I totally agree but many times what we hear with our "English ears" is half of what's going on. I remember I dated this viet girl for a while. I would always try to say certain things in her language only to be meet with the reply, "no, it's like this..." To me, I was doing the exact same thing, but to a native speaker, there was part of the sound that I wasn't pronouncing.

I dated an Ameri-Viet girl, but her parents were refugees from the war. I tried to speak a couple words, but although it sounded to me like I was saying the same thing, they explained how words change based on tone. So, if you change your tone, then you change the word. In English, you can say a word with multiple tonal inflections, and the word is always the same.

Or, they could've just been messing with me. "Let's get the white round eye boy to say 'I fuck little boys' and see if we can make him say it in a high voice!"

^No, they weren't just messing with you. Either that or they all attend the same meeting on how to mess with white guys. Another fun game I used to play with her involved me making random sounds and her telling me if they are words.

But it is true, different tonal inflections mean different words.

I once accidentally revealed the cure for cancer in an unknown language, when I dropped a bowling ball on my foot. It sure was unfortunate that no one around me understood that language and they all interpreted it as "Aargh, fuck it all to hell".

I can agree that some Hanyu pinyin is confusing, but for those of us studying chinese, we depend on reliably consistent Pinyin. If someone writes xi(3), it means a different thing to me than shi(3) (and I wouldn't use the parenthesized numbers for tones if I knew how to get a "u" over the i).

man...chinese keyboards must be HUGE!!!!!

So... do you have to memorize 10,000 alt codes to type chinese quickly?

You know what's really hilarious? Pinyin means "phonetic".

Well, that makes sense, that pinyin means phonetic. That means Hanyu pinyin just means "phonetically represented Chinese" which is all it is. I remember the uproar when China went to using Hanyu Pinyin in all official communication and lots of Americans were pissed. Peking was better than Beijing, Sian was better than Xi'an, and so on. But it's consistent. And when someone all of a sudden makes me read Wade-Giles instead of Pinyin, it's so hard. I mean, Chinese is hard for me in general, but at least if it is written in full Pinyin with the tone symbols, I can say it--I have no chance if it isn't consistent.

My understanding is that Chinese character keyboards start with the roots of the characters and then add embellishments. I don't know for sure, but I have watched people type in Chinese characters as quickly as I can type in alphabetic things.

Arabic is worse. It's such a old language that one word pronounced slightly different could mean something else entirely.

I always feel like I want to say cut and will end up saying cunt.

Yah... I've seen a guy struggle so hard to say the r in "reaction" that he said "erection" instead, repeatedly, while giving a serious talk.