Most Educated Accent / Private Lessons?

[JoshMehler]

Greetings All,

I am a beginner in Mandarin, and am interested in going to China to study. What I am interested in is a VERY intensive, short-term course (meaning 2 weeks or so) where I can learn the clearest, most educated sounding accent.

For example, Chicago in the US. Oxford in England.

I'm not worried about price, and I'm not interested in parties or hooking up (I'm married and 38 years old). I'd prefer 1 on 1 training and a course that focuses on professional, formal communications.

My dream location would not be a massive city, but something a bit more like San Francisco size/feel (where I work now). But, if it has to be Beijing, then so be it.

Thank you all!!!!!

Josh Mehler

www.translucentstudios.com

josh@splunk.com

[DrZero]

Well, wherever you go, the teachers will most likely be speaking with a standard accent.

Anyway, I hear that the Harbin area has a very standard accent. Not sure what schools are there.

I hear that the Taiwan Language Institute is very good and it sounds like it would suit your purposes. I'm pretty sure they have locations in Shanghai, Suzhou and Tianjin.

As an aside, I'm not sure why everybody focuses so much on a standard accent. It's an ideal that doesn't take shape all that often in the real world. I guess it's good to learn the most standard variation possible in terms of speaking. But part of the challenge in Mandarin is learning to understand accents, and insulting oneself in areas where only a standard accent is spoken will not help in that regard.

As I have mentioned before, my wife's area (Jiangsu Province) has some pecularities in its pronunciation. For me that means two things. For one thing, I have to tune in to the way they speak, or else I just won't understand. I can't say, "Hey, that doesn't sound standard; could you speak a little more like they do in Harbin?" And No. 2, I kind of have to avoid using a northern sound, like er hua, because it is off-putting to them. (Kind of like going to Savannah, Ga., and speaking like you're from Boston.)

[JoshMehler]

DrZero,

Thank you for your reply. It is good to know that teachers will teach me a "standard mandarin". That gives me confidence to consider places that I've not considered.

As to your aside:

The reason I, personally, am concerned with this is that my goal is not only to travel in China, but to conduct business there. I'm from California, but I don't do business with the same tones/words/style that I do when I'm throwing Frisbee with my musician friends on a Sunday. I'm sure you can imagine that "Dude, what's up!" kind of English. I also wouldn't want to sound like I'm from hicksville when doing business with highly educated people.

Sooo, my thinking is that if I learn a language where people speak in an educated, polite, clear manner, then I will emulate that from the start. I can vary it later if I ever get that good, but it just seems wisest to get started on the right foot.

Thanks again!

[self-taught-mba]

Well, wherever you go, the teachers will most likely be speaking with a standard accent.

huang1tang2! ("nonsense!" friendly tone intended.)

Even here in Beijing I get teachers applying that have no business calling themselves standard. Some of them have taught at many schools. Voice recognition just crashed. More later.

[DrZero]

Josh--

I don't blame you at all for seeking to acquire a standard accent. It's the best route, I'm sure. But I definitely think it's best to keep an open ear and try to acclimate yourself to several different accents, because it's highly likely that as you do business, you'll encounter non-standard speakers. (Probably will encounter quite a few business associates whose education level is not that high, too.)

self-taught-mba--

First of all, I very much appreciate your typing in pinyin. My reading of characters sucks.

Anyway, I had heard that the Taiwan Language Institute employs people with standard accents, but I cannot speak from experience. I hope to go there myself and do something much like what Josh is talking about. I've heard that they do a lot of one-on-one teaching, with lessons customized to what you want. (In my case, lots of pinyin and speaking and listening practice.)

[badr]

I do run such a program I have to side with the others on this one as far as the "Standard Accent" goes!

1- To get it to a level where it is TV-style, you need more than 2 weeks!

2- Speaking with a standard TV-Style accent will not help you when you face Mr. or Mrs. Wang originally from middle of nowhere in China and can't understand anything they try and tell you... was in such a situation just this past weekend in a business meeting!

3- The closest program i can think of (other than mine) is located in the Netherlands. The nuns there run special intensive language programs that last 2 weeks with about 8 hours of intensive instruction. The program is pricey and effective for many languages. I know they started doing Chinese a few years back but can't say I met anybody that has done it there. I know a fellow who did their Russian Intensive with great success

[Robert14]

As Dr Zero says, Taipei Language Institute (TLI) is excellent. I did 3.5 weeks August 2007 at TLI in Dalian, and Chinese friends commented on the noticeable improvement in my spoken Chinese. While they have some small group classes, they do mostly 1-on-1 classes at about 100 rmb/hour. They push you pretty hard, and the maximum I could absorb was 3 hours/day. Timing of classes is according to your desired schedule, an advantage of 1-on-1.

Dalian is a pleasant coastal city of 2-3 million people. Everyone I met, both in and out of school, spoke standard Mandarin. TLI/Dalian is located in a suburb, the only disadvantage in my view, though everything you need is there. There is also frequent light-rail service to downtown Dalian.

[DrZero]

Can I ask, how was your Mandarin before you went to TLI, and how was it when you were done? Did you follow their lesson plans or was it customized?

[Robert14]

I previously took a year of twice-a-week university classes in the USA and spent 4 months at BLCU in Beijing, but spread out over 3 years--a disadvantage of working full time at a regular job. After 3.5 weeks at TLI/Dalian, I would say my spoken Chinese advanced from middling intermediate to polished intermediate. Chinese is too vast to expect greater progress in just a few weeks, I feel.

TLI's own materials are truly excellent. They have 2 volumes of Beginning Dialogues and 2 volumes of Intermediate Dialogues. I did the second volume of Intermediate Dialogues. About half the material was new for me, half was review. These teaching materials do not use characters, only Pinyin. They are perfectly willing to work on characters, but I preferred to use the short time available to me to work only on oral skills. After a few days it became apparent that there were important points of grammar that I had previously failed to study, and so we added another hour per day of grammar review, focusing on resultative verbs, which are so different from English. So you could say that we followed their program, but we also did customized study as required.

[DrZero]

Any idea how many words (not characters) you might have known going in, and coming out?

[Robert14]

Rather than learning lots of new vocabulary, it was a matter of solidfying previously studied but not mastered usages. I suppose my spoken vocabulary is around 700-800 "words." Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised to come across new words where the meaning is evident from knowing the two or three component parts. Other times, I feel embarassingly ignorant, for example, with parts of the body, or banking terms, which none of my previous courses had covered in a thorough fashion. The TLI course helped a lot with these topics.

I hadn't mentioned pronunciation. In a classroom setting, it's easy to get away with approximate pronunciation. The TLI teachers are tough and won't let you get away with an imperfect tone or a mispronounced retroflex consonant.

[slcchina]

You may look at Shangri-la Learning Centre ( http//:www.slcchina.com ) in a beautiful city, Lijiang Yunnan. It's a private school offerring short-term courses which are tailored by students' schedules and levels.

[opper567]

No offense, but you won't have standard pronounciation in two weeks. It's not possible. I've studied Mandarin for three years, spent almost two months in China and still have an accent (American accent). Not even the greatest linguists in the world can master the pronounciation of a language in two weeks.

That being said, if you pick up some books and begin practicing before you go, you will learn considerably more. Especially if you familiarize yourself with pinyin and basic Chinese words and sentence structure.

[huisheng]

What should concern you is not what accent you have but if you can understand regional accents in China, some of which can be so wild that don't sound like Mandarin at all, like Scottish English to English English.