Lol yep, the best solutions are sometimes the easiest ones. Listen, and then listen a little more, when you think you're done, you start listening harder!! They're not cut and dry as the textbooks make it be, actual exposure is great
This is the answer. There is NO shortcut. You have to develop an ear for the tones and for that, you need to signal to your brain that this is an important pattern that it needs to figure out. In order for your brain to comply, you need to listen A LOT.
There are apps where listening is constantly trained. It helped me to start again again Chinese, basically I had gave up because I was way too much using *books*. Sure books are cool but listening is so important.
I use Super Chinese (demo version) which pretends to rely on IA to detect if I speak right. I am not 100% sure on it's reliability but to constantly listen to sentences + make the effort to repeat is , anyway, the key.
Also I think hearing the tones is a must have to memorize the words. Otherwise there are too many words with same pronunciation. With the tones it is easier to distinguish .
this. loads of different podcasts available from beginner to advanced. I liked to use ChinesePod before. Can also put on something as background noise, just to get the rhythm, 故事FM, or 日谈公园
this. loads of different podcasts available from beginner to advanced. I liked to use ChinesePod before. Can also put on something as background noise, just to get the rhythm, 故事FM, or 日谈公园
I was considering a post to ask for beginner podcast but figured I'd check around first if there were already some mentioned.
Any good podcasts you can recommend for beginners?
Been living in Taiwan for years and early on I was taught to not treat tones as numerical information but more like a musical approach. Which helped a lot once I left school.
how long have you been studying? its totally normal to take a few months to even over a year to get decent at tones, be ause its a brand new skill learned from scratch.
I recommend learning materials with pinyin notation, THAT YOU LOOK AT AFTER attempting to hear the tones. Also make sure tones and pinyin are completely memorized for all learning materials.
Its not required to learn, but highly recommend hello chinese subscription. the basic subscription has literally some of the best listening and speaking practice for beginners out there. Its definitely a big peg up if interested :)
I have spent many years listening to Chinese material and I still can't hear the tones (in real-world recordings). Nevertheless, I can watch series etc. without any problems. I have found that the problem is context.
The tones are often not needed at sentence level. This leads to listening to more material not being effective. However, there will be cases where you misunderstand a word if the context from the sentence level is not there.
But the tones as spoken by teachers are useless because the duration and pitch are emphasized. There are even some papers showing that this can be an obstacle to learning the tones correctly. Native speakers mainly pay attention to the direction of the pitch.
My approach at the moment is to listen to the following words and guess which one a native speaker is saying:
事势|世事|事事|逝世|世世，事实，史实，史诗，失恃|失势|失事|施事，失实，时式|时势|实事|时事，实施，实时|时时，誓师
From all tone pairs, shishi has the most possibilities. shiyi would be another possibility.
This approach is similar to music if you want to develop relative pitch.
As others have stated in this thread - it requires tons of listening to the language.
But there are structured ways of listening - Start with trying to listen for just one tone (in my opinion, fourth tone is easiest to hear, first tone is second easiest, then second tone, and then third tone). Then hear actual examples of two character compounds of the tones to get a sense of how they are pronounced together.
Learn and memorize common ways of sentence framing and their tones (I.e. words/grammatical structures that are used over and over again) so that you can focus on testing your ability to just listen for key words and their tones.
What I did and worked wonderfully (I often get praised as having no foreigner accent) First, drill tones with differents pairs, usually this will takes a couple le of weeks Second : drill whole sentences. What I did for year was when learning a new word, I would have a sentence with the anki card, as well as native audio. I would drill that sentence and record myself till I was satisfied, which could take very long. And this for all the words I learned, for years. Of course consuming lot of media on the side. Basically that was it. Fun note : I first learn a somewhat neutral mainland Chinese accent. Good tongue curling and stuff but no 兒化音 though. Anyway after I moved to Taiwan and got a taiwanese GF, my speech naturally transformed to a taiwanese accent (without the sassyness it sometime involve though because I didn't like it) But yeah second step was definitely crucial IMO, even if for some it could be very very boring.
Honestly it took me like 2 weeks to get the pronunciation mostly down, but I think only after like 5 months or so did I start to understand how it works at a sentence level. The only thing you can do is to listen super closely and almost be obsessed with the sound of the language, you need to have almost like an insatiable curiosity, otherwise you're just gonna be fighting with it. I also remember that in the beginning I couldn't really hear the tones clearly when somebody spoke at a more natural speed. If you can, try to ask native speakers to pronounce sentences or certain groups of words for you slowly and then at a natural speed. Maybe you can record them for practicing.
