Why is her Mandarin Rubbish?

[Lu]

No, tooironic said that, comparing her to an Aussie or a Texan.

[heifeng]

No, tooironic said that, comparing her to an Aussie or a Texan.

Maybe a Texan who's originally from south of the border and learns English later in life and speaks it every once and awhile when he/she's not at home...then yeah, sure. ..

[skillphiliac]

I am trying to understand this...

I have still much to learn, but I dare say there are some things I have learned about Chinese languages. And seeing as her native language is not mandarin, I can't really believe people seriously consider terms such as "rubbish".

I mean, it does sound sloppy, it does sound somewhat not fluent at times, but is this really a decent basis to call it bad?

[Hofmann]

Have you heard worse? I haven't.

[skillphiliac]

And he takes the lead!

See where I am going...?

[imron]

That is some mighty awful Mandarin.

[heifeng]

Yeah, that Mandarin was bad.

Wait, now I need to know something then. It's very important! (and maybe this deserves it's own thread)

0:00-3:00 in clip (even if the Cantonese isn't great, the movie is soooo goooood. Classic!)*

There are no comments under the movie booh that.

* Warning link may contain strong/offensive language. Watch at own risk.. (cough cough Meng LeLan

Edited July 7, 2009 at 03:11 AM by heifeng

[Hofmann]

Speakers of Mandarin in skillphiliac's link suck, and speakers of Cantonese in heifeng's link suck, but this sort of doesn't count, as they're acting, i.e. the actors don't speak Chinese; they're just reciting the script.

[imron]

I sure wish video or audio of Amanda Vanstone speaking Chinese existed. This is the former Australian Minister for Immigration who spent somewhere between AUD $30,000-$70,000 on Mandarin lessons () and still couldn't speak the language. A speech she delivered in Chinese was described by Chinese businessmen who had to listen to it as excruciating.

[Ncao]

It's not rubbish mandarin. I would called it Cantonese style Mandarin. There are many Cantonese speakers who speak Mandarin like that, some even worser then her. A good example would be Ekin Cheng from the 估惑仔 movies. Well I don't know if his Mandarin improve or not since it was a long time ago,but the last time I heard him try to speak Mandarin it was really bad(it sounded more like broken Cantonese then Mandarin).

[Lu]

Those actors speak really bad Mandarin. Miss HK also speaks bad Mandarin. As foreign speakers of Mandarin go, Miss HK's Mandarin is not that awful, but it's not good either. I know plenty of foreigners who speak Mandarin better than that.

I guess the 'rubbish' comment is also because as a Chinese, Miss HK is expected to speak Chinese well. She would probably get far less criticism if she just stuck to Cantonese, which I assume she does speak well enough.

[gato]

I guess the 'rubbish' comment is also because as a Chinese, Miss HK is expected to speak Chinese well.

She's a Miss HK from 1996 (courtesy of google, not that I'm an expert). Miss HK from more recent years might speak better Mandarin.

By the way, I thought Michelle Yeoh in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" spoke terrible Mandarin. Sounded like she was reading a script.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Yeoh

Yeoh learned English and Malay before Cantonese, and cannot read Chinese characters. As she does not speak Mandarin, she learned the lines for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phonetically.

[heifeng]

"Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" !

oh noo, don't even go down that road...except for Zhang Ziyi, I don't think anyone's Mandarin 'accent' was "correct" for the actual setting of that movie. Wasn't that desert guy speaking w/ a southern-ish (Taiwan maybe? Can't even remember)accent too. It's been a while since I saw that movie, but almost everyone was "off" and almost all those actors need to go on my (one day WILL be completed) Chinese actors putonghua proficiency scale.

Edited July 8, 2009 at 02:22 PM by heifeng
spelled putonghua wrong wahahahaha

[gato]

Wasn't that desert guy speaking w/ a southern-ish (Taiwan maybe? Can't even remember)accent too.

Yeah, the guy dressed in Tibetan-like clothing is played by the Taiwanese 张震.

http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=270603093

[skylee]

heifeng's post has somehow reminded me of calibre2001's comment in #14 on this thread -> http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/21564-chinese-language-in-singapore-question

[zozzen]

I'd tend to disagree. Yes, she has a thick Cantonese accent, but, can any native speaker not understand her? I find that you can basically understand her.

My background makes me so qualified to make a comment on this. my putonghua is 10000% better but people don't understand each and every word of mine all the time. Brush aside the strong cantonese accent, her pronunciation and tone is almost wrong. So could people understand this?

