Good stuff -- I've been in Thailand 6 years and I know that while I may some day be a fluent listener in Thai, I'll never be a fluent, "sounds like a native" speaker. Tonal languages are a bitch for anyone who didn't grow up with one.

*nsfw *asian

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It's pretty fricken amazing how your brain could be brought up with that and learn the differences between those words, but come to it late in life and almost have no chance of differentiating them.

That's because the brain is supple and elastic before the age of about 7, children exposed to 5 languages can learn then no problem before the age of five-Older you get, the hard-wiring gets in the way. Use it or lose it-

I'm going to have to run this by my folks to see if this is linguistically correct. Yes, my folks speak Cantonese. Can't say the same for my bro-in-law's side (Mandarin).

I studied Cantonese for a bit in college. I'm sure it's very difficult for a non-native speaker to really start conversing with the fluency of a native, but it's not really all that hard to kind of get an academic sense of how to hear and pronounce the different tones.

It takes longer, obviously, but it's still entirely doable by an adult.

I've lived in HK for the past year and hear Cantonese constantly everyday. I've heard more than 15 different languages over many years and I can honestly say the only language that doesn't actually sound like it's real communication is Cantonese (due to the endlessly repeated similar sounds).
The speed at which it's spoken just compounds the difficulty to comprehend how everyone is actually understanding each other.

The closest I've been able to come to learning it so far is short specific/objective phrases, which I learn correct verbal usage by deliberately spelling the words wrong (phonically), using numbers and symbols in the middle of sentences so as to ensure I get the pronunciation right.

I will be asking a lot of people tomorrow to tell me how to say "9 old dogs bothering enough to get dumpling".. but I already suspect that what he's saying is legit.

That's the beauty of English, you can get pronunciation complacently incorrect, and even use the vaguely similar "vocal speak things" and the really most poor grammaticles and still be understood.

I ran thru this with my mum. I can say with certainty that it is mostly correct. But some of the words and tones are off.

It goes to show you that regardless of language, there's bound to be words that sound so similar yet have completely different meaning. (see/sea, be/bee, eye/I)

Also, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Confirming this is correct.

Also, the responses of each person after translating this in their mind and before verbalizing it was consistently 'mouth covering' laughter.