That's What She Said | Mythbuster: does speaking Cantonese make you a better karaoke singer?
Experts argue the importance of tones in learning Cantonese but both tout karaoke to improve fluency
Simplest answer: depends who you ask.
Cantonese has long been considered the hardest language for English speakers to learn. Having been described as sing-song like, pronunciation is believed to be particularly difficult because of its six tones. Here lays the reason for Hong Kong’s love of karaoke?
“Cantonese music tends to follow speech tones very closely, so singing a song in Cantonese gives a good idea of tone melody of the spoken sentence,” says Dr Murray Schellenberg of the University of British Columbia.
In fact, tone language speakers often have more difficulty than non-tone language speakers telling apart pitches that are close together, says the researcher at the Interdisciplinary Speech Research Laboratory at the Canadian university.
“People who have musical training are better at hearing and distinguishing speech tones when learning a tonal language,” he says.