Laowai on Chinese Radio

[venture160]

Has anyone checked this out? Its called 老外看点 and it has 2 foreign hosts who should be fairly familiar to foreigners living in China

One of them is Risteard O Deorian from Ireland Bio in Chinese

The other is the french guy Julien Gaudfroy who has obviously pissed when he lost the laowai "star search" last year.

Their Chinese is VERY good, I think both of them have been speaking for over 10 years.

[heifeng]

Yeah, if I am at home during their broadcasts on 90.50 I like to listen to them. Oddly, I don't mind listening to foreigners on the radio, but for some reason I really dislike tv shows with foreigners speaking Chinese and avoid watching those completely...(exceptions made for soap operas though...hehe)

This is Julien's info:

http://newsradio.cri.cn/8383/2006/04/11/1568@579259.htm

[Yang Rui]

Risteard O Deorian has a few interesting blogs. At least, they are either written by him or someone pretending to be him:

http://chinaok.livejournal.com

http://niulang.livejournal.com

http://dongmohan.spaces.live.com/

In China you'll need to go through a proxy for the livejournal sites

[imron]

I also quite enjoy listening to them on the radio, though by radio I mean the internet broadcast :-) Listening to foreigners with good Chinese is always good incentive to study harder!

I agree with Heifeng about foreigners on tv though, and I think the big difference between that and radio, is that on the radio they seem to used less for novelty value, i.e. they are actually expressing their own thoughts and opinions, rather than just being a talking, performing monkey.

[Long Pan]

About Julien Gaudfroy, here is an article from the front page of China Daily last week

"Gaudfroy began studying Chinese in 1998 while still in France, creating within his Paris apartment an "almost 100 percent Chinese environment". Helped by a Chinese girlfriend, he studied at home for hours and engaged in conversation with any Chinese person he happened upon. "I didn't have much else to do so I would spend all day long studying Chinese in any possible way," he says. He tried a language course at a Paris university, but lasted just weeks, finding tapes and self-study to be a more suitable method. (...) Hailing from Lille, Gaudfroy first came to China in 1999. He left the following year, but returned in 2002 and has lived here since. To improve his reading and writing skills, Gaudfroy consumed whatever Chinese language material he could - novels, newspapers, magazines and historical texts.He constantly listened to television and radio shows, and would repeat new phrases to himself until he was sure the pronunciation was perfect."

He has talked about his experience of learning Chinese on this forum. which is quite close to Steve Kaufmann's advise.

Here are some extracts:

"Another one is the fact that most adults want to understand evrything before they learn. If we can fight that tendency and adopt a children's attitude, our understanding ability is greater than children and we can at least compensate for that brain cells deficiency, if not learn faster than children."

"Language is mostly imitation. I'd say at the beginning, imitating perfectly takes 90% listening and 10% practice. Radio is the best way on this matter, and TV to a lesser extent, but TV is fantastic because with the image you can guess the meaning of everything. Avoiding any translation is the only way to really feel a language and think it naturally. After one year of Chinese I basically refused to use anything else than a 100% Chinese dictionary. It's just a matter of time, at the beginning you'll be tired of not knowing the meaning of things, but that will force you to develop hearing abilities and a great feeling for the language. And you'll think naturally in the language beacuse you have no choice."

"Most of the time people who always ask WHY are bad learners, because there's not much logic in the grammar or the way people speak in the mother language. Why is it this way? Because it IS this way! I was one of those WHY people, but hard work made me realize I was wrong."

"Remember, always listen a lot more than you speak or practise, and read and write a lot. Don't write by yourself in the first two years, just copy anything you can all the time. This way you'll get used to not making mistakes."

"Being gifted is more about being able to find out the best method and elimitate the useless ones in a short period of time. When I see how somebody is studying I can tell how his Chinese will be after two years."

"Don't forget that I combined my method with 24/7 full attention for quite a few years. So my two cents are: you can do it, are you ready to work that hard?"

2 相声 with 马季 from Youtube

[Scoobyqueen]

""Language is mostly imitation. I'd say at the beginning, imitating perfectly takes 90% listening and 10% practice. Radio is the best way on this matter, and TV to a lesser extent, but TV is fantastic because with the image you can guess the meaning of everything. Avoiding any translation is the only way to really feel a language and think it naturally. After one year of Chinese I basically refused to use anything else than a 100% Chinese dictionary. It's just a matter of time, at the beginning you'll be tired of not knowing the meaning of things, but that will force you to develop hearing abilities and a great feeling for the language. And you'll think naturally in the language beacuse you have no choice."

I think Julien speaks amazing Chinese. I was wondering what people thought about this statement above. Doesnt it depend on what kind of learner you are? Some people are actually quite good at picking up stuff if they see it written.

[anonymoose]

Well don't forget that those who manage to make a name for themselves in the Chinese media (and I can only think of Da Shan, Da Niu and Julien off the top of my head) are likely to be in the top 1% of learners. We can all aspire to that level, but 99% of us will never reach the top 1%.

[xianhua]

And yet there was a contributor on here the other day stating that native speakers couldn't distinguish his/her Chinese from native speakers. Surely, he/she should be famous too? I don't understand how the select few become celebrities when there are others out there claiming to speak better Chinese who don't.