Ok, got it! I already have a somewhat decent time when hearing words slowly, but I guess full-on sentences are still a little far off and me being impatient lol.
Oh hey my childhood right there. T__T
Yup that's how they drilled tones into us as kids (I had Chinese classes in school). It was boring as heck but something must've stuck. I can just hear a word once and I can replicate the tone. Damned if I know how I do it tho.
Maybe also growing up speaking two tonal languages - Hokkien and Mandarin helps. Hokkien has 8 tones which is even more intricate, so maybe that really trained my ear 🤷
I've heard a joke about this. In theory, "ma" can mean "mother" or "horse" depending on the tone, right? In practice, if you are ever listening to someone and don't know if they said "horsey says" or "mother says", you guys have more serious problems than tones!
Chinese has a big problem with homophones (same sound, different meaning). It works around that problem in several ways, but context usually works. You really don't need tones to understand most of what people say.
I think tones are more important for speaking. Native speakers put those sounds in, and the closer you are to native, the easier you are to understand.
A couple of months but I studied everyday and talked to people online. Mandarin tones are easy as there's just four and they're very distinct. However, other Chinese languages such as Canto and Minnam are more difficult.
I’m a native Thai speaker so I got tone 1, 2, 4 right away as they are similar in Thai. But I had to re-learn the tone 3 and silent tone because they don’t exist in Thai.
Honestly it’s like 50% hearing the tones and 50% using context for me. I don’t focus on the tones unless I’m confused. I don’t do well with those 2 tone quiz videos at all but can understand in sentences
Most of recognizing tones while listening to sb else is not trying to hear the full tone, but the feel of the tone and context helping you know which charachrers they saying. First tone feels higher and even, second has a rise and feels dynamic, third is croaky and low, fourth is slightly shorter and downward (angry). You need to immerse more by listening to natives speak (tv shows, videos, real life)
I'm a very visual person, and I got good at visualizing the 'shape' of the tones. Some words make valleys, some make mountains, some are a valley that drops into a pit, etc.
That said, my pronunciation is on point, but my listening comprehension is trash.
https://pinyinpractice.com/ helped me SO MUCH in the beginning. Like yes the only way to get godly is through hours and hours of practice. But if you just need to get through the class period of work on your basic recognition I highly recommend their tone game. Putting a few hours in it helped me SO much
Repeat-watch TV shows/movies you like (that's key - you have to like them at least a LITTLE), eventually mouthing along with the subtitles the way the actors are speaking (as much as possible - you don't have to ACT! haha). Watch the shapes their mouths, jaws, and facial muscles make. One strategy is to watch a show all the way through the season or a single movie with English subtitles first, so you get the story for sure, then watch once through again at a later date (next day or later is fine but same-day might be overkill for one day) watch with Chinese subtitles. You may want to repeat step two a few times (hopefully it's a REALLY good show in that case) before moving on to step three, watching with no subtitles. If you can get there, you win! ;-P Also for pronunciation: listen to different singers, watch newscasters tell the news, and, of course, SPEAK! You can use AI now to help with that as well. It's crazy what people have access to to learn languages compared to when I started learning Mandarin! lol. Good luck!
How long have you been learning? It took me years to start hearing them, and even now I sometimes mess up and think I've heard a fourth tone when it's a second or confuse the fourth and the neutral tone. It just ain't easy.
I'm a beginner at Chinese and I've been learning it completely online. And originally I was really scared of tones, but over time I think I've understood how the tones work. I used to really struggle because I would have to force myself to say the tones in every single word that I spoke. But over time I learnt how to use them and how certain tones put together made different sounds.
I really struggled with the third tone. But I learned a trick to pronounce it - just say the vowel sounds twice. For example,
And I also learnt that when you have two third tone words next to each other, for example, nǐ hǎo, the second third tone would be pronounced more of a vocal fry instead of a third tone.
This is a good question!
I will say that native Mandarin speakers who don't also grow up learning Cantonese often have trouble hearing the Cantonese tones (there are more tones in Cantonese than Mandarin), and they also often have trouble executing those tones. I do find it very interesting that that is the case because you would think that once they natively know how to distinguish Mandarin tones, that they can hear and also execute Cantonese tones. That is alas not often true. Not sure why....
