learnt thai in the bar for example by the way you talk and the words you use..... You can really shock middle class thais if you start throwing bar slang around, and do you really want to let your nice gf or her parents know that you go to those type of places. Of course you can always say you learnt those word from thai films...... goo, meung, wa, woi etc Then there are also some khmer and lao words that have made it into thai and really set off warning lights for a thai if a foreigner know them.... Learning thai for 2 years has taught me that I still have such a lot still to learn even though i can get by in the majority of cases Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pescator Posted August 2, 2002 Report Share Posted August 2, 2002 > Of course you can always say you learnt those word from thai films...... goo, meung, wa, woi etc These words and more are quite common up country. Nobody would raise an eyebrow if you used them there - among friends anyway. So you knowing this kind of vocabulary is definitely no clear indication of you having picked it up in a bar. Regards Hua Nguu. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pescator Posted August 2, 2002 Report Share Posted August 2, 2002 Maan, I feeeel like a woman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gobbledonk Posted August 3, 2002 Report Share Posted August 3, 2002 Fidel said: I notice myself imitating the female intonation and pitch too. I speak with quite a low male tone of voice so it must be to do with intonation. Bingo. I'm currently studying Mandarin, and our female teacher is exaggeratiing her natural 'singsong' cadence to get us mimicking the tones correctly. Almost all of the guys in the class, myself included, are raising our 'natural' speaking voice by about an octave : the holdout who is trying to maintain his 'old' voice simply doesnt sound 'right' I was never quite so aware of how dull and flat my voice can sound until I started the course. I can only think of one Asian culture with a large number of notably deep-voiced males : Japan. I may be wrong, but I dont believe that they place the same importance on tones as China, Vietnam and Thailand. I wonder how deaf people cope in cultures like these - ever hear Marlee Matlin speak ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibblies Posted August 4, 2002 Report Share Posted August 4, 2002 "Japan. I may be wrong, but I dont believe that they place the same importance on tones as China, Vietnam and Thailand.." You're not wrong. Japanese isn't a tonal language, as far as I know. Neither is Khmer. By the way, does anyone else find Thai male voices much harder to understand than female ones on TV and in movies? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jp1 Posted August 4, 2002 Report Share Posted August 4, 2002 I can only think of one Asian culture with a large number of notably deep-voiced males : Japan. I may be wrong, but I dont believe that they place the same importance on tones as China, Vietnam and Thailand. Japanese and Korean are both non tonal languages and are not related to the Sino-Tibetan language group where among others Thai and Chinese belong to. Btw you are learning Mandarin for your trip to Southern China, right? I think you'll not understand a lot of the local language. Quite different from Mandarin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibblies Posted August 5, 2002 Report Share Posted August 5, 2002 This language thing gets interesting, doesn't it? Why, for instance, do Cambodia and Korea - countries surrounded by nations with tonal languages - have languages that don't use tones? More bizarrely, I've heard that Korean is actually most closely related to Portuguese... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gobbledonk Posted August 5, 2002 Report Share Posted August 5, 2002 jp1, I take your point re 'Southern China' and local languages not necessarily being Mandarin. The problem is that there are several dialects within the province I am visiting (Guanxi Zhuang), so I would have been hard-pressed to pick one, and how would I find a teacher ? They are all taught Mandarin in school, and I believe that ANY attempt to communicate in the local language is viewed favourably, wherever you go. Whatever the outcome, it is interesting to get a window into such an enduring culture, however tiny my window may be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jp1 Posted August 6, 2002 Report Share Posted August 6, 2002 This language thing gets interesting, doesn't it? Why, for instance, do Cambodia and Korea - countries surrounded by nations with tonal languages - have languages that don't use tones? More bizarrely, I've heard that Korean is actually most closely related to Portuguese... I'm far from being an expert but just my thought: Koreans are 'immigrants' from Northern Asia who settled on the K. peninsula several thousand years ago. Their origin is not from China, more from Mongolia. At least many Koreans have a rather Mongolian look (big round faces). I can at least assure you that Korean is not at all related to Portuguese. The grammar is more or less comparable to Japanese. So I was told by Koreans. As for Cambodia. Is it possible that this language (Khmer) is related to Sanskrit? Sanskrit and Hindi -as far as I know- are also non tonal languages. Maybe there are some language experts who can give better information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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