A colleague at work also claims to have a cousin who speaks Chinese as a native would, and yet I've never seen him on TV. It's strange.

[Meng Lelan]

Well don't forget that those who manage to make a name for themselves in the Chinese media (and I can only think of Da Shan, Da Niu and Julien off the top of my head) are likely to be in the top 1% of learners. We can all aspire to that level, but 99% of us will never reach the top 1%.

They likely had nothing to do but just study Chinese, not like the rest of us who have jobs, families, life challenges (eg caring for those with special needs), etc. so I really don't have any special regard for the top 1%. The ones who try their best while handling real lives in the real world, those are the ones we should admire most.

[Brian US]

And yet there was a contributor on here the other day stating that native speakers couldn't distinguish his/her Chinese from native speakers. Surely, he/she should be famous too? I don't understand how the select few become celebrities when there are others out there claiming to speak better Chinese who don't.

A colleague at work also claims to have a cousin who speaks Chinese as a native would, and yet I've never seen him on TV. It's strange.

Have they ever pursued a career in the media? I don't think CCTV calls you after ordering take out in flawless Chinese.

[roddy]

I don't understand how the select few become celebrities when there are others out there claiming to speak better Chinese who don't.

It's possible to have excellent Chinese and absolutely no interest in a TV career. I imagine.

[anonymoose]

there are others out there claiming to speak better Chinese

Claiming to speak fluent Chinese is easy. Actually speaking it is a different issue.

[Yang Rui]

And yet there was a contributor on here the other day stating that native speakers couldn't distinguish his/her Chinese from native speakers. Surely, he/she should be famous too?

In addition to the points above (that not everyone who speaks Chinese well wants to be famous), I would also add that it's one thing to be able to speak a few sentences with an excellent accent, but quite another to be able to ad-lib or speak for extended periods in varying scenarios on TV.

I went pretty full-on into learning Chinese when I first went to China, and can now speak Chinese well enough that on the phone for a short time, locals can't tell that I'm not Chinese. But my vocab is limited, and especially after a while outside mainland china, I've found that what really reveals my non-nativeness isn't my accent but my limited vocab. I would also add that probably the main reason foreigners can pass for native speakers on accent alone is that Chinese people from different regions speak with such varying accents and varying degrees of fluency in putonghua that most people's reaction on hearing a strange accent isn't "that must be a foreigner" but "they must be from Guangdong/Fujian/other far-away place in China".

[anonymoose]

Of course one needs to have good Chinese to become famous for it, but that doesn't mean everyone who has good Chinese will inevitably become famous. That's obvious, right?

[renzhe]

And yet there was a contributor on here the other day stating that native speakers couldn't distinguish his/her Chinese from native speakers.

This sort of stuff needs to be qualified. I think that many people here can get away with a short phrase or sentence over a phone which doesn't arouse suspicion and sounds native-like. Not too many can go on for a bit longer (a few minutes) without raising suspicion. Then there are people who can hold a conversation for a long time and still pass off as native, but they are very few and far in between.

But this is true for most languages. I've met many people who can pass as native when speaking English or German for a very short time. I've met exceedingly few people (non-native speakers) who can hold a conversation with a native speaker for fifteen minutes and still pass for a native speaker without raising suspicion. It's often very subtle things, but something usually sticks out. People are very good at noticing such nuances.

I think that the problem most people who reach fluency tend to have is not that they have an accent -- many native speakers have an accent. It's that their accent is strange and unusual, and sticks out, even if the pronunciation is excellent. Most Mandarin speakers have an accent -- a Chengdu accent, Shanghai accent, Beijing accent, etc. Most foreigners will have an unusual, different accent, which is difficult to pinpoint, or which sounds distinctively "laowai". This is why it's exceedingly difficult to reach a level where you are mistaken for a native consistently. It is still very much possible to reach a level where your speech is completely fluent and correct, just sounds slightly different from any of the native accents due to your inherently different background. And I think that this level is worth striving towards.

This might be a bit trickier with Chinese (tones), but goes for any language. I've spent over a decade in Germany. In a very short conversation, sometimes people don't notice I'm foreign. In a longer conversation, they inevitably do. Same with English, which I've learned for about 24 years now. I once managed a 15-minute conversation in England before I was finally uncovered as a non-native speaker (I was very proud of that!), but usually something will set them off much earlier than that. I don't see why Chinese would be any different. If I can reach a similar level with Chinese (this mostly has to do with the tones as they are used naturally in a sentence, which is very difficult for me), I'll be very happy. I don't expect to have people think that I'm a native speaker, it probably won't happen.

[aristotle1990]

Same with English, which I've learned for about 24 years now.

And all this time I thought you were a native speaker. Damn.

[Scoobyqueen]

In a very short conversation, sometimes people don't notice I'm foreign. In a longer conversation, they inevitably do.

there are also people who no longer live in their native country who lose their native accent so that people from their home country no longer recognise them as being a native speaker. I have come across a few people like that. They may take on the intonation of the other language or start translating directly from their acquired language into their native language not being conscious that you cannot do that (example from German into English "what does that bring me" "daughter company" for "subsidiary" "branch" for "sector/industry") or even use another syntax. I work with some translators who have lived in a given country for too long (20-30 years) and it seems some are no longer aware of such direct but false translations.