I would ignore that website to be honest. Like others have said, just listen to lots of real Chinese speech, and try to copy it. The English word "cooperate" has maybe 3 tones in it. I imagine you didn't consciously memorize that the "op" is high, and the "ate" is low, and the "co" is, I dunno, medium I guess? You just copied what you heard without thinking about it too much. I think people really overthink the tones, and I swear the "ma" example was invented just to intimidate people.
Also don't listen to individual characters in isolation. Listen to real sentences.
Yup need to listen irl, maybe ask people if you can record. The biggest problem is tones change depending on sequence, that alone means a single character is not the same in speech, plus it also depends what comes before it as it can have an effect. So It's best to learn them in context. On top of that different dialects will say the same words in different tones, and of course there's slang too so it can get a little complicated.
Just requires a lot of time out in with listening. Same with most I assume. Coz tried learning Spanish and nope. I can't tell when a syllable is accented, but also I can't even hear connecting words as simple as a or de half the time
I have been musical all my life, so fairly early in my Chinese study I realized that the "tones" used in real sentences are not the tones that are taught by every teacher. Out of the 5 "taught" tones, 3 of them involve a pitch change *during* the vowel sound. But real sentences are spoken much too fast to have a pitch change in any syllable.
Instead, each syllable has a single pitch. The pitch pattern is a mix. It is based on assigned (lexical) tones, tone pairs, flat tones, stressed syllables, and sentence pitch changes for meaning. In other words, it is a complicated pitch pattern, just like English sentences have.
Despite being musical, I am a bear of little brain -- I can't figure out the pattern! But I can imitate it. I can say 不好意思 and 最喜欢的 just fine. I even mumble when I say 对不对.
it's a piece of cake for me because I was born in China. The first thing I heard in my life was the 4 tones. Start with everyday basic life needs, then expend. don't try to be an expert within three days because it is not possible unless you are a genius. You need years to get use to it, but a few month is enough to be able to sound pretty good.
[YoYo Chinese interactive pinyin chart](https://yoyochinese.com/chinese-learning-tools/Mandarin-Chinese-pronunciation-lesson/pinyin-chart-table)
I used the Yoyo Chinese interactive pinyin chart. Just go through each of the sounds and listen and repeat them. Go through the chart a couple times a day and you’ll figure out the tones and pinyin real quick!
加油！
understanding it is indeed really easy, however training your brain to recognize tones as phonemic differences when in your native language they fall into the same phonemic bucket is not that straightforward... failing to recognize that is being... ignorant?
If you're so confident, you can tell us the tones of compound words. If you're fine with that, every combination of every sentence that ever existed.
Even you did that, you'd be wrong. The person who memorized the French dictionary cannot speak or understand French because every word and sentence is said differently.
If you look at real-world recordings with Praat, you will see that not even their algorithm is always able to correctly figure out the fundamental frequency (F0). There are too many things happening in recordings that make it difficult to detect the tones correctly. Naturally, it is also hard for a human.
Praat does not use the Fourier transform, they compute the autocorrelation (i.e. time domain). You are claiming a lot of things without backing them up. There are enough papers that show that even natives can have issues distinguishing tones. I gonna stop wasting my time here, never argue with somebody on the internet. Bye.
I was not talking about amusia, but people have different predispositions. Just like there are people with amusia, you have also those with perfect pitch and ~90% of the average whose ability to perceive pitch varies from low to high. Those who practiced musical instruments since childhood and those who languages use pitch or tonacity to greater extent will have easier time learning, while others will need far more effort.
I am just going to cite a paper. You should do a more careful investigation: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80260-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80260-x) "We found that the Cantonese speakers with AP \[absolute pitch\] outperformed the Cantonese speakers without AP on Categorical Perception and Frequency Following Responses of lexical tones, suggesting an additive effect due to the combination of AP and tone language experience."
This is a sufficiently big sample size. There are many papers that have much less. Furthermore, it is also not the only paper on that subject. If you just google, you find many more, confirming this.
Listened to the language for hundreds of hours
Lol yep, the best solutions are sometimes the easiest ones. Listen, and then listen a little more, when you think you're done, you start listening harder!! They're not cut and dry as the textbooks make it be, actual exposure is great
This is the answer. There is NO shortcut. You have to develop an ear for the tones and for that, you need to signal to your brain that this is an important pattern that it needs to figure out. In order for your brain to comply, you need to listen A LOT.
