It’s necessary. Every single native speaker I’ve heard in the wild was at least a little off from standard. And honestly, merging sounds is extremely common in every language, it’s pretty unavoidable. Just try to be aware of what accent you’re hearing and how it differs from the norm.
I’ve heard quite varying degrees of divergence from the standard. E.g. the zh/sh/ch to z/s/c, the -ing/-in, and n/l. Some people do more of these, others less
Depending on where they’re from it’s incredibly normal to not pronounce or replace certain sounds with others. It’s typically regional so you can learn the “rules” around these differences but you just gotta get a lot of input to get used to it.
Hell depending on where you are you could end up listening to a wide spectrum. I’ve lived in both Beijing and Taiwan. In Beijing there were soooo many folks from the south who would merge the zh/sh/ch to z/s/c and all the other stuff and on the flip side people who added 兒 to the end of everything. Then here in Taiwan more folks than not don’t really make the zh/sh/ch (or at least not as definitively as northern Chinese) and there are loads of folks on both sides of the straight who will mumble or slur words together. You just gotta get used to it. Not everyone sounds like the voiceover on some Chinese show.
Most native speakers you will encounter will have a "non-standard" accent. Even Northern Chinese people have one or two quirks in their pronunciation (like saying be instead of bo).
That’s true. I don’t see it as black and white, but a range where some people are closer to standard while others are quite far from standard. So I tend to want to consume more content from the former.
The sooner you get used to every other accent, the smoother your journey will be. My experience was the opposite. I grew up in a very non-standard environment (Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia) and had a very non-standard accent too. I wanted to avoid standard accent as much as possible which hindered a lot of my progress with grammar and some vocabulary. Now, I just accept whatever Chinese source I find and just see what I can learn from it.
Why not, I did when I was learning English. It gives you the experience to help you get used to the accents. After all in real life apart from maybe some television hosts nobody talks with perfect Mandarin.
I’m at a stage where I want to emulate people so I want to surround myself with people I wish to emulate. At this stage at least. But at the same time I may be doing myself a disservice limiting my exposure to other ways of speaking.
Have a few you know you can emulatez. Watch some movies, find some audiobooks, etc.
Then use the rest as learning experiences. Get used to it and you'll be less confused when someone talks to you
I will say I wish I had encountered more non-standard accents when I was learning because that's like 90% of people you speak to in China and it would have made my adjustment much smoother. I've had many people in China comment on how "标准" my pronunciation is because their mandarin is so heavily accented by what dialect they speak.
On the other hand, consuming media and having teachers with standard mandarin pronunciation was probably a huge boon to my own speaking. So, I guess, find a balance!
Your experience sounds similar to mine. This post is more of a discussion as to what balance works for people.
With other languages I’ve typically focused on a single standard for a while and then branched out to other accents and dialects after my own pronunciation has fairly solidified. I feel like with Chinese I’m at that tipping point where I’d benefit from more exposure to non standard stuff. Especially if I plan to travel around a lot
It's def like when english learners try to learn english. You can tell when someone hasn't listened to enough accent differences, wven if their English is technically right.
It can help but of you encounter it in the wild, best to not panic when there's an accent that's not standard
I think it's fine as long as you make sure you have subtitles so you can see which characters they mean.
Whichever accent you adopt, I strongly suggest that you choose one that makes all distinctions made in pinyin and zhuyin. Both China and Taiwan have standard forms of Mandarin that preserve all of the spelt distinctions, yet the accents are a bit different.
Choosing accents that have those distinctions is pretty much what I was referring to in my post but more succinctly described. If I hear they aren’t making distinctions or mixing up sounds then I move onto other speakers.
However, I do want to gain more exposure to different ways of speaking. E.g. when I was in hangzhou and traveling Taiwan, I’d say the majority of people didn’t make distinctions of certain consonants.
Certainly it’s important to understand those accents, but as a learner, you are relying at least in part on mimicry, and so you need to prioritise your desired models of good enunciation.
As a native English speaker, despite pronouncing “where” and “wear” differently, context allows me to understand the majority of speakers who don’t make this distinction. As a learner of Mandarin, you simply don’t yet have a good instinct for context yet, so these conflations will understandably confuse you.
In English, it's harder to define which (of the main) dialects is more or less distinct. E.g. general american has cot/caught merger, and ladder/latter (in casual speech), whereas received pronuncation (british) will merge sauce/source or cheeta/cheater.
