Is this a native speaker?

[Hofmann]

Umm...I listened to the first one. At first it didn't sound like she (or he, using she from now on) is a native speaker. However, the kinds of mistakes she made indicated otherwise. First, it's obvious that she isn't a native speaker of Standard Mandarin.

There is a possibility that she is a native speaker of some other Chinese dialect/language, as she makes some mistakes that are common with Chinese speakers but pretty impossible with 老外, such as the mixups between zh and z, n and l.

Furthermore, something that screams "Chinese speaker" loud and clear is the preservation of features that are lost in Standard Mandarin, like how she pronounced 眨眨眼 as zhánzhányǎn. In Middle Chinese, 眨 was something like [tʂep]. In My Cantonese , that would normally map to [tɕaːp˧]. However, the ending bilabial implosive, usually written [p], became a nasal [m], and so 眨 is usually pronounced [tɕaːm˧˥]. In Standard Cantonese, that would be [tsaːm˧˥], which is zaam2 in Jyutping. Next, as finals with [m] in Cantonese map to finals with [n] in Mandarin, the logical mapping would be to zhan3 in Pinyin. However, because this character had an entering tone instead of a rising tone in Middle Chinese, the Beijing Mandarin tone doesn't necessarily have to be 3 (上), and so, from a Cantonese point of view, zhan2 is not unexpected. What is unexpected is the complete omission of the coda. However, this is normal from a Middle Chinese perspective, as entering tones usually lose their stop consonants in Mandarin. Therefore, this person might be a Cantonese speaker.