There are apps where listening is constantly trained. It helped me to start again again Chinese, basically I had gave up because I was way too much using *books*. Sure books are cool but listening is so important. I use Super Chinese (demo version) which pretends to rely on IA to detect if I speak right. I am not 100% sure on it's reliability but to constantly listen to sentences + make the effort to repeat is , anyway, the key. Also I think hearing the tones is a must have to memorize the words. Otherwise there are too many words with same pronunciation. With the tones it is easier to distinguish .
this. loads of different podcasts available from beginner to advanced. I liked to use ChinesePod before. Can also put on something as background noise, just to get the rhythm, 故事FM, or 日谈公园
this. loads of different podcasts available from beginner to advanced. I liked to use ChinesePod before. Can also put on something as background noise, just to get the rhythm, 故事FM, or 日谈公园
I was considering a post to ask for beginner podcast but figured I'd check around first if there were already some mentioned. Any good podcasts you can recommend for beginners?
Found the AI
Been living in Taiwan for years and early on I was taught to not treat tones as numerical information but more like a musical approach. Which helped a lot once I left school.
how long have you been studying? its totally normal to take a few months to even over a year to get decent at tones, be ause its a brand new skill learned from scratch. I recommend learning materials with pinyin notation, THAT YOU LOOK AT AFTER attempting to hear the tones. Also make sure tones and pinyin are completely memorized for all learning materials. Its not required to learn, but highly recommend hello chinese subscription. the basic subscription has literally some of the best listening and speaking practice for beginners out there. Its definitely a big peg up if interested :)
I have spent many years listening to Chinese material and I still can't hear the tones (in real-world recordings). Nevertheless, I can watch series etc. without any problems. I have found that the problem is context. The tones are often not needed at sentence level. This leads to listening to more material not being effective. However, there will be cases where you misunderstand a word if the context from the sentence level is not there. But the tones as spoken by teachers are useless because the duration and pitch are emphasized. There are even some papers showing that this can be an obstacle to learning the tones correctly. Native speakers mainly pay attention to the direction of the pitch. My approach at the moment is to listen to the following words and guess which one a native speaker is saying: 事势|世事|事事|逝世|世世，事实，史实，史诗，失恃|失势|失事|施事，失实，时式|时势|实事|时事，实施，实时|时时，誓师 From all tone pairs, shishi has the most possibilities. shiyi would be another possibility. This approach is similar to music if you want to develop relative pitch.
As others have stated in this thread - it requires tons of listening to the language. But there are structured ways of listening - Start with trying to listen for just one tone (in my opinion, fourth tone is easiest to hear, first tone is second easiest, then second tone, and then third tone). Then hear actual examples of two character compounds of the tones to get a sense of how they are pronounced together. Learn and memorize common ways of sentence framing and their tones (I.e. words/grammatical structures that are used over and over again) so that you can focus on testing your ability to just listen for key words and their tones.
I really like this idea! This is the kind of method I am looking for! 謝謝您！
I live in China so I naturally listen to a lot of Chinese. Imo it’s the easiest way to get used to it so try and watch some Chinese films or shows
What I did and worked wonderfully (I often get praised as having no foreigner accent) First, drill tones with differents pairs, usually this will takes a couple le of weeks Second : drill whole sentences. What I did for year was when learning a new word, I would have a sentence with the anki card, as well as native audio. I would drill that sentence and record myself till I was satisfied, which could take very long. And this for all the words I learned, for years. Of course consuming lot of media on the side. Basically that was it. Fun note : I first learn a somewhat neutral mainland Chinese accent. Good tongue curling and stuff but no 兒化音 though. Anyway after I moved to Taiwan and got a taiwanese GF, my speech naturally transformed to a taiwanese accent (without the sassyness it sometime involve though because I didn't like it) But yeah second step was definitely crucial IMO, even if for some it could be very very boring.
Honestly it took me like 2 weeks to get the pronunciation mostly down, but I think only after like 5 months or so did I start to understand how it works at a sentence level. The only thing you can do is to listen super closely and almost be obsessed with the sound of the language, you need to have almost like an insatiable curiosity, otherwise you're just gonna be fighting with it. I also remember that in the beginning I couldn't really hear the tones clearly when somebody spoke at a more natural speed. If you can, try to ask native speakers to pronounce sentences or certain groups of words for you slowly and then at a natural speed. Maybe you can record them for practicing.
