I will not blog much this week because I feel a little overwelmed. On the bright side, I have Steve Jobs’ authorized biography to get through to take some of the stress off, along with a few other materials in my thesis development.

On that last bit, a question for language students: does anyone have a guess as to why (American) English speakers have problem with tone in language? Yes, they are not used to tone languages because English is intonational. But they never have such problem with music which also works with tone levels, so what’s going on? Here’s more, when researchers who have looked at the matter say that one of the reasons for poor tonal acquisition by American/English learners is the limited “pitch range” of such learners, what exactly do they mean? English speakers are humans too and pitch is physiological and not something tied to race or skin colour. I have looked everywhere online for information about this and I haven’t come up with much.

I can do with some brainstorming session here.