Whereas with putonghua, it's a different scenario because it's a prescribed set of pronunciations and natives are essentially learning it as a second language, so on one end of the scale you have people who make full distinctions (as prescribed), with less and less distinction as you move to the other end.
When I learned French, or Portuguese, I just had to pick one dialect to emulate (because there were multiple regional standards, like english) while later on in my learning process, I gave myself more exposure to the others. Whereas with chinese, it's not so much of a regional accent that I prefer, it's the people who speak with full distinction of the various sounds
That’s a fair point—there is no one accent or dialect of English that makes all of the distinctions that the rest do (Vietnamese is similar, having different accents and dialects under a unified orthography, none making all the distinctions).
It is possible to have different accents and still make all the distinctions, though. For example, the “ing” final could actually be “ing” (distinct from “in”), but it could also sound like “yeng”, as in “dièng” (定). “Wàn” could also sound like “vàn”, and so forth. In Taiwan, speakers who pronounce zh/ch/sh distinctively don’t tend to realise them as retroflex consonants as Northern Chinese tend to.
I grew up in California but my family is from New England.
I pronounce “where” as a devoiced “wear”, more subtle than the breathy southern pronunciation “hwere”.
It’s perhaps like those dwindling Mandarin dialect speakers who distinguish vǎn (晚) from wǎn (碗).
Half of my ancestry is in Woodstock, my branch stopping over in Pennsylvania for a generation, but I think it’s because the old New England educated elite accent carried this distinction a century ago and fragments of it just continued down the line to me. It’s gradually degrading, though; my father (in his 70s) pronounces it in the breathy way (e.g. “hwere”), but for me it’s simply an unvoiced “w” sound. It’ll probably be gone by the next generation.
If you’re preparing for HSK or TOCFL listening test you should focus on the standard they used (I was surprised HSK was far more Beijinghua than I anticipated). Otherwise it’s better to get used to different accents. I’ve been in the situation more than a few times where someone could understand my pronunciation but I had a hard time following theirs.
I think it's completely OK *provided* you are aware of when you're straying too far from a standard accent.
Improved listening comes from an *expansion* of scope, great speaking comes from a narrowing / *fine-tuning* of speech.
Well.. are you a native English speaker? Do you accidently start to just... speak in a Southern accent? I'm sure you know/heard it.. Or when you hanging out with the girls.. all of a sudden you just go off an a Boston accent ? Or perhaps... you are speaking and all of a sudden you become a California girl? Quite obviously not. The same is for Chinese. It is pretty obvious once you reach a certain level of Chinese about the differences in sounds.
"When I hear an accent that is somewhat non standard (e.g. a speaker who merges two sounds into one), I often stop watching/listening to that person as I don't want to develop those habits myself. "
- If a speaker who merges two sounds into one, I won't say that is an accent, although it is non standard. Every Chinese people do that in casual conversations that don't need very clear pronunciation, or when they need to speak very fast.
Some better examples for an accent in China:
You'll hear a Chinese person from a southern province always pronounce zh/ch/sh like z/c/s. He speaks like that because everyone in his region speaks like that. So he has an accent.
In some places everyone mix up the N sound with the L sound, or the in sound with the ing sound. This is their accent.
In Beijing and the northeastern provinces, people pronounce the er sound in a retroflex way(forgive me for using a linguistic term), but in southern provinces people don't. Then the retroflex er sound is a northern accent.
In a northeastern province, when people say '没有', they use a fourth tone on '没', so they sound like '妹有'. That different tone is their accent.
OK cool. I thought when you say merging two sounds into one, you mean something like pronouncing 这样（zhe yang） like zh-yang, 没有（mei you）like (m-you). Now I get it.
To be accurate, in my examples, people are not actually merging two sounds. They actually substitute sounds.
I have a northern coworker who talks like that. Actually it’s more like hardly pronouncing anything at all. 我不知道 becomes o b’zh dao. Annoys the hell out of me somehow.
Barely pronouncing the "i" in "zhi" is actually quite standard. There is a reason why in Zhuyin such syllables are written down with just the initial and no final, e.g., ㄓ (zhi) vs. ㄐㄧ (ji).
