What languages do you speak?

[redchild]

I know many people who speak Cantonese and/or Mandarin, but I'm ashamed to say I haven't even learned to tell them apart by sound. If your Cantonese pronunciation is Americanized, does that mean you live in America? Or somewhere else?

It's quite easy to differentiate between Cantonese and Mandarin. Mandarin is more melodic while Cantonese is more rhythmic and just sounds funnier. If you want examples you can try looking up Mandarin videos on youtube. It's a bit harder to find decent examples of Cantonese so you can try Hong Kong movie trailers.

I'm a second generation American so like many other American-born I speak with a slight accent and splice it with English sometimes, too. But I know many other American-born who have a much better grasp of their mother language than I do and are even fluent in writing and speaking. Usually it's because they have parents who don't speak English and need them for translation or their parents made sure they retained the language by speaking it at home most of the time or enrolling in classes.

This is one of the problems I have with Swedish, but to a lesser extent. I'm not worried about saying the wrong thing (at least not because of the tone), just about sounding like a fool.

That's one of the reasons why I don't speak Chinese that often. Also because I don't really have an urgent incentive to learn any more :rolleyes: