Deciding which accent to learn?

[creamyhorror]

My point is to respect different accents and to avoid placing value judgements on them early on.

Well said. In real life, there's nothing wrong with choosing to sound southern, Taiwanese, or Southeast Asian, as long as you're clear and understandable. I don't add 儿s to my speech, even with northerners; to my mind it's simply not necessary.

At the same time, I agree you should certainly strive to eliminate any hint of a non-Chinese accent, as Mike N and anonymoose have said - unless you like being classed as an expat with bad tones. Which isn't entirely wrong in itself, just that it might be perceived as indicating a low standard of Chinese in general.

[jkhsu]

Which accents do you think are the most important to be able to understand?

I would say Beijing or northern accent. I know native Chinese people (not from Beijing) who talk to Taxi drivers in Beijing and have a hard time understanding them. On the other hand, a Beijing native can understand the taxi drivers fine in Shanghai. In Hong Kong, it's sometimes better to speak English instead of broken Mandarin.

[hbuchtel]

I would say Beijing or northern accent.

I spent all my time in the South, and find it very difficult to understand Northerners with strong accents. Watching more 相声 would probably help with that!

This November I'll be in Guangzhou doing interpretation work, and am a little concerned about being able to understand patients with a strong local accent. Does anybody know of any online resources that feature strongly accented Guangdong-Putonghua?

[rezaf]

Do the patients and doctors speak in Mandarin in Guangzhou? Here in Shanghai in most hospitals over 90% of the conversations are in Shanghainese. Every once in a while when a doctor or a patient speaks Mandarin I get too excited to worry about the accent.

[Lu]

A standard accent, with or without erhua, but preferably with some juanshe, would be best, I guess. Don't make it too Beijinghua though, taxi drivers in Beijing sound to the untrained ear like a string of erererer, very hard to understand.

And don't overestimate the 'taken for Chinese over the phone' thing. Many Chinese can't imagine that anyone not Chinese would ever be able to string a sentence together in their language, so whoever manages to do so with understandable pronunciation and acceptable grammar must inevitably be Chinese, or else huaqiao. You reach that point sooner than you think.

[hbuchtel]

Do the patients and doctors speak in Mandarin in Guangzhou? Here in Shanghai in most hospitals over 90% of the conversations are in Shanghainese. Every once in a while when a doctor or a patient speaks Mandarin I get too excited to worry about the accent.

Yea, that is generally true here in Changsha as well, but it depends on whether the doctor is a local or not. For this job in GZ the doctor doesn't understand Cantonese, so his patients will have to speak Mandarin (or find somebody to translate).

[msittig]

A couple reactions.

It seems too troublesome to try to find, for example, how a Shanghainese person (speaking Mandarin) would say something.

(disclosure: I've lived in Shanghai for 7 years now) It doesn't contradict this point directly, but I'd like to agree with jkhsu that the Shanghai young, white-collar accent is pretty much standard Mandarin nowadays. And it's not just spoken by Shanghainese: Shanghai is becoming a melting pot of young domestic immigrants from all over China that have to work together in business environments. So while Shanghainese is used conversationally, Mandarin in the classroom or office is hardly affected by it.

Especially since it dispenses with erhua, the Mandarin spoken by my peer group in Shanghai is my preferred accent.

End of the day, ESL learners will need to be able to comprehend English in all its spoken varities at some point.

Disagree. I'm a *native* English speaker and I still have trouble with Indian English, Scottish English, and Singlish. ESL learners should be able to evaluate and pick which dialects to specialize in, being made aware of their pros and cons.

[rezaf]

Depends on where you live and work in Shanghai. Still most places are heavily Shanghainese but probably these places are not where expats and waidiren end up wortking at.

[jkhsu]

Still most places are heavily Shanghainese...

Can you tell us which places you are referring to? I am guessing you are talking about places where people actually speak Shanghainese.

[rezaf]

Sorry I know that it is not directly related to the topic but yes I mean places where people speak Shanghainese most of the time and it means that no matter how well they speak Mandarin still it's difficult for waidiren and maybe even foreigners who can speak Mandarin to work in that kind of environment. There are newly developed places in Shanghai like Zhangjiang and Minhang where there are many waidiren and there are places in Shanghai that are more populated by Shanghainese people. There are also certain types of companies that prefer Shanghainese employees and certain companies that prefer waidiren because of reasons like 四金 etc. But all in all although the number of waidiren has been increasing rapidly there are still more Shanghainese people in Shanghai than Waidiren and Shanghainese people prefer to speak Shanghainese to each other. I actually read something about this problem recently on cbnweekly as a part of 各种被忽视的“不安全”:

外企的上海办公室里的“上海话氛围”

　　虽说是外企，但是除了正式的会议场合，很多时候上海公司人互相之间还是会用上海话聊天。说起来其实当事人也不是故意用方言“示威”，或者向同在一个场合里的其他人隐瞒他们在聊的话题。

　　不过既然知道现场还有可能听不懂上海话的同事在，还用方言聊天就显得不那么礼貌了。换一个角度说，作为听不懂的那一方，也可以用尽量平和的心态看待这件事，有些人只是说上海话说得太习惯了，聊high的时候不自觉就调到那个频道里，自己也还没意识到。

　　在一家人力资源咨询公司担任主管的孟元，就经常碰到和两位副主管开会时，那两位激烈地争辩起某个话题，句句都是语速极快的上海话。对此，他只能等他们争辩告一段落，再“严正”地提醒他们：说普通话！

　　公司的规章制度里当然没有写“说普通话”这一条，不过如果是对自己的职场表现、职业态度还有所要求的公司人，那就尽量记住在公司的公共场合里，用普通话交谈。

As for my own experience Shanghainese is one of the biggest problems of international students of our university in short-term and long-term internships. I'm sure Chinese students have the same problem but they get used to guessing and understanding Shanghainese faster than us specially those who come from places close to Shanghai. In my recent experience of the 11 doctors that I know in internal medicine ward there are only 2 who are not from Shanghai and of more than 30 patients that I have seen these days only 2 patients didn't speak in Shanghainese.

[Koxinga]

My knowledge of Chinese is elementary, but I pretty much learned pinyin and I can pronounce everything correctly. I used to talk to people from the northern parts of China and I didn't have trouble understanding them.

However, my new Chinese teacher is from Sichuan and has trouble with zh (z), sh (s), etc. I often get confused when she talks. Is there any way to get used to it, but still keep my northern pronunciation?

I wouldn't want to find a new teacher because it's difficult to find a teacher that explains things as well as she does for the same money (free) B)

[Scoobyqueen]

However, my new Chinese teacher is from Sichuan and has trouble with zh (z), sh (s),

At my Chinese school, they dont allow teachers who do not have a standard pronunciation to teach. I can see the point in that. I am surprised that this is the case at your school.

[jbradfor]

Think of it as free learning-other-accent lessons.

No, I'm serious. I'm really wondering if having all the teachers use "Standard Mandarin" is such a good idea. It leads to this huge disconnect when one leaves ones classroom and tries to talk with a taxi driver.

[roddy]

Yeah, but realistically you can't expect schools and learning materials to give a broad survey of accents. He could learn from his Sichuan teacher and still have trouble in a taxi in Wuhan. China's got a standard, might as well work to it - the Chinese, by and large, do.

[jkhsu]

In my recent experience of the 11 doctors that I know in internal medicine ward there are only 2 who are not from Shanghai and of more than 30 patients that I have seen these days only 2 patients didn't speak in Shanghainese.

Thanks for describing your scenario. Your experience and position in Shanghai is quite unique I think, especially for a foreigner. The other situations I can think of would be in state owned enterprises (not consumer facing) where the majority of workers are clerical types over the age of 40. Most of those workers tend to be Shanghainese and they will talk in Shanghainese but it's pretty hard for most foreigners to encounter those situations in Shanghai.