I assume you know this, but Chinese is a tonal language. 'Mom scolds the horse' translates as ma ma ma ma. With nothing but tones distinguishing the various 'ma's. People who grew up with only tonal or non-tonal languages tend to do poorly with languages on the other side because they're extremely alien.

Like imagine not being able to use inflections to express emotion when speaking. That'd sound as alien to a non-tonal speaker as the concept of using inflections to express emotion to a tonal-speaker. Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.

There's also the side issue that most non-tonal languages tend to have a relatively close linguistic background. Russian has a massive amount of 'English' cognates (often from shared ancestors predating both), especially if you consider words that are basically cognates but have different stresses or maybe one slightly different vowel sound or whatever. But the number of cognates between tonal and non-tonal languages is far fewer. It makes them much more difficult to learn, at least for me.

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sls 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.

You certainly can. Just because a morpheme has a tone doesn't mean that there aren't other contributors to pitch, such as sentence pitch contour. Do you actually speak or understand any tonal languages? I can assure you that Chinese people definitely use sentence prosody to convey extremely subtle nuances of meaning.

	▲	somenameforme 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that's much more of a technical argument than a practical one. Take a response like 'really?' in response to something. In non-tonal languages you can express a bunch of different connotations there depending on how you say really. In tonal languages you'd often end up saying entirely different words by doing such, so they often rely on things like particles to add intent/emotion, particles which simply do not exist in non-tonal languages. Obviously you're right that the entire broad pitch of a sentence can also add meaning, but this is all increasingly alien to any sort of non-tonal speaker, and similarly the way "we" speak is alien to tonal speakers. It's not just learning new words and grammar, but learning a completely different way of expressing oneself and having to unlearn your old way of doing it. Hence why people who grow up one way or the other tend to do poorly with languages on the other side. For instance a non-tonal speaker will find it extremely difficult to break the habit of trying to make a rising tone when asking a question, yet obviously in a tonal language you simply cannot do that or you risk using a different word. So they use particles at the end of sentences in indicate a question. Come to think of it, I should have made 'mama scolds the horse' into a question, as ma is also the particle to indicate you're asking a question! Now we're up to 5 ma's - ma ma ma ma ma.