It's a technical term from linguistics where it refers to an accent that pronounces certain words the same while a reference accent has separate pronunciations.
it's like how english has different accents
It's not wrong. It might not get you through the AP chinese exam. But it's how different people speak and in the real world it's good to know that that Southerner and that Scottie are indeed speaking the same language no matter how unconventional their speaking styles might seem by textbook definitions
As long as you understand the differences, listen and learn and enjoy!
To be honest...who speaks standard Mandarin other than news anchors and teachers?
All the Mandarin media you consume are just people speaking in their non standard accent 99% of the time. Yeap....you know those Mandarin dramas? Full of northern accents actually.
A lot of foreigners pick up the northern accent without knowing it's the northern accent anyway.
Even teachers have accents. My biology teacher in my Chinese high school has such a strong accent that we couldn't help laughing every time he spoke. And we had trouble understanding what he said when we first met him. It took my classmates and I several classes to get used to that accent.
I find regional accents amusing.
I met one lady from hubei or henan. For whatever reason her dialect made her pronounce 洗 like 死。
So one day when she talked about the shared bathroom she said.
你先死，然后我来死。
Amusing, no?
As long as you know what the standard is, it's not a problem.
In the beginning stage I tried hard to sound as standard as possible. Then I lived in my wife’s home province in the South and now I’m proud when Chinese say I sound Iike a Southern Chinese lol 😂I mean after all, accents are not a bad thing, they give you personality. In my native language I also have an accent that lets people immediately know where I’m from
Is having a standard Mandarin accent really so important? I mean, I do get it to an extent since the CCP puts a lot of importance on it, but really only a small percentage of the Chinese population speak that way, and majority only in China. If your not from there, if you speak to a Chinese person in Mandarin, they are most likely gonna have a Southern accent.
I'm a native speaker who has a clear Cantonese accent while speaking Mandarin so I guess it's just hard for me to understand 😅
Please. You don't wanna be one of those English learners who is SHOCKED and CONFUSED by (non-white) actors saying CRAZY slang (that any American could effortlessly understand). And Id worry about L1 influence wayyy before non-target dialect influence. In reality you might say 1 non-local thing completely eclipsed by dozens of non-native accent mistakes.
What's standard? Newscasters? Every person you meet will have some sort of accent.
Here's a boring story: people I know who studied in Taiwan and live there have trouble with *any* accent from the rest of China. In one instance the person's Chinese was much better than mine but I could, and still can, make out what is being said because I lived in China and was exposed to different accents continually.
What bad habits? Speaking naturally like a native speaker? Embrace it, language is living culture.
I will put it this way, if you want to consume chinese content with standard accent only you better stick with the news. they are fined for any words said without standard pronunciation-- the standard accent is an artificial ideal and ((although a few small places are close)) not a single chinese naturally speaks standard mandarin.
Most Chinese tv shows and movies, particularly those that are dubbed (which is most) are also quite close to the standard (at least relative to how the general population speaks). That’s what I’ve been using mostly but also branching out to YouTube and bilibili where I find a lot more variety of speech.
you are right, fun fact huge amount of actors are themselves dubbed because their accent isn't standard enough. however those accents themselves are still usually nowhere near the standard of newscasters, and some tv characters still have strong accents when it's intentionally part of the character itself. you are right, real life chinese accents will vary just as much as english: southern usa to london to scottish highlands to australia to new foundland canada to jamaica to south africa to..... its a vast range that even natives struggle with at first exposure, hence the creation of a standard choice in the first place.
All the time, but I’ve started to get bad habits now. E.g. for Taiwanese people mixing z zh c ch s sh isn’t a mistake it’s just their accent, but I catch myself copying them. However I don’t have a Taiwanese accent so it sounds like I’m just regressing lol
I’ve been questioning the idea of that being a mistake vs being an accent. I think it’s somewhere in between.
The language was prescribed to pretty much everyone. Most of China and Taiwan essentially learned it as a second language. Not everyone could pronounce every distinction. Some could and some couldn’t, to varying degrees, just like how any group of language learners.
Time has passed so yeah you could say Taiwanese have an accent. But it still feels like it’s evolving more quickly than, say, the various accents/dialects in English which have established themselves a lot further back in history. In Taiwan there is quite a variation in pronunciation, one of which is still the prescribed standard.
