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English doesn't have falling-rising contours like the Mandarin third tone, so there's at least the difficulty of having to learn a new category of pitch change. I do wonder whether e.g. Mandarin speakers have similar difficulty acquiring the different contours of e.g. Cantonese. Intuitively, I'd expect it to get easier the more different categories one can already distinguish.


English does have such a contour, in the fairly special case of the three-tone "I don't know" sequence. (On the "know".)




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