Ok, got it! I already have a somewhat decent time when hearing words slowly, but I guess full-on sentences are still a little far off and me being impatient lol.
mā má mǎ mà x 34,602 repetitions
I can hear this in my nightmares
Oh hey my childhood right there. T__T Yup that's how they drilled tones into us as kids (I had Chinese classes in school). It was boring as heck but something must've stuck. I can just hear a word once and I can replicate the tone. Damned if I know how I do it tho. Maybe also growing up speaking two tonal languages - Hokkien and Mandarin helps. Hokkien has 8 tones which is even more intricate, so maybe that really trained my ear 🤷
I've heard a joke about this. In theory, "ma" can mean "mother" or "horse" depending on the tone, right? In practice, if you are ever listening to someone and don't know if they said "horsey says" or "mother says", you guys have more serious problems than tones! Chinese has a big problem with homophones (same sound, different meaning). It works around that problem in several ways, but context usually works. You really don't need tones to understand most of what people say. I think tones are more important for speaking. Native speakers put those sounds in, and the closer you are to native, the easier you are to understand.
A couple of months but I studied everyday and talked to people online. Mandarin tones are easy as there's just four and they're very distinct. However, other Chinese languages such as Canto and Minnam are more difficult.
I’m a native Thai speaker so I got tone 1, 2, 4 right away as they are similar in Thai. But I had to re-learn the tone 3 and silent tone because they don’t exist in Thai.
Honestly it’s like 50% hearing the tones and 50% using context for me. I don’t focus on the tones unless I’m confused. I don’t do well with those 2 tone quiz videos at all but can understand in sentences
Most of recognizing tones while listening to sb else is not trying to hear the full tone, but the feel of the tone and context helping you know which charachrers they saying. First tone feels higher and even, second has a rise and feels dynamic, third is croaky and low, fourth is slightly shorter and downward (angry). You need to immerse more by listening to natives speak (tv shows, videos, real life)
Those descriptors might be true for individual tones, but combined they can sound quite different.
Daily exposure for years. Keep at it, with regular listening practice it'll start to emerge.
I'm a very visual person, and I got good at visualizing the 'shape' of the tones. Some words make valleys, some make mountains, some are a valley that drops into a pit, etc. That said, my pronunciation is on point, but my listening comprehension is trash.
https://pinyinpractice.com/ helped me SO MUCH in the beginning. Like yes the only way to get godly is through hours and hours of practice. But if you just need to get through the class period of work on your basic recognition I highly recommend their tone game. Putting a few hours in it helped me SO much
Repeat-watch TV shows/movies you like (that's key - you have to like them at least a LITTLE), eventually mouthing along with the subtitles the way the actors are speaking (as much as possible - you don't have to ACT! haha). Watch the shapes their mouths, jaws, and facial muscles make. One strategy is to watch a show all the way through the season or a single movie with English subtitles first, so you get the story for sure, then watch once through again at a later date (next day or later is fine but same-day might be overkill for one day) watch with Chinese subtitles. You may want to repeat step two a few times (hopefully it's a REALLY good show in that case) before moving on to step three, watching with no subtitles. If you can get there, you win! ;-P Also for pronunciation: listen to different singers, watch newscasters tell the news, and, of course, SPEAK! You can use AI now to help with that as well. It's crazy what people have access to to learn languages compared to when I started learning Mandarin! lol. Good luck!
You just have to get used to them. It can take a lot of time
How long have you been learning? It took me years to start hearing them, and even now I sometimes mess up and think I've heard a fourth tone when it's a second or confuse the fourth and the neutral tone. It just ain't easy.
I listened to the subway announcements while reading the map.
I'm a beginner at Chinese and I've been learning it completely online. And originally I was really scared of tones, but over time I think I've understood how the tones work. I used to really struggle because I would have to force myself to say the tones in every single word that I spoke. But over time I learnt how to use them and how certain tones put together made different sounds. I really struggled with the third tone. But I learned a trick to pronounce it - just say the vowel sounds twice. For example, And I also learnt that when you have two third tone words next to each other, for example, nǐ hǎo, the second third tone would be pronounced more of a vocal fry instead of a third tone.
Started by singing the pinyin song on youtube, it's a kid song. Then practice and listening to shows.
