Chinese, in the verbal form, has a little over 400 monosyllabic sounds (says John Pomfret, author of Chinese Lessons (a fantastic read)). The problem for foreigners and the untrained ear is to hear the amazingly subtle and highly intricate art of Chinese tonal speaking. Each phonetic sound has four or five tones (and then from there, the definition of the word relies entirely on context. I can ask my Chinese teacher about a new word I learned - any word, really, and after a solid five minutes of multilingual arguing, gesturing, and firing off of synonyms, she will finally say, “Oh, Fish? You were trying to say “fish”! Oh, yeah, that’s about right, but you need to drop the last tone a bit more…” Flatly verbalizing yu doesn’t say a whole lot - there are over
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