Best sounding chinese dialect/fangyan

[Quest]

http://www.xlmz.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=484&sid=VQf8Gpoh

I came upon this thread and found it interesting. what's your favorite chinese fangyan?

[Guest Anonymous]

My favorite used to be Mandarin because it is my native tongue but since my one-month stay in Shanghai, I've started to like Wu dialect (Shanghainese). It's relatively difficult for a Mandarin-speaker to learn but I'm getting there ;-)

[ala]

New generation (spoken under age 40) Shanghainese is the most pleasant dialect to my ears. Very fluid-like, even, and clear. Doesn't feel like a "fangyan" at all, even in casual conversations; there is little drawl or slur, and almost no strongly contrasting pitches in a phrase. In fact Shanghainese uses euphonics and tone sandhi extensively to make sure that sharp contrasts between syllables do not occur (this makes learning it more of a problem for other Chinese though). Broadcast Mandarin is okay too, but Mandarin spoken by native speakers in conversation typically sounds much more cacophonous. Of course I'm probably biased as a native Shanghainese speaker.

Some older residents of Shanghai will say that older syles of Shanghainese sounded more pleasant than today's. The new style today is somewhat harsher and lower (more similar to Ningbo-hua and Japanese) than the old; giving it a more masculine and precise character. Personally I feel this was a much needed evolution for Shanghainese to better reflect its urban environment and Shanghai's position as a financial capital. In the transition from old to new, however, many vowels were lost and besides the "entering tones" (rusheng) and voiced consonants, only two tones (independent of initials and finals) are in the new style. Tone sandhi further "neutralizes" even those two distinctions. This phonological degeneration is occuring at a rapid pace for nearly all Wu dialects (Suzhou, Ningbo..); possibly from Shanghainese influence? or perhaps some trait in Wu that causes it to change at a rate far faster than any other major Chinese dialect today.

[skylee]

I only speak Cantonese and know nothing about other Fangyan. I wouldn't say Cantonese is good-sounding. But it is very 鏗鏘, sonorous, forceful and lively (and also noisy). In my opinion, there are always "sharp contrasts between syllables" in Cantonese.

Yesterday I saw an ad that used the words 叱吒. Consider how bland the Putonghua pronunciation "chi4 zha4" is when compared to the Cantonese (something like "chick chart", both are rusheng).

[Quest]

903?

[skylee]

Yup.

[smithsgj]

> The new style today is somewhat harsher and lower (more similar to Ningbo-hua and Japanese) than the old; giving it a more masculine and precise character. Personally I feel this was a much needed evolution for Shanghainese to better reflect its urban environment and Shanghai's position as a financial capital.

Ala can you expand on that a bit? I'm surely not alone in not having the faintest clue what you're talking about! You go from "harsh and low" to "masculine and precise" to urban and financial.

Is is that men have low voices, and most people working in finance are men? THat's a bit of a leap of faith in itself; and then how do you account for harsh > precise > urban?

[trooper]

My opinions are based purely on how they sound.

If you're talking about the quality of broadcasters' formal speech, I rate Cantonese highly, higher than Mandarin, which sounds a bit too smoothed out and bland to my ears. I can't comment about broadcasting in other Chinese dialects though.

If you're are talking about everyday informal language, I have a different opinion. I think Cantonese sounds a bit too coarse. Here, Mandarin's slightly better.

I've heard Wu, Min and Hakka in informal speech and I don't like the sound of any of them!

[pazu]

Being a native Cantonese speaker, it's arrogant to say Cantonese is the best sounding Fanyan no matter what I think...

But I do think Shanghainese sounds very nice to me, very soft, every sound element crushes into a single second, that when you are trying to get some ideas of what people were talking in the previous moment, it'll vanish like a breeze.

[confucius]

I've acquired an ear for Zhejiang dialect. (Having a girlfriend in Hangzhou really helps!) I still can't speak a word of it, but I have learned to recognize it when it's spoken.

One day I was meandering around the streets of the Fengtai District of southern Beijing when I overheard a couple of ladies talking about me as I approached them on the sidewalk. As I got closer, one smiled to the other and said "Laowai!" (foreigner). I waited until the precise moment that I was a step past them, turned my head, smiled, and exclaimed "Zhejiang!" to their astonishment.

(The Fengtai District of Beijing is known locally for its significant population of Zhejiang immigrants.)

[Ian_Lee]

I guess Cantonese is good for making speech but bad for making out.

I have heard from some old tapes of speeches made by Sun Yat Sen and Wang Ching Wei in Cantonese.

They were really motivating.

But when I heard the speeches made by Mao and Deng in Putonghua, I couldn't help dozing.

But when I said "I love you" to my former girl friend in Cantonese years ago in HK, she complained she got goose bump.

However, I recalled when I confessed to my Taiwanese girlfriend that "I love you" in Mandarin, she couldn't help smiling with tears coming down her cheek.

[Quest]

But when I said "I love you" to my former girl friend in Cantonese years ago in HK, she complained she got goose bump.

Cantonese doesn't have a good equivalent of love. 中意is not enough, but 爱 is too much.

[Ian_Lee]

Actually I don't understand why Cantonese speakers hesitate to say the word 爱

By the way, the traditional script of this character with the heart in the center is much more conveying than the simplified character which uses the friend in the bottom part.

Love is much more than friendship.

[confucius]

It's kind of hard for foreigners to say "Ngo oi lay" without sounding like a snorting hog. "Woe eye knee" is much easier to pronounce; stick with Mando instead of Canto when popping the big question:

"wo ai ni, jia gei wo?"

That'll work in Hong Kong or Toronto Chinatown or wherever your Chinese girlfriend may be.

[skylee]

I think the word "愛" when spoken in Cantonese is too bold/strong (making Ian's ex-gf's skin crawl). We say "中意", which is mild and elegant in my opinion. To make it stronger it can be 好中意, 非常中意.

By the way, I would really like to write the expression as "鍾意" (pronunciation same as "中意" in Cantonese), which reminds me of 鍾愛 and 鐘情.

[Ian_Lee]

Skylee:

鍾意 is far less passionate and direct than 愛

I guess there are some reasons why Cantonese speakers are so inhibited to express love.