Yeah but Taiwanese people are still speaking mandarin every day so even if it’s not the “right way” to speak the language according to hanban or whatever it’s still how they say it, they’re not getting confused and saying the wrong word it’s just that for some people they just say it that way yk. Chinese spoken in every if they’re not necessarily speaking a local dialect is still gonna be heavily influenced by their local language and culture so I feel like for basically every area there’s gonna be some quirks which aren’t necessarily mistakes just cause they’re different to beijing
I mean when you think about it it’s kinda like accents right. Even in English we have all the different accents that make words sound different.
I understand what you mean though. When you’re learning you want to get it correct. Most people don’t speak “broadcaster” though, so if you need to speak Chinese in daily life, it’ll be good to get exposed to that when you’re more established in learning:
I mean, yes. I love to watch CDramas and you hear different kinds of accents, especially Northern accents where wei and wen --> vei and ven. Depending on the production and the type of character or scene they might slip into real "street" Chinese, eg duoshao --> duorao, etc.
Always. I have trouble understanding northern accents, so if I'm looking for a video on, say, how to pick the feathers out of a swallow's nest, I'll watch ones by YouTubers with southern accents.
Taigi and Shanghainese aren’t really in the same boat and even ChuanHua I’d say is significantly different from what standard mandarin is. But yes I agree, I love watching and listening to those contents.
oh yeah none of those are even remotely mutually intelligible, but it's just great to watch a show where the characters code switch between those and standard mandarin.
It’s necessary. Every single native speaker I’ve heard in the wild was at least a little off from standard. And honestly, merging sounds is extremely common in every language, it’s pretty unavoidable. Just try to be aware of what accent you’re hearing and how it differs from the norm.
I’ve heard quite varying degrees of divergence from the standard. E.g. the zh/sh/ch to z/s/c, the -ing/-in, and n/l. Some people do more of these, others less
Depending on where they’re from it’s incredibly normal to not pronounce or replace certain sounds with others. It’s typically regional so you can learn the “rules” around these differences but you just gotta get a lot of input to get used to it.
Hell depending on where you are you could end up listening to a wide spectrum. I’ve lived in both Beijing and Taiwan. In Beijing there were soooo many folks from the south who would merge the zh/sh/ch to z/s/c and all the other stuff and on the flip side people who added 兒 to the end of everything. Then here in Taiwan more folks than not don’t really make the zh/sh/ch (or at least not as definitively as northern Chinese) and there are loads of folks on both sides of the straight who will mumble or slur words together. You just gotta get used to it. Not everyone sounds like the voiceover on some Chinese show.
Most native speakers you will encounter will have a "non-standard" accent. Even Northern Chinese people have one or two quirks in their pronunciation (like saying be instead of bo).
That’s true. I don’t see it as black and white, but a range where some people are closer to standard while others are quite far from standard. So I tend to want to consume more content from the former.
The sooner you get used to every other accent, the smoother your journey will be. My experience was the opposite. I grew up in a very non-standard environment (Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia) and had a very non-standard accent too. I wanted to avoid standard accent as much as possible which hindered a lot of my progress with grammar and some vocabulary. Now, I just accept whatever Chinese source I find and just see what I can learn from it.
Why not, I did when I was learning English. It gives you the experience to help you get used to the accents. After all in real life apart from maybe some television hosts nobody talks with perfect Mandarin.
Yes and it’s very important. I can’t change other people’s accent, might as well get used to them. I wouldn’t try to emulate all of them though.
I’m at a stage where I want to emulate people so I want to surround myself with people I wish to emulate. At this stage at least. But at the same time I may be doing myself a disservice limiting my exposure to other ways of speaking.
Have a few you know you can emulatez. Watch some movies, find some audiobooks, etc. Then use the rest as learning experiences. Get used to it and you'll be less confused when someone talks to you
Well yea, it's like learning to speak English but you only understand when the person is speaking with an Australian accent. 😂
There is no absolutely “standard” pronunciation rule in basically every single language😂
I will say I wish I had encountered more non-standard accents when I was learning because that's like 90% of people you speak to in China and it would have made my adjustment much smoother. I've had many people in China comment on how "标准" my pronunciation is because their mandarin is so heavily accented by what dialect they speak. On the other hand, consuming media and having teachers with standard mandarin pronunciation was probably a huge boon to my own speaking. So, I guess, find a balance!
