The Old New Thing

Raymond's subjective, biased, unfair, and completely wrong characterization of the sounds of several East Asian (and one Southeast Asian) languages

September 19, 2013 Sep 19, 2013 09/19/13

Raymond Chen

Hokkien: This is the language I learned first, so to me it sounds perfectly normal and is in fact how languages should sound. I find it odd that people describe it as one of the more difficult languages to learn. I mean, sure it has a large tone repertoire (eight theoretical, though only seven in practice) and extensive tone sandhi, but that's...