"H. S. Teoh" <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message news:mailman.278.1331251506.4860.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > > The problem with learning by 'hearing' is that, past a certain age, you > lose the sensitivity to certain sound distinctions that are not present > in your mother tongue. I suppose it's a sort of instinctive > "optimization" done by your brain: if a certain set of sound differences > don't matter, then there's no need to retain the extra resources to > distinguish between them. Lump them all together and treat them as the > same sound for higher efficiency. >
Hmm, I don't doubt that theory. > English speakers trying to learn Chinese, for example, have an > incredible difficulty in hearing the "tones" -- because there is simply > not such a distinction made in English that saying something in a > different tone can *completely* change the meaning. I've heared that in countries like China which have a tonal language, the percentage of people with "perfect pitch" is incredibly high - something like 90-99%. Whereas in other places, like the US, it's *way* below half the population (something like 10%, IIRC). > Korean speakers > learning English, OTOH, have the hardest time telling the difference > between "fork" and "pork" -- because in Korean, "p" and "f" are not > distinguished. They just don't hear it, or if they do, they can't > reliably reproduce it. (Makes for hilarious dinner conversations -- > "please pass the [fp]ork".) > Fun :)