How good is this Italian guy?

[L-F-J]

so how come michael started out pronouncing "shi" and "zhong" correctly and having a fairly decent accent, then suddenly changed it to "si" and "zong" and made his accent change into a cantonese one....?

[Lu]

Because he starts out very conciously speaking in a nice clear textbook Putonghua accent, but as he talks on slips into a more comfortable (to him) Southern Mandarin.

I do it too. When I talked to some Mainland Chinese recently I was suddenly concious of my heavy Taiwanese accent, and tried to get my zh-ch-sh right, and put some -r's in appropriate places. It didn't feel right (and it probably didn't sound quite right either), so I quickly slipped back into my Taiwan guoyu.

[LaoLiang]

"I agree with heifeng. On an accent scale of 1 to 10 (10 being native-level), I would say Dashan is a 9, whereas this guy is probably a 7. While his pronunciation is good, there is still a clearly noticeable foreign accent. He's also enunciating each character too clearly. A native wouldn't have such clear pauses between characters (maybe it's because he's reading). Dashan sounds much more fluent than he does. He also has some non-idiomatic word usage here and there."

Gato, other than what I've seen on CCTV, I haven't encountered even one "native speaker" that you'd probably give them a 10 or even a 9 for correct intonation and pronunciation. Where does that leave DaShan?

[ganyuehan]

Now, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but he seems better than many at mimicking the voice of a Chinese man. By that I don't mean tones and pronunciation etcetera; I mean that even when some foreigners speak well enough, for some reason their voices still may sound unnatural or just not Chinese like.

[L-F-J]

i know what you mean. it seems like it has something to do with western vs chinese vocal chords.

even dashan has this as well. even though his tones and pronunciation is perfect. he still sounds obviously foreign.

[Lu]

Western vs Chinese vocal chords? That doesn't seem very likely. Overseas Chinese seem to have no problem sounding exactly like locals, and some Westerners come very close to sounding native, without the benefit of starting learning at age 4. If there was something like Chinese vocal chords, Wang Lihong's Chinese should be better than all Westerners', which it isn't.

More likely it's education, surroundings, etc. Everyone around you speaks in a certain way, and so naturally you start speaking like that as well. A Hongkongnese would also have difficulty sounding like a Beijingnese.

[muyongshi]

Recent study (wish I could cite it- I will look for it) thinks that there is a gene difference in tonal language speakers versus non-tonal language speakers (the implications of this are very interesting) but in relation to THIS topic, I wonder if that might be the reason you can virtually ALWAYS identify a non-native speaker no matter how good they are (as opposed to being vocal chords). I have a good friend that was born in China and has grown up speaking Chinese but she still sounds like a foreigner. Maybe it is all in the genes...

[carlo]

Maybe it is all in the genes...

This is very unlikely. Though it's hard to prove anything at all in language acquisition, so there are all sorts of wacky theories out there....

To test 'nativeness' you'd need to arrange something like a Turing test: put a guy behind a screen and see how many native speakers can catch him out. Otherwise the bias is too strong.

On the other hand social groups do tend to develop their own accents and speech habits. Black people who don't talk black enough have to withstand the social pressure, for example.

btw, I also have a friend who grew up in China and speaks Chinese with a foreign accent... unless he's drunk, whereby the accent magically goes away! He puts it down to being self-conscious when speaking Chinese in front of strangers.

[imron]

Back to the topic of rating foreigners for their Chinese, yesterday at a press conference, Andy Brown, a journalist from the wall street journal asked his question to 温家宝 in Chinese. Footage can be found in this clip, starting at around the 16:18 mark. I imagine such a high profile press conference with the eyes of China and world watching is bound to be more nerve-racking than say the spoken component of the HSK :-)

Anyway full-props to the guy. Hopefully we'll start to see more of this kind of thing in the future, and Chinese leaders will no longer feel the need to say "your chinese is very good" everytime they are asked a question in Chinese by a non-native speaker. Can you imagine the reaction if say Bush (or Obama)'s first response to a question asked in English by a Chinese person was "your English is very good".

[roddy]

Seen a few foreign journalists speaking Chinese during the 两会， some of them obviously reading, but all understandable. I think there was one guy from Interfax who seemed pretty good.

[HashiriKata]

I have a good friend that was born in China and has grown up speaking Chinese but she still sounds like a foreigner. Maybe it is all in the genes...

No, nothing to do with genes. His foreign accent is all down to his social environment & psychological makeup. He was born in China but his parents and people he's often associated with were not, for example. Edited March 14, 2009 at 10:47 AM by HashiriKata

[imron]

Seen a few foreign journalists speaking Chinese during the 两会， some of them obviously reading, but all understandable.

To various degrees I guess While reading this article I came across this particular comment:

身后一位外国同行用不流利的汉语和我说，

[Lu]

Maybe Obama should start doing that. Maybe then after a while some Chinese would realize how annoying it is. I have a Chinese friend who I met at an interpreting gig (of mine), known the guy for years, and STILL every time we chat he has to tell me how amazing my Chinese is. It's a total conversation killer.

Muyongshi, I also saw that study. I think it said that there was a gene for speaking non-tonal languages, so that it's actually special for a language to be non-tonal. This probably has implications for the development of languages, but I don't believe it would influence the ability of people to learn Chinese. We can all learn to use tones.

That the accent many foreigners have in their Chinese has nothing to do with this gene can, I think, be proven by looking if Thai and Vietnamese sound more native than, say, Russians. I doubt they do. The sound of the language is just different, and with some people the sound of their native language lingers more strongly than with others.

[carlo]

Does Premier Wen say this all the time to the Australian Prime Minister too? Though to be fair the guy in the video is obviously not a native speaker, and Wen is simply saying out loud what 99% of the local audience is thinking. To them, he's being polite.

And I personally dislike it more when the remark is made to another person, as if you weren't even there ("His Chinese is **&^% good." "Yeah, right." Rolling of eyes.)

Btw, can you spot the Chinese accent in Carma Hinton's English? She speaks like a Beijing architect I know who went to the States as an adult. An interesting interview.

http://www.npr.org/templates/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ATC&showDate=30-Nov-2003&segNum=8&NPRMediaPref=WM

Oh, I posted this before.

[leigao]

Oh wow, I can tell the Chinese accent right away. That's really cool.