tape or cd with beijing accent

[john]

Hi all. Long time listener, first time caller.

I've searched the archives and haven't found information on what I am looking for.

I am an avid learner of mandarin chinese. I am always interested in improving my accent and pronunciation.

One great way to improve an accent, linguists have told me, is to get a tape (or cd or any kind of audio) of a native speaker and speak simultaneously with the speaker, repeating each sentence ten to twenty times (and the tape should be pretty long too, because this process takes a few months and you shouldn't repeat parts of the tape to many times because memorization does not help you at all). The speaker should be the same sex/gender as you, as most languages have differences in the way males and females talk (cultural, not biological).

Anyway, what I am looking for is a tape of a male Beijing speaker (with a Beijing accent), at least an hour long, but preferably 2-3 hours long. It can be anything, like reading aloud from a book (like the "books on tape" that americans are familiar with), or giving a speech, or doing a documentary on a subject, or whatever.

I was wondering if any of the members of the forum would know where I can get what I am looking for.

Thank you.

[BeijingSlacker]

Maybe I could make one just to earn some money

Anyway, I would guess Chinese movies may be a good source since an unbalanced number of them are somehow in Beijing accent, which of course sometimes doesn't make sense.

[atitarev]

I don't see your location in your profile but you should be able to buy books with tapes/CD's, borrow from a library.

This site is great for beginners to intermediates:

Simplified/Tradition/Pinyin/English translations/Audio (embedded in files)

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/chinese/

[Haoqide]

I'm working on that, too. My biggest problem right now is that most of the people I come into contact with are from Fujian province, so it's not the standard Beijing accent. Their "shi" sounds more like "si", among other things, so I have a REALLY hard time understanding lots of what they say, even when it's words I do know. hehe. Anybody got any tips for dealing with the HUGE differences in accents, besides just listening to them talking more and praying that I eventually get to recognize what they're saying???