Observations on vocal comparisons between the Thai language and Mandarin Chinese as they relate to the English language and English language speakers

(How's that for a long title?)

Over the last few years I have been learning a little Thai and Mandarin. They are both tonal languages and both have certain characters that make sounds not present in the English language. What I am going to talk about is how they compare to the English language. More specifically, how the pronunciation of each compares to the English language speakers ability to form the requisite sounds for each language.

Let's start with the similarities. While both Thai and Mandarin have more letters in their alphabets, many of the sounds they make are very much the same as various English language letters. A randomly selected example might be; W, D, O, T, B. There are equivalent sounds in all three languages for what these letters represent in English. Now, by letter I mean characters. In both the Thai and Mandarin writing systems the characters actually represent words or concepts, especially in Mandarin. A "real world" example of the "same sound" would be my name, Joe. In Thai there are two characters that, when combined, make the sound that is the same as my name. Interestingly, in Thai the character for the "O" sound comes before the one for the "J" sound. But that's getting ahead of myself. The reality is that most of the sounds made by these languages are very similar across the board. However...

The differences are where the fun begins. First off, the number of characters in the languages are interesting in their differences. English has 26 letters in our alphabet: 5/6 vowels & 21/20 consonants (that damned "and sometimes Y" thing keeps things from being completely clean). The Thai language has 44 consonants & 24 vowels. Plus some special characters we'll get into shortly. Mandarin has, it is estimated, some 40-50,000 characters! There's a rule of thumb that you need to know a minimum of 3,000 to be able to communicate and 6,000 to read a news paper. But if you are learning the language phonetically it's not as important how many characters there are. You only need to know the sounds. This makes it much easer, as the Pimsleur Approach has shown.

Second, while there are similar sounds there are also unique sounds that are not made in the English language. Sounds, which are often so different, the English speaker is unable to correctly form their mouth, tongue, lips, etc. in order to make the sound. This seems to be more prevalent in Mandarin than in Thai. Because of the complexity of Thai and Mandarin, the slightest variation in the way you hold your lips or position your tongue can mean the difference between communicating and just making strange sounds. This goes both ways, though. There are some sounds in the English language that are difficult for native Thai and Mandarin speakers to make. In both cases, Thai/Mandarin -> English and English -> Thai/Mandarin, the trouble comes partly from the fact that the native speakers mouth/lips/tongue/etc. are not used to the subjectively strange positions they need to be in in order to make the correct sound. As a simple example, there is a sound that is most closely approximated by an native English speaker by saying the "U" while spreading your lips in as wide a smile as possible. This is a learned trait and becomes more pronounced the longer someone has only spoken their native language. Young children up to teens are much more able to adapt themselves to handle the sounds made in both languages. This is why you find that older people tend to have a more pronounced accent to their speech when speaking a non-native language. A person could have their first 20 years immersed in their "native" language then another 30 in their "second" language yet will likely still have an accent that can be heard in their speech.

Finally, and most importantly, there are the tones. Both Thai and Mandarin are tonal languages. This means that the tone used when saying a word or phrase will change the meaning, often quite drastically. Thai has five tones while Mandarin has four. In Thai the tones are mid-level, low falling, high, and raising. In Mandarin the tones are high, rising, falling~raising, and falling. The third tone here starts out high then falls to low and then raises back up. Tones are the most difficult thing that English speakers have to learn. When you start out the tones are imperceptible; they all sound the same. But, with practice and help, they can eventually be heard and even spoken. I can speak some of the phrases in Thai that I have learned with no accent. Sometimes I am mistaken as being fluent in Thai by some native Thai speakers. They quickly learn that I am far from that. But I take it as a compliment.

So what does this all mean? My limited exposure to the two languages leads me to believe that Thai speakers will have an easier time speaking English than those who speak Mandarin. Conversely, it will be easier for English language natives to speak Thai than Mandarin. This is true only when not considering the tones. Factoring the tones in the Thai/Mandarin -> English is much easier than the other way. This is not unique, really. I also happen to know a lot of German plus some Italian & French. From the perspective of being able to be understood, it is much easier to go from pretty much any language to English.

