Accents are killing me....

[Smog]

Hey guys,

So I've been living in China for almost a year now and studying with the help of some students and my gf. I switched from using a textbook about six months in to just watching news programs, radio, etc and putting new words in my anki deck as they came. This has helped my listening ability tremendously. In a lot of ways I think it's because this makes studying really enjoyable to me. It's really thrilling to start to be able to follow what native speakers are saying in every day discussions. That being said, I'm having a really hard time understanding people on the street.

I live in the dongbei area, and while people here do speak very standard Chinese, for some reason the way they talk is so unclear to me, especially the men. It's as if they're talking with food in their mouths and not annunciating anything. There seems to be an 儿 sound on more words than I'm used to as well. Sometimes I get so down about it; I spend half the day studying Chinese only to go out and encounter a curious Chinese person whose sentences I can only comprehend about 50% of.

I'm in Sichuan traveling now and it's even worse in some ways. I talked to my gf's sister today and was having a hard time understanding fairly simple sentences. She wasn't speaking 四川话 either, she was trying to speak Mandarin for me. I felt like a complete ass.

This is more or less just about me venting. Just curious if people have had similar experiences.

[msittig]

Listening took the longest for me, especially in contrast to other languages I've studied.

And men of all cultures speak less clearly than women; I consider myself high-intermediate in Mandarin, but I still have a problem making male friends because (among other things) it's so hard to keep up an informal conversation with them. With women, it's much less of a problem.

[querido]

Edited out impractical verbiage. :-)

[WestTexas]

If you live in dongbei you will get used to the accent eventually. As for understanding people in Sichuan or any other non-standard area, even Chinese not from those areas have trouble.

[songkaren11221]

haha,not every Chinese person speaks good Mandarin.

dongbei hua has very strong accent,but southern accent is much stronger.

Sichuanhua is interesting.All of my friends think sichuan dialect is easy to understand and learn.But it depends,although i have lived in chongqing for 4years,yet sometimes i dont understand it.(sichuan hua and chongqing hua are almost the same.)

[abcdefg]

Accents are a big problem here in Yunnan. Even when people aren't actually speaking dialect 方言, lots of the Putonghua 普通话 one hears is colored by it. It isn't proper "school-type" Putonghua.

I'm currently on a Spring Festival trip with Chinese friends in Honghe Prefecture 红河州 and yesterday in the car at a highway tollbooth, the friend behind the wheel, a Kunming native, couldn't understand how much money the person in the booth was trying to collect.

She said it twice and he still was puzzled. I could understand him telling the toll booth girl "我听不懂你的方言。“ She repeated it a third time in more standard Chinese, we paid and drove on.

I have another friend in Kunming who teaches Chinese in public middle school. She says she has to fight the good fight everyday to keep the kids from speaking dialect and to help make their Putonghua pronunciation more "standard" 标准。

[陳德聰]

OP, I like that you say that the girl wasn't speaking 四川话 and you couldn't understand her "Mandarin" (emphasis mine). I just spent 春节 in 贵州 which had a lovely array of unintelligible 方言 for me to bumble through, and my all time favourite was the "普通话".

My boyfriend's little sister (5) seemed hellbent on telling me that I can't even understand 普通话, despite the fact that what she was speaking was very clearly 大普话 (大方's version of 普通话, kind of like an additional 方言 to add to their 大方话). Some 方言 in that area (SW China) are really similar to Standard Chinese in grammar and pronunciation, but some are radically different. Certain things are easy to get used to quickly, like in 大方话, 去 being pronounced [k^he], 冷 being [liŋ], but other things like word choice and sometimes grammatical structures aren't really things you can see coming!

My favourite part was on the long bus back into 贵阳 the man behind me was on the phone with someone clearly not from the area explaining to her that she could go to "huey en", that is "seng huey de huey", "en qun de en"... and on the other side of the conversation when the woman finally got it she went "噢！ 海...安... 海安!!" He also mentioned somewhere called "rugou" but I haven't figured that one out yet and I seriously doubt he was saying 乳沟

It may sound like tripe but really, really, really don't get too down on yourself about this kind of thing. Ever wondered why almost every program you watch on TV has Chinese subtitles?? It probably doesn't sound like a good response to say "most Chinese people can't speak Mandarin so don't worry", but instead I would say travel more, longer, meet new friends, expose yourself to all this diverse goodness and even though you may not fully understand everything, you will start to realize how impossibly high your expectations are for yourself if you expect to be able to understand everyone's 方言 coloured 普通话.

[iteachchina]

Ha, yes, we have the same problem in our area. Chinese here is 'se' 'se' 'se' everything. So when you buy something that's 4 kuai they say 'se kuai qian' and if you buy something for ten kuai it's 'se kuai qian'.

