This intermarriages have definitely helped Indo-Pak relations. Didn’t we all see BARAAT from pakistan on 26/11?

I think the fun in learning Chinese begins with understanding of this confusion in pronunciation of English letters. What we consider as English is generally the Pinyin. [Pinyin is used for romanization of Mandarin. Computer keyboards and mobile phone keypads use pinyin to convert roman keys into Mandarin character.]

This common experience of ‘p’ & ‘b’ , ‘t’ & ‘d’ could be due to the difference in Pinyin and English for pronunciation of the same letters. Not sure why English was not directly used rather than developing another system of pinyin. This would have made us write & pronounce ‘Wuxi’ as ‘Wushi’ , ‘HongQiao’ as ‘HungChiao’, ‘Pudong’ as ‘ Phutung’, ‘Dalian’ as ‘ Talian’, ‘Tianjin’ as ‘ Thianjin’.

Localise, localise, localise!!

When the Chinese, Americans and so on pronounce P and T, they let out more air. The Indians let out less air. The South Americans’ P when they speak Spanish and the Japanese’s P when they speak Japanese sound similar to Indians’ P.

So people in some countries pronounce soft sounding P and T and other hard sounding ones. I have lived in US for 20+ years. The hard P and T still sound like B and D to my ears. I have also tried to pronounce the hard P and T but sound B and D came out of my mouth.

The Chinese cannot compare with the native English speakers in understanding spoken English. When Americans miss a sound or a word, they can guess it from the entire sentence. Like you were talking about “time” not “dime”. But a missed syllable can throw off the Chinese.

Keep warm!