One year on Blogger

I just noticed that I'm coming up on my first anniversary with Blogger. While I started "blogging" on Kuro5hin in 2001 and moved to .Mac using iBlog in late 2003, it is here on Blogger that things seem to fit best. K5 was quite good for a while but it, as with anything that gets popular, got inundated by idiots whose sole purpose was to try and disrupt everything that happened on K5. iBlog was a fantastic tool and had all kinds of features but it only ran on a Mac and worked best with a .Mac account. Now, I have both a Mac and a .Mac account but it is just much easier to blog from anywhere using just about any system. So, in just a few days it'll be one year. WhooHoo!

On the cover of a Newhouse Story

A few weeks ago I received an email from a reporter who was doing a story on only children. Somehow she found this blog and, noting that I have an only child, wanted to interview me for said story. Initially I was surprised that she actually found this place but I agreed to a phone interview. It went well and I thought, "I could be in a news publication that wasn't techie or Linux specific. Far out." Shortly after the interview she called back and asked if it would be ok to have a photographer come out and take some pictures with the potential of having one appear in the article. Again I thought, "Even farther out." The photographer came over and took about a thousand pictures of everything from me picking my son up from school, us doing his homework, us playing PS2, and just hanging out in the back yard. About two weeks later the article was published. It is available on the Newhouse website at -
http://www.newhouse.com/archive/melendez050605.html.

It not the cover of the Rolling Stone but it seems that I am getting my 15 minutes of fame in 30 second increments. :-)

Comments on the Spanish GP

The Flying Finn just crushed everyone else. Kimi started from P1 and never lost the lead of the race. Fernando Alonzo, the obvious crowd favorite rocketed out of the gate, as the Renaults are wont to do, and jumped from P3 blasting past Mark Webber who started in P2. The Ferrari's didn't fair well this time out. Rubens ended up just out of the points at 9 while Michael left on lap 46 with some major tire failures. As for Kimi, he had been saying that the McLaren-Mercedes was much better than the field if it could finish a race. And he was right.

As for the Championships, it looks like the Schumacher/Ferrari dominance will finally be broken. While it's still very early in the season there's good indications that we will have a new Drivers Champion in what seems like a hundred years. Time will tell.

Extremely late comments on the San Marino GP

I didn't get to see it but the race was a scorcher. Renault won for the fourth time in as many races and Fernando Alonso took his third straight win but only by 0.2s over Michael Schumacher in the new Ferrari F2005. Ferrari had been running the F2004 car for the first 4 races due to some issues with the F2005. But it seems to have been ironed out. Maybe. Rubens Barrichello went out on lap 18 of the 62 lap race with "electrical problems."

Jenson Button and Takuma Sato disqualified from third and fifth respectively following a BAR weight infringement. Thursday the BAR-Honda team was handed a two-race suspension due to the infringement. Additionally, a 25-second penalty was added to Ralf Schumacher's race time for an unsafe pit lane maneuver. This took him from what could have been a sixth place finish to just out of the points in ninth. Team Toyota will not be happy with that.

Red Bull Racing finished in the points again and have now scored points in every race so far. Granted it's not been at the same level as Renault. The former Jaguar-Cosworth team has scored 7, 4, 1 and 1 points for a total of 13. However, that is enough to put them in sixth place in the Constructors Championship.