[Xuelan]

iteachchina - you must live near where I lived! I lived in 西安 and they all pronounced "sh" like plain old "s". It was such a pain in the butt to have them act like you're a complete idiot who doesn't even know your numbers when they pronounce 四 and　十 exactly the same!!

I had the same problem everyone else describes... at school, whether in class or during breaks I could carry on long conversations with my teachers without ever having to revert to English. But then I'd go out into the "real world" and I felt like I barely understood a third of what they were saying! I found that I had no problem conversing with or understanding children, it was only the adults who gave me trouble, with all their accents and dialects.

What really aggravated me was when I'd encounter the occasional person who couldn't comprehend anything that came out of a white person's mouth. I have excellent pronunciation (and I'm not bragging here - I'm ranting). My pronunciation level is far beyond any of my other skills, vocab, reading, speaking, listening, etc. On the telephone they all think I'm 中国人and go off at a thousand words per minute. (That’s one of the main things I’ve always struggled with – because my pronunciation is so good people assume I know a LOT more than I do.) But every now and then I’d come across someone in person who, just because I’m white, wouldn’t understand a word I said. They’d look at me like my speech was incomprehensible and I’d repeat what I was saying about five times, exaggerating more and more as I went, until finally a compassionate bystander would step in and say the exact same thing I was saying in the exact same way I was saying it and suddenly the first person understands! I just loved that...

[陳德聰]

I don't want to be a jerk but I find it highly unlikely that someone would not understand you "just because [you're] white". Perhaps your pronunciation is not as good as you believe it to be. I have noticed that there seems to be a relatively pervasive Dunning-Kruger thing going on with students of Chinese.

I do however sympathize with you on the phone issue, because I usually have a hard time understanding people on the phone when they do the whole "Hi I'm calling on behalf of such and such a company responsible for such and such a jargon, is now a good time to bother you with a survey?"

I'm not a hundred percent sure about Sichuan, but when I had dinner in Guizhou with a couple of drunk businessmen they actually got into a bit of a argument over the fact that they said 4 and 10 the same way in their 方言. Quite comical to see them talking math and using their digits to illustrate for clarity.

[li3wei1]

I think it is possible for a Chinese person not to understand another person speaking Chinese, because the other person doesn't look Chinese. I heard a similar story from Taiwan in the 80s: a white person, very sophisticated speaker of Chinese, walks into a shop, where the shopkeeper has his back turned. He asks the shopkeeper something, gets a perfectly reasonably response, then the shopkeeper turns around, sees him, and doesn't understand anything else he says.

It doesn't happen often, and it may be limited to certain areas, and it probably doesn't happen as much now as it did in the past. It's the flip side of being complimented on your pronunciation no matter how bad it is - the assumption that white people can't speak Chinese. Just taken to an extreme.

[陳德聰]

Is there any chance you could provide some sort of link to information regarding such a phenomenon? I can see how cognitive dissonance theory could explain that happening, but I would prefer to believe in the more likely situation where a person thinks they are speaking Chinese well but they are in fact not.

[Bates]

Hey guys,I am a Chinese, and in my dor, six boys are from six provinces, guess what, we can't understand each other if we don't speak mandarin, the 广东 and四川 dialect, we can't understand even one word, so, two boys often call their family member in the dor, no need to worry about talking something private, lol

//my home is about 35 miles away from my school when was in high school, the same object are call ed in different ways , it amazing,//so, mandarin is important:D:D

[imron]

I don't want to be a jerk but I find it highly unlikely that someone would not understand you "just because [you're] white". Perhaps your pronunciation is not as good as you believe it to be.

There's only one way to know for sure.

[陳德聰]

Or perhaps taking the 普通话水平测试 ;)

[Guest realmayo]

I don't want to be a jerk but I find it highly unlikely that someone would not understand you "just because [you're] white".

I find it highly likely.

1. There's tonnes of research suggesting that you don't notice certain stuff you're not expecting. Just google "basketball gorilla" to learn more.

2. I've often had Chinese people register a blank when I first say something to them, but once they've got used to the idea I can speak Chinese they understand no problems.

3. A few times I've been in conversation with Chinese students, using either Chinese or English. They'll then throw in a very simple sentence in French or German and I've no idea what they've just said. When they explain that they're speaking (say) French and repeat the sentence, I understand fine.

[陳德聰]

The invisible gorilla experiment is not about not noticing things you don't expect, it's about inattentional blindness when you divert significant portions of your attentional power to completing complex tasks like counting passes between people or driving. They used the theory as the basis for their explanation of why some cops beat the crap out of another undercover cop in their book, as well as for why cars seem to hit a lot of oncoming motorcycles when turning left. In theory, you could say that this same psychological phenomenon is causing Chinese people to not know what you're saying, but it would be because they're distracted by something requiring attention, not because you're white.