There was a famous story about 李長春, a northern Chinese senior official who served as the gov't head in Guangdong province around a decade ago. Before he took his office, he was told that Cantonese is extremely difficult to understand. At the first gov't meeting, it came to his surprise that Cantonese is "VERY EASY" because, as he told his fellows, he can grab almost 50% of what they said.

His subordinates hesitated, "Comrade Li, we're speaking in Putonghua".

After all, Cantonese is not a foreign language to Chinese. People should be able to understand a part of it, especially when they're pretending to speak in mandarin. It just makes life more challenging.

[wrbt]

Brush aside the strong cantonese accent, her pronunciation and tone is almost wrong. So could people understand this?

I'm not a native Chinese speaker, currently learning Mandarin in the United States thru self-study. I could understand most of what she said, and could probably have caught almost all the rest if I'd listened again. At least she spoke quickly enough that she obviously had confidence in her speaking.

So I think it's safe to say she can communicate well enough.

[zozzen]

'm not a native Chinese speaker, currently learning Mandarin in the United States thru self-study. I could understand most of what she said, and could probably have caught almost all the rest if I'd listened again. At least she spoke quickly enough that she obviously had confidence in her speaking.

So I think it's safe to say she can communicate well enough.

You, as many learners, are trained to have great error-tolerance ears, but you will, as many learners too, see a big frustration when you find what you learn is so different than in a non-classroom native environment.

The problems with the woman's mandarin include:

- wrong tone (tolerance level for this can be the highest among all mistakes)

- confusing sounds like zh, z ; x and s interchange randomly; r sounds like y.

- some pronunciations are just wrong, they don't sound like this.

These are problems I had before. I thought that i didn't have to overcome it because all my teachers, my colleagues and even native mandarin speakers who live in Hong Kong can understood me very well, but once i got to China, i found these 'minor' mistakes can often cause a problem. It doesn't mean people hardly understand anything she said, but it can be a big problem if people can only understand 50% of what she's talking about.

Of course it also depends on what you're going to speak of. The mandarin like this is fine only if you're satisfied with conversation in a wet market and never bother to discuss your experience to travel around china, chinese history, recent uprisings and riots.

[Lu]

It's funny how native Chinese can overlook n/l-mistakes, missing retroflexes, even s- and x-mixups, but not tones, get the tones wrong and you will be instantly misunderstood. For foreigners, it's the exact opposite: tones don't matter much, but letters do.

I used to actually find HK speakers who learned Chinese later on easier to understand than native Mandarin speakers,simply because their Chinese was closer to my own level: slower, and more simple, than that of native Mandarin speakers.

[zozzen]

It's funny how native Chinese can overlook n/l-mistakes, missing retroflexes, even s- and x-mixups, but not tones, get the tones wrong and you will be instantly misunderstood. For foreigners, it's the exact opposite: tones don't matter much, but letters do.

I used to actually find HK speakers who learned Chinese later on easier to understand than native Mandarin speakers,simply because their Chinese was closer to my own level: slower, and more simple, than that of native Mandarin speakers

I'm always curious on the actual figure of "native mandarin speakers" in China. To many, mandarin is an instructional and educational language rather than a dialect you speak at home.

Tones, like many mispronunciations, can cause a problem, but in Guanhua(官話) areas like Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Henan, people seem to have greater tolerance ears than people in the native homeland of mandarin. In some rare cases, you'll probably find that your "correct" mandarin pronunciation can't be understood by them, and you need to switch your tones to fix it. After all, the main difference in Guanhua dialects is on the tones rather than pronunciation.

For mispronunciations, the difference between n/l is blurred and you won't have problems on this most of time, but don't ignore the difference between chi/c/q, zh/z/j, shi/s/x. It can cause problems everywhere in China. If you tell a girl to "fen shi yi xia ni nan pengyou", you know how important these subtle differences.

I think it's not a well put to compare the mandarin of Hong Kong people to other learners. The general proficiency in Chinese of a graduate is probably greater than most western Sinologists you can meet in the west, but they don't speak it in the Mandarin way. When I hang out with a group of mainlandese and hongkonges in China, I often see that some hong kong guys trying to discuss advanced and in-depth topics with their depth of vocab, unfortunately in their terrible Cantonese accents and mispronunciations. That makes Hongkongese mandarin practically harder than western mandarin.