Yes I'm learning Chinese. Except that I am a native Taiwanese and I'm learning Hakka. I've just got started, but I can't even get the tones right. We know that Mandarine has four tones. Hakka I am learning (四县 dialect) has six tones. Two of those are the so called "Entering sounds" 入声. They're the "stops" if you know a little phonetics. Technically they not tones in themselves, but classified as tones traditionally, perhaps because they do have the accompanying tones, which may fall, or not fall, in the range of other non-stop tones. OK the entering sounds, they're difficult, I can sometimes pronounce them, sometimes not. But at least their actual "tones" is not a problem for me. For the rest of the four tones, the first three tones sound pretty much the same as in Marndarin. It's the fourth tones that's really giving me a headache. Sometimes it sounds like the fourth tone in Mandarine, sometimes it doesn't! I can't see why both are all lumped to the same tone. Or maybe the real tone of it depends on the tone immediately prior to or after it. I certainly haven't discovered a rule yet. In phonetic class back in college, I know that sometimes a phoneme may appear to be the same to a native speaker, when to a foreign speaker they're two. (Well, because they're really two!) Perhaps same thing occur for the Hakka tone also. It makes me wonder if the four tones for Mandarin area different depending on context. Any foreigner learning Chinese here to have a say? --

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