It could just as readily be that they need to take time to get used to the way you, as a non-native speaker, talk...

The same thing happens to me when I tell people that I speak French and they suddenly start speaking French at me in the middle of our conversation. But do I have trouble understanding them at first because they look like they can't speak French? When people who are clearly French speakers do it, I still have trouble if it catches me off guard. But none of that points to some sort of expectations for the first interaction with a person influencing your ability to understand them.

The Taiwan story li3wei1 brings up could just as easily be because "Hi" is a lot simpler and less prone to mistakes than "I'd like a double tall americano with five sugar lumps dangling from the string of an unused teabag".

I also think it's silly to say that you know your pronunciation is good because people speak to you fast on the phone. Since when do all Chinese people immediately adjust their speech to suit learners? I thought this was something that Chinese teachers had to practice. I witness English speakers being completely unable to modify their speech to suit ESL people all the time.

Maybe this needs its own thread, but I still don't see how you as an "Intermediate" speaker can claim that people not understanding you because you're white is more likely than people not understanding you because it's hard to understand you.

A great reality show idea is to film 大山 going around to various coffee shops and see how often he encounters this mysterious because-you're-white-I-don't-understand-you phenomenon.

[Guest realmayo]

The invisible gorilla experiment shows, along with countless other research, that we filter out lots (most?) of the input we get from our senses. The gorilla is the most striking example but yes, involves concentrating on some other activity. Most of the stuff we ignore is less striking. There's countless things that your eyes are picking up right now but your brain isn't bothering with.

I'd recommend a book called "Thinking Fast Thinking Slow" if you want an interesting explanation of the way the brain makes lots of time-saving assumptions and intuitions which are usually right but sometimes wrong.

To certain people in certain parts of China who see a white person open their mouth, the assumption is that they won't be speaking Chinese. Compound that with a non-familiar accent and the person won't understand a word you say. Repeat the sentence, give them time to realise that you can speak Chinese, and a normal conversation magically becomes possible.

When I referred to French I wasn't referring to complex sentences, but instead stuff like "Bonjour, je m'appelle Rock". In my case, if I'm not expecting to hear French, I don't! And from what I've read, that's normal.

Also, who are you referring to when you talk about "you as an 'intermediate' speaker"?

Finally 大山 in coffee shops is wrong in two ways. First, he's recognisable -- it's no surprise that he speaks Chinese. Second, the people most likely to not-believe-their-ears are unlikely to be regular customers at coffee shops.

[陳德聰]

You say "countless other research", but you don't show what this research is or how it is actually applicable to Xuelan's point, which is that his pronunciation is "excellent" and people don't understand him solely because he is white. We filter out a lot of information that our brains think is not important, but I think that when someone speaks to you, the sound coming out of their mouth is the primary stimulus is it not? Are you saying that visual stimuli are overriding auditory stimuli? Your being white is just so attention-consuming that I don't even hear you talking? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think that it's a bit far-fetched to say that it is more likely that this is a pervasive phenomenon than it is that this is a result of non-standard Chinese.

My point is that Xuelan says it's simply because he's white, it could not possibly be because he is saying words wrong. If you have a slightly different opinion, which it seems you do, then I can see it working with your theory.

Yeah the most common one I get is "oh, parles-tu francais?", and I rarely catch it the first time. Being caught off guard in the middle of a sentence is not the same as initiating speech though, which is the language environment we're discussing is it not?

Also, I completely read your "indeterminate" as "intermediate" so consider that my fault and you can discount what I said.

Finally, I meant have 大山 talk to the "barrista", not people in the coffee shop, and it was directed at li3wei1's anecdotal Taiwan story about the worker who miraculously stops being able to understand Chinese when he turns around and sees a white person. As for 大山 being recognizable, I assure you I and many Chinese have a case of "all look same" when it comes to white people.

[li3wei1]

I'm the indeterminate one, and I can't remember this ever happening to me. I know nothing about Xuelan's ability level except what he says:

On the telephone they all think I'm 中国人and go off at a thousand words per minute.

So I think it's safe to assume that his pronunciation is understandable. The guy in the story I was told said something more complicated than 'hi', I just don't remember what it was. It was something like 'do you have any X?', and what the shopkeeper subsequently refused to understand was anything at all, including 你好？

I can appreciate your desire for peer-reviewed studies in laboratory conditions with double-blind control groups, but I'm afraid there have been some funding cutbacks. We're not talking about everyone, not even a lot of people, but there are Chinese people who exhibit this behaviour, just as there were, at some point, Americans who thought that Jews had horns and tails. As a (white) American living in the UK, I have had people who either knew, or should have been able to tell from my voice, that I was an American, get into conversations with me about how "these immigrants" are coming over here and taking all our jobs. Assumptions based on skin colour overriding other evidence? Yup.