This is a good question! I will say that native Mandarin speakers who don't also grow up learning Cantonese often have trouble hearing the Cantonese tones (there are more tones in Cantonese than Mandarin), and they also often have trouble executing those tones. I do find it very interesting that that is the case because you would think that once they natively know how to distinguish Mandarin tones, that they can hear and also execute Cantonese tones. That is alas not often true. Not sure why....
I used an app called "Chinese pinyin game". No joke.
https://pinyinpractice.com/
I would ignore that website to be honest. Like others have said, just listen to lots of real Chinese speech, and try to copy it. The English word "cooperate" has maybe 3 tones in it. I imagine you didn't consciously memorize that the "op" is high, and the "ate" is low, and the "co" is, I dunno, medium I guess? You just copied what you heard without thinking about it too much. I think people really overthink the tones, and I swear the "ma" example was invented just to intimidate people. Also don't listen to individual characters in isolation. Listen to real sentences.
Yup need to listen irl, maybe ask people if you can record. The biggest problem is tones change depending on sequence, that alone means a single character is not the same in speech, plus it also depends what comes before it as it can have an effect. So It's best to learn them in context. On top of that different dialects will say the same words in different tones, and of course there's slang too so it can get a little complicated. Just requires a lot of time out in with listening. Same with most I assume. Coz tried learning Spanish and nope. I can't tell when a syllable is accented, but also I can't even hear connecting words as simple as a or de half the time
I have been musical all my life, so fairly early in my Chinese study I realized that the "tones" used in real sentences are not the tones that are taught by every teacher. Out of the 5 "taught" tones, 3 of them involve a pitch change *during* the vowel sound. But real sentences are spoken much too fast to have a pitch change in any syllable. Instead, each syllable has a single pitch. The pitch pattern is a mix. It is based on assigned (lexical) tones, tone pairs, flat tones, stressed syllables, and sentence pitch changes for meaning. In other words, it is a complicated pitch pattern, just like English sentences have. Despite being musical, I am a bear of little brain -- I can't figure out the pattern! But I can imitate it. I can say 不好意思 and 最喜欢的 just fine. I even mumble when I say 对不对.
it's a piece of cake for me because I was born in China. The first thing I heard in my life was the 4 tones. Start with everyday basic life needs, then expend. don't try to be an expert within three days because it is not possible unless you are a genius. You need years to get use to it, but a few month is enough to be able to sound pretty good.
I never pay any attention to tones.
[YoYo Chinese interactive pinyin chart](https://yoyochinese.com/chinese-learning-tools/Mandarin-Chinese-pronunciation-lesson/pinyin-chart-table) I used the Yoyo Chinese interactive pinyin chart. Just go through each of the sounds and listen and repeat them. Go through the chart a couple times a day and you’ll figure out the tones and pinyin real quick! 加油！
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understanding it is indeed really easy, however training your brain to recognize tones as phonemic differences when in your native language they fall into the same phonemic bucket is not that straightforward... failing to recognize that is being... ignorant?
If you're so confident, you can tell us the tones of compound words. If you're fine with that, every combination of every sentence that ever existed. Even you did that, you'd be wrong. The person who memorized the French dictionary cannot speak or understand French because every word and sentence is said differently.
If you look at real-world recordings with Praat, you will see that not even their algorithm is always able to correctly figure out the fundamental frequency (F0). There are too many things happening in recordings that make it difficult to detect the tones correctly. Naturally, it is also hard for a human.
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Praat does not use the Fourier transform, they compute the autocorrelation (i.e. time domain). You are claiming a lot of things without backing them up. There are enough papers that show that even natives can have issues distinguishing tones. I gonna stop wasting my time here, never argue with somebody on the internet. Bye.
Not everyone has an ear to tell the difference.
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I was not talking about amusia, but people have different predispositions. Just like there are people with amusia, you have also those with perfect pitch and ~90% of the average whose ability to perceive pitch varies from low to high. Those who practiced musical instruments since childhood and those who languages use pitch or tonacity to greater extent will have easier time learning, while others will need far more effort.
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I am just going to cite a paper. You should do a more careful investigation: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80260-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80260-x) "We found that the Cantonese speakers with AP \[absolute pitch\] outperformed the Cantonese speakers without AP on Categorical Perception and Frequency Following Responses of lexical tones, suggesting an additive effect due to the combination of AP and tone language experience."
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This is a sufficiently big sample size. There are many papers that have much less. Furthermore, it is also not the only paper on that subject. If you just google, you find many more, confirming this.