2005 Drivers Championship
Pos    Driver               Nationality     Team             Points
1      Fernando Alonso      Spanish         Renault          36
2      Jarno Trulli         Italian         Toyota           20
3      Giancarlo Fisichella Italian         Renault          10
3=     Michael Schumacher   German          Ferrari          10
5      Nick Heidfeld        German          Williams-BMW      9
5=     Ralf Schumacher      German          Toyota            9
5=     David Coulthard      British         Red Bull Racing   9
5=     Mark Webber          Australian      Williams-BMW      9
9      Rubens Barrichello   Brazilian       Ferrari           8
9=     Juan Pablo Montoya   Colombian       McLaren-Mercedes  8
11     Kimi Räikkönen       Finnish         McLaren-Mercedes  7
12     Alexander Wurz       Austrian        McLaren-Mercedes  6
13     Jacques Villeneuve   Canadian        Sauber-Petronas   5
14     Pedro de la Rosa     Spanish         McLaren-Mercedes  4
15     Christian Klien      Austrian        Red Bull Racing   3
16     Felipe Massa         Brazilian       Sauber-Petronas   2
17     Vitantonio Liuzzi    Italian         Red Bull Racing   1

2005 Constructors Championship
Pos    Constructor       Points
1      Renault           46
2      Toyota            29
3      McLaren-Mercedes  25
4      Ferrari           18
4=     Williams-BMW      18
6      Red Bull Racing   13
7      Sauber-Petronas    7

Now it's on to Spain, where there's sure to be one or two people cheering for Alonso.

On Telecommuting

[If this seems semi-coherent that's because it's 3am. But I believe the idea behind this is sound.]

It seems that I am not quite setup for telecommuting. Not from the technical aspect. I got all the hardware and software I would need to do the kind of work I do. It's more like the world isn't quite organized and ready for it. Very few organizations have a defined policy for it and those that do have such widely desperate methodologies it's a wonder that anything could get done. Someone needs to organize and create a simple plan that can be used by everyone to build their policies on. It's true that the actual needs and technical situations of every organization will be different but the overall policy can be done as a framework upon which the specific needs can be fairly simple to merge. People forget that a policy is not supposed to be a technical guideline but a methodology to use for creating or using whatever the policy covers. I'll bet dollars to donuts that there is already an ISO policy for telecommuting. I'll also bet that it's not used by many, if any, organizations. This leads to the splintering effect and to what we have today. If there were some way to develop/implement/enforce a policy across the board then maybe I could get a job where I could be all setup to telecommute.

Car accidents

My son was in a car accident this morning. His second mother (it's a long story) was bringing him home so he could go to school and some kid who was speeding ran into them. Thankfully no one was seriously hurt. The kid had to go to the emergency room. My son was quite a bit shaken up, this was his second accident but this time he was in the front seat. The pickup he was in didn't have a back seat. The air-bags deployed but he had already turned his head away so it just got him in the cheek. His ankle was bruised or sprained, the kid hit the passengers side of the pickup. Anyway, we kept hi home today and are going to take him in for a "just-to-be-safe" doctor visit tomorrow. Hhmmm... I should try and remember to call the school about tomorrow.

It all reminded me of the accidents I'd been in over the years. Most were fender benders but two were significant. One was when a guy pushed me off of the road into snow and ice which caused the car to crash into the middle guard rail, slide right over two lanes and hit a small snow bank at the foot of a retaining wall. I was ok but the car was totaled. It was my sisters car. She'd only had it for a couple of weeks. She was not amused.

The other one was fairly serious. My head when through the front window and everyone in the car was hurt to some degree. Nothing bad enough for hospital but more than just a little bump. The passengers were my two brothers and our sister. Afterwards I was very shaken up, mostly about the fact that I could have caused one of my siblings to be critically hurt or worse. The cause, though, was the right front tire blew out on a snow covered road. We went down a 12 to 15 foot embankment where the care ended up lying on the drivers side after doing a couple of rolls. There was more but these were the highlights. For weeks after I could still see the car rolling whenever I'd close my eyes.

Lots of stuff I can't remember

There's been so many things I wanted to post on here but just keep forgetting to. Hell, I still haven't even seen the results from the F1 race two weekends ago. Here's some things I can remember...

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Ok, I can't remember squat. I should carry something around with me like a mini-tape recorder so I can at least get the idea or subject I am thinking about down for possible future postings. I have one of these around somewhere. It's probably in a box in the garage with all the other crap I can't find. Oh well... A lot happened today so I'll post separate entries for them.

Unless I forget.