Why is her Mandarin Rubbish?

[wrbt]

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.

I believe the opposite is true, non-native learners have ears with much less error tolerance as what they work with for listening skills is usually recorded dialogs and passages read by speakers with a clear, standard accent. I'm not in a classroom so I'm not getting a lot of pidgin Mandarin from classmates that is training my ears for errors... I'm listening to lots of recorded dialogues both rehearsed (like with textbooks) and more spontaneous like on LinkQ.

Here in America I can understand someone from Beijing a lot more easily than I can someone from Hong Kong who speaks Mandarin. Why? Because the Beijing person sounds a lot more like study materials, and I don't have the breadth of exposure to different accents that people in China encounter. I don't have good ears for variation from the standard.

Therefore I'll stand by my position that this woman is communicating well enough if someone like me who is mainly used to standard Mandarin can understand what she is saying.

[zozzen]

wrbt, try sooner as you can.

The topic seems to move to "Where can we hear the easiest mandarin? "

So what is it to you guys?

In my experience, the one who travels between north and south a lot can often speak the most comprehensible mandarin. They can usually understand various accents and at the same time their accent is modified to a level that is easily understood by people from different backgrounds. When I met native Beijingese who has less traveling experience, i often wondered if they put an orange into their mouths. What make it worsen is that Beijingese, including taxi drivers, are so devoted to take you to discuss political subjects with a lot of vocab needed. It's not easy anyway.

[renzhe]

I believe the opposite is true, non-native learners have ears with much less error tolerance as what they work with for listening skills is usually recorded dialogs and passages read by speakers with a clear, standard accent. I'm not in a classroom so I'm not getting a lot of pidgin Mandarin from classmates that is training my ears for errors... I'm listening to lots of recorded dialogues both rehearsed (like with textbooks) and more spontaneous like on LinkQ.

Personally, I've had the opposite experience, but it likely had to do with the butchered pronunciation I've listened to during classroom study

I found that foreigners who learned German often understood Bavarians better than native German speakers (with proper Standard German pronunciation). Perhaps we had greater tolerance, or perhaps the natives refused to understand what they perceived to be wrong pronunciation.

I also seem to be more tolerant to tone mistakes (like Lu said), probably because European languages don't feature them, so we naturally abstract them away.

But I think it would be good to specify what is meant by Mandarin. Zozzen seems to be referring to the putonghua standard.

[zozzen]

I found that foreigners who learned German often understood Bavarians better than native German speakers (with proper Standard German pronunciation). Perhaps we had greater tolerance, or perhaps the natives refused to understand what they perceived to be wrong pronunciation.

my experience to learn vietnamese is similar and it's very interesting to see how people react to it. I learned was southern accent and i found:

- northerners often understand me better than southerners. They assumed that I was from the south and spoke proper Southern vietnamese. When they didn't get my pronunciations, they thought that it was their fault not to understand it and tried hard to comprehend it. Southerners just know it's fake.

- Vietnamese who has many foreign friends learning the language tends to understand me better. They told me "yeah, many of my friends speak vietnamese like you and that's why i can hear you"

- Kids do far better job than adults. The weirdest experience to me was that a kid did as my interpreter and translate "my vietnamese" for other adult vietnamese speakers.

[zozzen]

But I think it would be good to specify what is meant by Mandarin. Zozzen seems to be referring to the putonghua standard.

Yes, i mean standard putonghua here, isn't it?

[wrbt]

In my experience, the one who travels between north and south a lot can often speak the most comprehensible mandarin. They can usually understand various accents and at the same time their accent is modified to a level that is easily understood by people from different backgrounds

And this is exactly why I believe students have a harder time understanding non-standard Mandarin. 95% of the language lab and enclosed-with-textbook materials that they use to build their listening comprehension is a very standard, accent-neutral Mandarin.

It makes encountering a variance far more difficult.

[wushijiao]

And this is exactly why I believe students have a harder time understanding non-standard Mandarin. 95% of the language lab and enclosed-with-textbook materials that they use to build their listening comprehension is a very standard, accent-neutral Mandarin.

