When are you going to learn to speak our language?

[abcdefg]

Was asked this twice yesterday (in Kunming.)

First in the morning market where I was buying fruits and vegetables. Often buy from the same friendly vendor there. After the sale, he said, "How long have you lived here, by the way?" I told him it had been about six years off and on. He looked at me with mock reproachfulness like a parent or teacher and asked, "Well, when are you going to learn to speak our language?"

I smiled, shrugged, said something non-committal, and moved on.

Same thing happened in late afternoon at a foot massage place I usually visit about once a week. Mild reproach for not using Kunminghua.

The two incidents in the same day drove home the point that Putonghua is still a foreign language here, especially for the middle aged population. It's not as foreign as German, Italian, English, or French, but it still takes a conscious effort for locals to understand and speak it.

To be frank, I've consciously resisted trying to talk Kunminghua because I think it will be far too easy to get it confused with Putonghua and I might wind up with some kind of a real "blended" language mess. But as long as I interact in Putonghua on the streets, I will always be an outsider in Kunming.

That's not a disaster of course, but it does seem to mark a new milestone. I would imagine others have had a similar realization in other parts of China after living there a while. Seems like only a year or two ago people would say, "Oh your Guoyu 国语 is not bad." Now I'm getting "When are you going to learn to speak our language?"

[drencrom]

When I first moved to China I thought it would be super-k00l to learn the local language instead of Mandarin. Then I visited another city and couldn't communicate. These Kunmingese are in the same boat. Don't worry about what they think - they're the equivalent of six-fingered, corn whiskey drinking hillbillies.

[anonymoose]

Noone in Shanghai expects foreigners to speak Shanghainese. When I do say the odd sentence here or there, it is usually met with surprise and amusement.

[gato]

Kunming Hua sounds pretty close to Mandarin, which means it should be easy to learn if you really want to.

[imron]

Kunming Hua sounds pretty close to Mandarin

I think that's the main problem :-)

[abcdefg]

I think Imron hit the nail on the head, the two are close enough that I'm afraid I'll wind up with a scrambled mess if I undertake learning Kunminghua when my Putonghua is still half baked.

[Guest realmayo]

The people you're referring too: are they speaking decent Putonghua (give or take a lot of sh/s zh/z ch/c laxness etc) or are speaking a version influenced by Kunminghua? If the latter, your ear could already be learning Kunminghua without you realising it. And if you don't realise it, you might unconsciously reproduce it in speech. So, there's something to be said for learning how Kunminghua works, so you can avoid it affecting your Putonghua. You might already have a tinge of Kunminghua?

I tried to practise a bit of Wuhanhua after learning the basic differences from Putonghua, and after becoming very comfortable having conversations where I spoke Putonghua and the other person spoke (could only speak) Wuhanhua. It's very similar to Putonghua: most of the differences map consistently. Trouble is that some of those tone changes as well as a tiny bit of vowel-accent and consonant change (q->ch, n->l) have crept into my Putonghua and are quite happy there unless I make an effort to avoid them. But then, I already tend to decide before I start a conversation whether to bother do all the ch/zh/sh retroflexion things or not.

So, if you did start learning it I'd say there's a very real chance it would affect your Putonghua, even if you tried to prevent it doing so. But probably not much, and arguably your Chinese would be no less comprehensible to any native speaker. Depends how important the "perfect accent" is for you. If you do start, try to occasionally get a Kunminghua speaker who has also learned perfect Putonghua to assess your Putonghua: someone from another part of the country might think that you have a tendency to slightly mispronounce, say, one particular initial, whereas the Kunming native will identify that as a tendency common to all Kunminghua speakers which you've unconsciously started mimicking.

[roddy]

How do you know they can't speak Mandarin, Drencrom? Maybe they just prefer not to...

Wouldn't do any harm to learn some basic stuff for the market - numbers, food names, bit of haggling vocab. They'd love you even more...

[abcdefg]

The vendor at the market I referred to above speaks clear and true Putonghua. He just turns it on for me and turns it off for local customers. Wouldn't be surprised to learn he's an educated gentleman who is selling fruit now that he has retired from his university position or some such. (Could be wrong of course.) And he is teasing me in a friendly way; not really being harsh or critical.

[Lu]

There was this chart somewhere that maps the compliments a foreigner gets and what it actually means: your pronunciation is so good = I can tell you're trying to speak our language, you sound like Dashan = you're a total beginner, your Chinese is not that great = your Chinese is not perfect yet but already pretty good, things like that. This seems a case in point :-)

If you can find someone who can really teach you Kunminghua, with pronunciation and everything, then that might be quite useful in separating the Kunminghua from the Kunming accent from more standard Mandarin. And I agree with Roddy that learning a little bit will likely get you a lot of goodwill.

[roddy]

Sounds like he's got plenty of goodwill anyway.

Hey, you should learn the Kunminghua for "Oh, I learned that ages ago, I just wanted to help you with your Mandarin."

[Meng Lelan]

I like Lu's thinking on this. A few phrases in Kunminghua would be nice to learn and practice in a natural Kunming environment.

[count_zero]

> Wouldn't be surprised to learn ... he is teasing me in a friendly way; not really being harsh or critical.

Yeah, there's something psychologists call the "spotlight effect", which is amplified if you're a foreigner living in China. It's important to remind yourself that actually, people don't really care about you that much. 99% of the time that guy's thinking about his fruit or his next game of mah-jong or whatever, not about how you talk.

There might be some kind of middle ground. A lot of 外地人 (people not born in Beijing) living in Beijing speak pretty standard Chinese but with some 儿化 on the local place name such as "潮阳公园儿"

> I've consciously resisted trying to talk Kunminghua because I think it will be far too easy to get it confused with Putonghua and I might wind up with some kind of a real "blended" language mess.

I can understand your concern but I think it's down to your language abilities. If you watch Once We Were Warriors, by the end of it are you able to impersonate a Kiwi accent as distinct from Australian? The best way to learn impersonations is to listen to one person a lot until that voice is in your head.

Final option: never leave Kunming!

[abcdefg]

It's important to remind yourself that actually, people don't really care about you that much. 99% of the time that guy's thinking about his fruit or his next game of mah-jong or whatever, not about how you talk.

Yes, no doubt that's true.

A good friend who is a Kunming native is now helping me learn a few phrases, primarily to use in buying produce at the market. She has reminded me that other tones often get converted into fourth tones here, and that it's normal for Kunming conversation to sound a little "quarrelsome" to outside ears.