So (I don't remember why) today in Physics I was trying to teach people how to properly pronounce things in standard Mandarin Chinese (Putong Hua). That is me and a couple other native speakers in the class and the people trying the pronunciation obviously weren't native speakers.

Young people really are pretty flexible and they were okay when they were following along with me but even after I explained all the Pinyin accent marks they still couldn't get the tonality right by themselves.

Random observation, it's kind of funny how when you're only familiar with, or rather learning, a couple languages (yeah, I know, "only"?) you sort of lump "foreign language" under one category... er, easier with an example. Like, one of the girls I swear was pronouncing the Chinese with a French accent because she takes French as a class. And I swear when we were doing Certamen practice I was pronouncing all my Latin "r"s as Japanese "r"s (vowels, too, but they're almost the same). I suppose you just think, "time for foreign language mode," and all the subcategories just mix together.

Anyway afterwards one girl turned the tables and tried to get me to say the numbers in Urdu. This time around she got to make fun of my pronunciation... although I think she was laughing just a bit too hard... I can't have been that bad, could I? =( And Indic languages have a bunch of consonants that don't exist in any of the languages I'm familiar with! Chinese only has... four that aren't in English... maybe... plus the trouble with tonality...

I guess I see what it's like now. Because no, I really couldn't hear the difference very well, much less reproduce it, when they were explaining it to me.

Also, 52-pickup chapter 16.