It makes encountering a variance far more difficult.

wrbt, you might be interested in taking a look at this old tread I started, where I complained about the same thing.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/39-electronic-dictionaries25&highlight=listening+materials

For years I had the idea of making my own Chinese textbooks that would feature something like 20 chapters, with dialogues about common subjects, but then have audio (using local actors) for southern-style Chinese, northern-style (maybe like 河南話，or 北京話), or maybe 四川话, maybe the way HKers speak Mandarin.

But, the idea never about.

Edit: (Come to think of it, after re-reading John Pasden's link about how tones behave (or misbehave) in sentences, I think the biggest problem with most listening materials designed for intermediates and above is that they don't include enough stressed and unstressed parts of sentences, and instead, they speak in an semi-artifical way in which most tones are farly well pronounced Just off the top of my head, I'm estimate that 2/3 or so of most of the words in sentences are unstressed, but you'd never see a percentage that high in any sort of listening materials you could buy. The makers of the materials would probably feel that most of ther customers would complain that they can't understand the audio, and that it's useless for trying to reproduce sounds).

Anyway, I think I somewhat lost interest in the issue because I more or less went from listening by listening for the pinyin, to being able to listen for a more solid combination of sentence patterns, tones, and pronunciation.

What Lu wrote here, "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." is 100% true.

But even more than that, native speakers also listen for sentence tones, as described here. To be honest, I think that's actually one of the aspects that makes listening to native Cantonese speakers somewhat taxing. They often pronounce the tones pretty well, but all with equal emphasis- like an airport announcement in China, but with odd pronunciation. Whereas, on the vocab level, people in Shanghai have a lot of the z/zh, s/sh...etc. issues, but their individual tones and sentence tones are fairly similar to northerners, in my opinion.

Anyway, with that said, I'm not trying to pick on Cantonese speakers, or southerners. After all, whenever any group of people try to speak another language, they'll always have issues. Also, 9 times out of 10, foreigners in HK can't speak Cantonese (and haven't even bothered to learn) and 9 times out of 10 white collar Manlanders haven't bothered either. Ths puts a huge burden on HKers, having to be trilingual.

In Hong Kong, it's interesting to note who can and can't speak Mandarin, and to what degree. As for English, it seems to me, that it closely follows class lines, with (roughly) the rich and well-educated speaking almost as well as native speakers, and with the middle class speaking fairly solid functional English (but with issues, and of course this depends), and with the underprivileged speaking with just the basics. (Please note, this is a crude generalization).

But with Mandarin, you never know who will speak well. Some rich people and well educated can't speak any, or very minimal amounts, while other people, often in the service industry, speak very well indeed. But then again, some middle class and rich people can afford classes and they travel to the Mainland for business a lot. In other words, you never know who will speak Mandarin and to what extent.

Edited July 10, 2009 at 05:49 PM by wushijiao

[tooironic]

I think the biggest problem with most listening materials designed for intermediates and above is that they don't include enough stressed and unstressed parts of sentences, and instead, they speak in an semi-artifical way

Textbook dialogues speaking in an artificial way? Heavens!

Sarcasm aside, I definitely see your point. But you know I think this comes down to the fact that textbooks are more or less useless. Useless, that is, for anyone above the intermediate stage of learning. The texts they give you will always be just a little too comfortable and, of course, inevitably contrived. This is why, in my opinion, listening can only really be improved by engaging with the real world, speaking to real people - creating your own 'texts' this way. As I always say, language (especially spoken language) is a living, breathing thing that can't always be pinned down by rules and textbooks. So if you really want to improve your listening skills (which I certainly know I've struggled with over the years), the best way is to get off your backside and interact with some real people.

[wrbt]

Yup real people is good, or people of varying accents (perhaps in non-scripted dialogues) like the mythical textbook that wushijiao mentions.

The stuff on lingq is helpful in this, as their dialogues don't seem to be read line-by-line from some script and they've got people who are from different regions. That one girl on there has me saying "deng deng deng deng" at the end of a lot of sentences, it's so fun wooo.

There are a few textbook series that are based on TV shows from China, including:

- Scenario Chinese

- Reality Chinese

- Tell It Like It Is

These use segments of the show to form learning materials, and you definitely get more idioms and non-standard accents although it's still mainly from the North. Plus they're damned expensive man.

[zozzen]

And this is exactly why I believe students have a harder time understanding non-standard Mandarin. 95% of the language lab and enclosed-with-textbook materials that they use to build their listening comprehension is a very standard, accent-neutral Mandarin.

yes, textbook is, but a learner may not. Renzhe has good explanations on the issue.

