People who had someone condescendingly explain something that they didn't know you're an expert on, what happened?

It also differs between regional dialects too, so like China’s mandarin has different tones than Taiwan’s mandarin.

Different dialects of Mandarin do employ different tones, but standard Mandarin on the mainland and in Taiwan use the same tones, with a few exceptions. And Taiwanese mostly ignore the neutral tone (the so-called “fifth tone” people are talking about in this thread).

except that in Chinese when you pronounce it differently there’s almost always another word that uses your incorrect tone.

Since most words in Mandarin are bisyllabic, this is actually much less common than you might think. Getting the tones wrong when speaking Mandarin usually just means not being understood, not saying a word you didn’t intend to say.

The whole poem is made up of words that are shi with different tones, and makes proper sense

It’s called “Lion-Eating Poet.” I would copy-paste it here, but some subs auto-remove comments with non-Roman alphabet characters.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent