墨神的凡龛

We always complain the difficulties on spoken English.The use of idoms, the pronunciation of letter "r" in American-English,and the rising or falling tone in sentence.But how do you guess that the foreigners also have the same problems as ours when they learn Chinese.

Such is an example they wondered:

I heard from somewhere that speaking Chinese (including dialects,topolects,whatever lects) makes use of the left and right brain as the word-processing and tone-processing are located at either side of the brain, thus they say the reason native speakers of English (and possibly other no-tonal languages) have a hard time with mandarin is because when they speak they only utilise one side of the brain, so when tones come in, the other side of the brain is not used to it, and thus the 怪腔怪调 (strange accents and tones...no offence )

Is this true? Or what i heard was merely crappy craps?

And a news(maybe too old) once reffered to that:

Dr Sophie Scott and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust carried out brain scans on a group of Mandarin and English speakers.

They found that the left temporal lobe, which is located by the left temple, becomes active when English speakers hear English.

People who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways
Dr Sophie Scott,
Wellcome Trust

The researchers believe that this area of the brain links speech sounds together to form individual words.

They expected similar findings when they carried out scans on Mandarin speakers.

However, they found that both their left and right temporal lobes become active when they hear Mandarin.

"People who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways," said Dr Scott.

"It overturned some long-held theories."

Mandarin is a notoriously difficult language to learn. Unlike English, speakers use intonation to distinguish between completely different meanings of particular words.

For instance, the word "ma" can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp depending on how it is said.

The researchers believe that this need to interpret intonation is why Mandarin speakers need to use both sides of their brain.

The right temporal lobe is normally associated with being able to process music or tones.

"We think that Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken words," said Dr Scott.

"It seems that the structure of the language you learn as a child affects how the structure of your brain develops to decode speech.

"Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin."

Besides I think we can learn some knowledge from the interesting topic.Enjoy it.