I'm sorry you have trouble pronouncing my name.

[onodera]

The "Zh" sound is similar to the "S" in measure, but with more of a "D" sound in front. It's a mixture of a "J" or "D" sound and the "S" you mention.

The "-ong" ending is pretty much what you'd expect from western script. The tone is first tone, so it's high and level.

The "Guo" part is actually pretty similar to the UK pronunciation of the word "gore". There is a bit of a "gwoh" sound. The tone for this is second, so it starts off low and ends up high. Like when you're asking a question, "Who, me?" the word "me?" is exactly the right tone.

Thank you. However, I fear we need a new exploding brain smilie. I can grok the consonants, but East Asian tonal systems go completely over my head. How do Chinese who have no sense of pitch learn to speak Chinese?

[Q Classic]

Thank you. However, I fear we need a new exploding brain smilie. I can grok the consonants, but East Asian tonal systems go completely over my head. How do Chinese who have no sense of pitch learn to speak Chinese?

Actually, the tonal thing is exclusively within the Chinese languages (yes, with an s. They are not mutually intelligible between then, hence the government's insistence on the Mandarin standard), and isn't an "East Asian" thing. You do see it for some Southeast Asian languages. I think it appears in some Sub-Saharan languages as well.

Koreans and Japanese don't require tones for their language. Now, in some dialects (which are mutually intelligible, different like how Manchester English can be understood by a speaker of Midwestern American English) of Korean and Japanese, tones are how stress is marked within a word, but those tonal accents are not actually required.

Also, there's been a recent discovery correlating ethnic groups that developed actual tonal languages with having a specific mutation on a gene that isn't present in ethnic groups without tonal languages. It's an open question whether that mutation has changed anything, but it's an interesting note.

[onodera]

Actually, the tonal thing is exclusively within the Chinese languages (yes, with an s. They are not mutually intelligible between then, hence the government's insistence on the Mandarin standard), and isn't an "East Asian" thing. You do see it for some Southeast Asian languages. I think it appears in some Sub-Saharan languages as well.

I think Vietnamese and Thai are definitely tonal. They always have many diacritics in their transliterations.

[Elok]

Yeah, Vietnamese is definitely tonal.

[Q Classic]

I think Vietnamese and Thai are definitely tonal. They always have many diacritics in their transliterations.

Yes. Vietnamese, though, is Southeast Asian, which I made an allowance for.

Their Latin-based alphabet is the only one that actually has tonal markings built in, represented by those diacritics you mentioned.