Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnnyB
Absolutely. Chinese is one of them, and Shanghainese is even more magnified. When you don't know what someone is saying it often sounds like an argument with raised voices compared to a typical English conversation. I've often thought that my wife and her mother were having a fight when they've been speaking Shanghainese on the phone, but in reality they're just talking about the most mundane things.
A lot of foreigners are bothered by this in China, but that's just the way a lot of people speak here. Funnily enough, when multilingual people switch from Shanghainese to Mandarin they seem to get a bit quieter, then when switching from Mandarin to English become quieter still. It's interesting.
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I love languages. I am not particularly gifted in learning them, but it's still kind of a hobby of mine. I learned Croatian as a child, but was brought up speaking mostly English, but then as an adult, re-learned Croatian and am still trying to expand on it. It's similar enough to Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian that I can understand varying degrees of those languages. Slovenian, less so... but I digress.
One thing my wife pointed out to me that I never noticed was that when a lot south Slavic people learn English, there is often a sarcastic tone when speaking. It has to do with the way certain syllables are stressed and the "question" and "answer" tones being slightly different in our native language. When people learn languages, they often overlook those differences. Add to that, the way the language works just sounds more blunt when you translate to English. I have seen first hand how this causes friction and misunderstandings in translations.