I think the discussion is a little bit too much on this. If you're interested, in some other time i can make a cantonese-style mandarin recording for you and see how much you can get it.

[renzhe]

These use segments of the show to form learning materials, and you definitely get more idioms and non-standard accents although it's still mainly from the North. Plus they're damned expensive man.

I've always wondered why more people don't use this approach. There is a wealth of material out there (Chinese-language shows), and it often sounds more native than textbook recordings.

We have something similar going on with the Grand First Episode Project, but of course this doesn't match all the work that goes into a professional resource. Still, something like 奋斗 features everything from wedding to funerals to love to family affairs, to business meetings and going out, and in a much more realistic settings than most textbook dialogs and tape recordings.

There are so many language-learning podcasts on the net nowadays, and great work goes into all of them, and it seems to me that it's probably easier to annotate real Chinese TV shows.

[HashiriKata]

it's probably easier to annotate real Chinese TV shows.

But most textbooks don't rely on having a TV screen for them to work. Besides, if you use TV shows as part of your teaching materials, you'll need a licence to use them: not an easy issue for most textbook writers to deal with.

[wrbt]

yes, textbook is, but a learner may not. Renzhe has good explanations on the issue.

I don't understand what you mean here. Do you mean the textbook can't understand different Mandarin?

If you're interested, in some other time i can make a cantonese-style mandarin recording for you and see how much you can get it.

Is the woman in the video Cantonese style Mandarin? I was able to understand her pretty well.

I also stated earlier "Here in America I can understand someone from Beijing a lot more easily than I can someone from Hong Kong who speaks Mandarin." I assume the people fro Hong Kong I encounter are speaking Cantonese style Mandarin.

Without offering an opinion on the very subjective position of whether it's rubbish, I'd say that the woman in the video can communicate just fine.

[wrbt]

But most textbooks don't rely on having a TV screen for them to work

The resources I listed mainly use DVDs, but what sucks is that you have to be on a computer, not the comfort of a couch with a book on lap.

For some reason I hate language learning in front of a computer. Except when talking to you guys and gals of course.

[wrbt]

Woah imron I just listened to that 邓小平 speaking clip, now that's tough to understand.

Granted he's talking about slightly deeper issues that his pretty white dress. When I read the captions I can understand but if I just listen to him I have problems with it.

What type of accent is that anyway?

[Lu]

Well, Deng Xiaoping was from Sichuan, so likely Sichuan Mandarin.

Didn't that generation of leaders all have heavy accents? When they went to school there was not real Putonghua yet.

[wrbt]

Well if he's from Sichuan I bet he would have tasted really good, I love that stuff.

[Hofmann]

How do Sichuanese people taste?

And there is no such thing as "Cantonese style Mandarin." Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages. Miss Hong Kong was just speaking bad Mandarin.

[wannabeafreak]

Anyway, with that said, I'm not trying to pick on Cantonese speakers, or southerners. After all, whenever any group of people try to speak another language, they'll always have issues. Also, 9 times out of 10, foreigners in HK can't speak Cantonese (and haven't even bothered to learn) and 9 times out of 10 white collar Manlanders haven't bothered either. Ths puts a huge burden on HKers, having to be trilingual.

So true. However, at my work the HKers will just speak Cantonese or English anyway to the Mainlanders, and the mainlanders will just talk Mandarin or English back.

[zozzen]

I don't understand what you mean here.

anyway, test how much you know about this:

ni3 ba3 je2ge3 xue2gao1 jin1 dou1 wo2 de3 kun2zi liao3, hai2ji3 shang1 dou1 you2 hen2 a3, xian1 ba2 shue2gao1 fang4 lu1 xue2gui4 ying2gu4 xia1 ba, mian3 de yong2 fa4 liao3, tong2xi2 li3 bang1 wo3 na2 ge4 ji3jing4 guo4 lai2. Ying1dou1 zeng1 de hao3 ye1, ye1 shi3 yan2 la, je4li3 lan3qi4 you1 bu4 niang2, zau3 ji1dou4 zou3 chi1 mei3guo3 la.

i guess it's the so-called typical hong kong accent.

If putonghua like her is 100% comprehensive to everyone, you should be able to take this too.