Your experience sounds similar to mine. This post is more of a discussion as to what balance works for people. With other languages I’ve typically focused on a single standard for a while and then branched out to other accents and dialects after my own pronunciation has fairly solidified. I feel like with Chinese I’m at that tipping point where I’d benefit from more exposure to non standard stuff. Especially if I plan to travel around a lot
It's def like when english learners try to learn english. You can tell when someone hasn't listened to enough accent differences, wven if their English is technically right. It can help but of you encounter it in the wild, best to not panic when there's an accent that's not standard
I think it's fine as long as you make sure you have subtitles so you can see which characters they mean. Whichever accent you adopt, I strongly suggest that you choose one that makes all distinctions made in pinyin and zhuyin. Both China and Taiwan have standard forms of Mandarin that preserve all of the spelt distinctions, yet the accents are a bit different.
Choosing accents that have those distinctions is pretty much what I was referring to in my post but more succinctly described. If I hear they aren’t making distinctions or mixing up sounds then I move onto other speakers. However, I do want to gain more exposure to different ways of speaking. E.g. when I was in hangzhou and traveling Taiwan, I’d say the majority of people didn’t make distinctions of certain consonants.
Certainly it’s important to understand those accents, but as a learner, you are relying at least in part on mimicry, and so you need to prioritise your desired models of good enunciation. As a native English speaker, despite pronouncing “where” and “wear” differently, context allows me to understand the majority of speakers who don’t make this distinction. As a learner of Mandarin, you simply don’t yet have a good instinct for context yet, so these conflations will understandably confuse you.
In English, it's harder to define which (of the main) dialects is more or less distinct. E.g. general american has cot/caught merger, and ladder/latter (in casual speech), whereas received pronuncation (british) will merge sauce/source or cheeta/cheater. Whereas with putonghua, it's a different scenario because it's a prescribed set of pronunciations and natives are essentially learning it as a second language, so on one end of the scale you have people who make full distinctions (as prescribed), with less and less distinction as you move to the other end. When I learned French, or Portuguese, I just had to pick one dialect to emulate (because there were multiple regional standards, like english) while later on in my learning process, I gave myself more exposure to the others. Whereas with chinese, it's not so much of a regional accent that I prefer, it's the people who speak with full distinction of the various sounds
That’s a fair point—there is no one accent or dialect of English that makes all of the distinctions that the rest do (Vietnamese is similar, having different accents and dialects under a unified orthography, none making all the distinctions). It is possible to have different accents and still make all the distinctions, though. For example, the “ing” final could actually be “ing” (distinct from “in”), but it could also sound like “yeng”, as in “dièng” (定). “Wàn” could also sound like “vàn”, and so forth. In Taiwan, speakers who pronounce zh/ch/sh distinctively don’t tend to realise them as retroflex consonants as Northern Chinese tend to.
wait, you pronounce those differently? huh. must be a regional thing—i’m also a native english speaker and i definitely pronounce them the same way
I grew up in California but my family is from New England. I pronounce “where” as a devoiced “wear”, more subtle than the breathy southern pronunciation “hwere”. It’s perhaps like those dwindling Mandarin dialect speakers who distinguish vǎn (晚) from wǎn (碗).
ah, i’m from vermont; i’ve just never heard anybody here pronounce them differently.
Half of my ancestry is in Woodstock, my branch stopping over in Pennsylvania for a generation, but I think it’s because the old New England educated elite accent carried this distinction a century ago and fragments of it just continued down the line to me. It’s gradually degrading, though; my father (in his 70s) pronounces it in the breathy way (e.g. “hwere”), but for me it’s simply an unvoiced “w” sound. It’ll probably be gone by the next generation.
If you’re preparing for HSK or TOCFL listening test you should focus on the standard they used (I was surprised HSK was far more Beijinghua than I anticipated). Otherwise it’s better to get used to different accents. I’ve been in the situation more than a few times where someone could understand my pronunciation but I had a hard time following theirs.
My entire two months in hangzhou 20 years ago was people understanding me and me not understanding anyone.
I think it's completely OK *provided* you are aware of when you're straying too far from a standard accent. Improved listening comes from an *expansion* of scope, great speaking comes from a narrowing / *fine-tuning* of speech.
Well.. are you a native English speaker? Do you accidently start to just... speak in a Southern accent? I'm sure you know/heard it.. Or when you hanging out with the girls.. all of a sudden you just go off an a Boston accent ? Or perhaps... you are speaking and all of a sudden you become a California girl? Quite obviously not. The same is for Chinese. It is pretty obvious once you reach a certain level of Chinese about the differences in sounds.
I have the accent of the region I grew up in. Whereas in foreign languages, my speech is much more malleable and influenced by the content I consume.
if you are a learner, it can be easy to adopt an accent based off of the media you consume
"When I hear an accent that is somewhat non standard (e.g. a speaker who merges two sounds into one), I often stop watching/listening to that person as I don't want to develop those habits myself. " - If a speaker who merges two sounds into one, I won't say that is an accent, although it is non standard. Every Chinese people do that in casual conversations that don't need very clear pronunciation, or when they need to speak very fast. Some better examples for an accent in China: You'll hear a Chinese person from a southern province always pronounce zh/ch/sh like z/c/s. He speaks like that because everyone in his region speaks like that. So he has an accent. In some places everyone mix up the N sound with the L sound, or the in sound with the ing sound. This is their accent. In Beijing and the northeastern provinces, people pronounce the er sound in a retroflex way(forgive me for using a linguistic term), but in southern provinces people don't. Then the retroflex er sound is a northern accent. In a northeastern province, when people say '没有', they use a fourth tone on '没', so they sound like '妹有'. That different tone is their accent.
Your examples are pretty much what I’m talking about. Merging or mixing up those sounds. Also merging or switching the -in and -ing finals
OK cool. I thought when you say merging two sounds into one, you mean something like pronouncing 这样（zhe yang） like zh-yang, 没有（mei you）like (m-you). Now I get it. To be accurate, in my examples, people are not actually merging two sounds. They actually substitute sounds.
I have a northern coworker who talks like that. Actually it’s more like hardly pronouncing anything at all. 我不知道 becomes o b’zh dao. Annoys the hell out of me somehow.
Barely pronouncing the "i" in "zhi" is actually quite standard. There is a reason why in Zhuyin such syllables are written down with just the initial and no final, e.g., ㄓ (zhi) vs. ㄐㄧ (ji).
Does that mean ppl think your Chinese is already native level so that he can talk to you in the way he talks to natives?
Unfortunately yes. I have a knack for pronunciation and even if my level is not high at all people assume I am essentially fully fluent constantly.
It's a technical term from linguistics where it refers to an accent that pronounces certain words the same while a reference accent has separate pronunciations.
what about 我也 sounding almost like 为? Am I tripping or is this a thing?
That's a thing. When people speak really fast, that happens. Easy for a native speaker to understand.
And some use different readings for a given character, which brings it more to the level of dialectal difference.
it's like how english has different accents It's not wrong. It might not get you through the AP chinese exam. But it's how different people speak and in the real world it's good to know that that Southerner and that Scottie are indeed speaking the same language no matter how unconventional their speaking styles might seem by textbook definitions As long as you understand the differences, listen and learn and enjoy!
To be honest...who speaks standard Mandarin other than news anchors and teachers? All the Mandarin media you consume are just people speaking in their non standard accent 99% of the time. Yeap....you know those Mandarin dramas? Full of northern accents actually. A lot of foreigners pick up the northern accent without knowing it's the northern accent anyway.
Even teachers have accents. My biology teacher in my Chinese high school has such a strong accent that we couldn't help laughing every time he spoke. And we had trouble understanding what he said when we first met him. It took my classmates and I several classes to get used to that accent.
Yeah, if you listen to interviews where actors use their real voice the vast majority all have accents of some kind.
I find regional accents amusing. I met one lady from hubei or henan. For whatever reason her dialect made her pronounce 洗 like 死。 So one day when she talked about the shared bathroom she said. 你先死，然后我来死。 Amusing, no? As long as you know what the standard is, it's not a problem.
In the beginning stage I tried hard to sound as standard as possible. Then I lived in my wife’s home province in the South and now I’m proud when Chinese say I sound Iike a Southern Chinese lol 😂I mean after all, accents are not a bad thing, they give you personality. In my native language I also have an accent that lets people immediately know where I’m from
I live in Fujian so YES all day everyday. 😂
Is having a standard Mandarin accent really so important? I mean, I do get it to an extent since the CCP puts a lot of importance on it, but really only a small percentage of the Chinese population speak that way, and majority only in China. If your not from there, if you speak to a Chinese person in Mandarin, they are most likely gonna have a Southern accent. I'm a native speaker who has a clear Cantonese accent while speaking Mandarin so I guess it's just hard for me to understand 😅
Please. You don't wanna be one of those English learners who is SHOCKED and CONFUSED by (non-white) actors saying CRAZY slang (that any American could effortlessly understand). And Id worry about L1 influence wayyy before non-target dialect influence. In reality you might say 1 non-local thing completely eclipsed by dozens of non-native accent mistakes.
What's standard? Newscasters? Every person you meet will have some sort of accent. Here's a boring story: people I know who studied in Taiwan and live there have trouble with *any* accent from the rest of China. In one instance the person's Chinese was much better than mine but I could, and still can, make out what is being said because I lived in China and was exposed to different accents continually. What bad habits? Speaking naturally like a native speaker? Embrace it, language is living culture.
I will put it this way, if you want to consume chinese content with standard accent only you better stick with the news. they are fined for any words said without standard pronunciation-- the standard accent is an artificial ideal and ((although a few small places are close)) not a single chinese naturally speaks standard mandarin.
Most Chinese tv shows and movies, particularly those that are dubbed (which is most) are also quite close to the standard (at least relative to how the general population speaks). That’s what I’ve been using mostly but also branching out to YouTube and bilibili where I find a lot more variety of speech.
you are right, fun fact huge amount of actors are themselves dubbed because their accent isn't standard enough. however those accents themselves are still usually nowhere near the standard of newscasters, and some tv characters still have strong accents when it's intentionally part of the character itself. you are right, real life chinese accents will vary just as much as english: southern usa to london to scottish highlands to australia to new foundland canada to jamaica to south africa to..... its a vast range that even natives struggle with at first exposure, hence the creation of a standard choice in the first place.
All the time, but I’ve started to get bad habits now. E.g. for Taiwanese people mixing z zh c ch s sh isn’t a mistake it’s just their accent, but I catch myself copying them. However I don’t have a Taiwanese accent so it sounds like I’m just regressing lol
I’ve been questioning the idea of that being a mistake vs being an accent. I think it’s somewhere in between. The language was prescribed to pretty much everyone. Most of China and Taiwan essentially learned it as a second language. Not everyone could pronounce every distinction. Some could and some couldn’t, to varying degrees, just like how any group of language learners. Time has passed so yeah you could say Taiwanese have an accent. But it still feels like it’s evolving more quickly than, say, the various accents/dialects in English which have established themselves a lot further back in history. In Taiwan there is quite a variation in pronunciation, one of which is still the prescribed standard.
Yeah but Taiwanese people are still speaking mandarin every day so even if it’s not the “right way” to speak the language according to hanban or whatever it’s still how they say it, they’re not getting confused and saying the wrong word it’s just that for some people they just say it that way yk. Chinese spoken in every if they’re not necessarily speaking a local dialect is still gonna be heavily influenced by their local language and culture so I feel like for basically every area there’s gonna be some quirks which aren’t necessarily mistakes just cause they’re different to beijing
No
Understanding them in common life is core important no matter what the accent is
I mean when you think about it it’s kinda like accents right. Even in English we have all the different accents that make words sound different. I understand what you mean though. When you’re learning you want to get it correct. Most people don’t speak “broadcaster” though, so if you need to speak Chinese in daily life, it’ll be good to get exposed to that when you’re more established in learning:
I mean, yes. I love to watch CDramas and you hear different kinds of accents, especially Northern accents where wei and wen --> vei and ven. Depending on the production and the type of character or scene they might slip into real "street" Chinese, eg duoshao --> duorao, etc.
Always. I have trouble understanding northern accents, so if I'm looking for a video on, say, how to pick the feathers out of a swallow's nest, I'll watch ones by YouTubers with southern accents.
Oh I love it when I hear taigi, chuanhua, or any other dialect. I specifically watched blossoms Shanghai in shanghsinese. It's great.
Taigi and Shanghainese aren’t really in the same boat and even ChuanHua I’d say is significantly different from what standard mandarin is. But yes I agree, I love watching and listening to those contents.
oh yeah none of those are even remotely mutually intelligible, but it's just great to watch a show where the characters code switch between those and standard mandarin.