Improving my accent... but which one?

[renzhe]

always remember that mandarin is only the second language of about everyone in Taiwan

I was under the impression that Mandarin was the mother tongue of the vast majority of today's Taiwanese...

15% of the population are native speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien, other dialects are probably negligible.

[Kamille]

I live in Kaohsiung and that might well influence my judgement. And it's true that I didn't check any statistics before speaking. But where do you take the information from? 15% seems very very few to me.

[renzhe]

Makes sense -- Kaohsiung is predominately Taiwanese-speaking. You'll find a different story in Taipei, for example.

I did a quick check on wikipedia. The 15% figure is for first-language speakers, more people speak Hokkien as a second language, after Mandarin.

[OneEye]

Taiwanese don't really pronounce "zi" because of an accent but because of a certain type of "laziness"

 

I disagree. In my experience, most Taiwanese, at least the native Mandarin speakers (I live in Taipei, so that's most people under 50 or so), do distinguish between zhi and zi (and all the other retroflex sounds), just not in the same way that they teach in the textbooks. That is, they pronounce them as alveolo-palatals rather than retroflexes. It's a common misconception that they pronounce z/c/s and zh/ch/sh the same, but I haven't found that to be the case at all and don't really understand why people think that. I guess [tɕ] sounds closer to [ts] than it does to [ʈʂ], but still, the distinction is there.

[Kamille]

Not in my experience. They would even mix up both sounds, like pronouncing 蜘蛛 "zhi zu" once and "zi zhu" the next time, or pronouncing 所以 as "shuo yi".

 

If i got your point you mean that they actually make a very clear difference using a typically Taiwanese sound that doesn't exist in 普通話 and that just doesn't sound that much different from "zi"? How to explain the mixing ups then? Because it does clearly sound like a real normal "zhi" sometimes.

[OneEye]

A lot of Taiwanese people have a notion that they don't 捲舌 when they're supposed to, and so they overcorrect, often on the wrong syllables. With some people, this overcorrection is more prevalent when they're speaking to foreigners because they assume they need to sound more 標準 for us to understand (ironically, it tends to make it more difficult to understand). For example, I've heard "shìshíshì" for 44. However, that's a separate issue from what they do in normal everyday conversation.

 

You've misunderstood. I was a bit hesitant to use IPA, but unfortunately using pinyin doesn't really help here either. Taiwanese people tend to pronounce zh/ch/sh in the same place they pronounce j/q/x, though with different vowels of course. I've attached a recording of what I mean:

 

1. zi/ci/si

2. ji/qi/xi

3. zhi/chi/shi (Taiwanese Mandarin)

4. zhi/chi/shi (my best impression of standard/mainland/普通話/whatever)

 

Then the word 正常 using 1. 普通話, 2. Taiwanese Mandarin, and 3. z/c (wrong)

 

If I said 正常 like #3, my friends would correct me. Older people and people with heavy 台語-influenced accents might pronounce it that way (but it would probably be more like zèncáng), but native Taiwanese Mandarin speakers would not.

zcs.mp3

[Lu]

Taiwanese don't really pronounce "zi" because of an accent but because of a certain type of "laziness" (and of course bad influence since about everyone speaks like that here; always remember that mandarin is only the second language of about everyone in Taiwan).

Everyone speaks like that and influences others to speak like that as well = accent. It has nothing to do with laziness, this is simply the way people speak there. Might as well say Flemish is not an accent but just people not bothering to learn proper Dutch.

[Kamille]

@OneEye: What you are saying might well be true but I'll need to have my friends listen to your recording to make sure of it. I'll keep you updated.

 

@Lu: Of course it can only be true if mandarin is not their first language...

[Lu]

People can (and usually do) speak their first language with an accent. Different areas often speak with different accents. People in the east of Holland pronounce their o's and a's different from people in the west, not because either is 'lazy', but because that's how everyone around them speaks. I'm sure you can think of examples in your own country and language. There is such a thing as the Taiwanese accent, and I take issue with calling it 'laziness'. That's simply nonsense.

[Kamille]

I think you misunderstood my last reply. My point is:

An accent in your first language is called an "accent".

An accent in your second language is called "laziness".

 

Do you also disagree with this?

 

Now OneEye told me that actually only 15% Taiwanese actually had Taiwanese as a first language and mandarin as a second (and I find the number incredibly low), which makes that, yes, Taiwanese speak mandarin with an "accent".

 

And basically everyone has an accent anyways. What you can say about the standard version is that it is a "standard accent". It is still an accent.

 

Given that 85% Taiwanese speak mandarin as a first language I might just reconsider my point of view and bring it together with yours: some stuff just sound "too Taiwanese" (and i would like to add the transformation of the "ie" sound into "ei", like in ""sei4 sei4" to the list of "over-Taiwanese" stuff). Young people don't talk like that anymore, except Taike maybe.

[OneEye]

@OneEye: What you are saying might well be true but I'll need to have my friends listen to your recording to make sure of it. I'll keep you updated.

 

Sure, but it would be even better if you decided to train your ears to the point that you could trust them to tell you if I was right or not. Also keep in mind that I live in Taipei while you live in Kaohsiung. The accents differ, so your mileage with your friends may vary.

 

 

 Now OneEye told me that actually only 15% Taiwanese actually had Taiwanese as a first language 

 

Go back and check that again. That wasn't me.

[Lu]

I think you misunderstood my last reply. My point is:

An accent in your first language is called an "accent".

An accent in your second language is called "laziness".

Do you also disagree with this?

I somewhat disagree because I think this is a bit harsh, but I see what you mean now and that you're not calling a Taiwanese accent lazy.

[Kamille]

Sure, but it would be even better if you decided to train your ears to the point that you could trust them to tell you if I was right or not

Well if you ask me, my friends all seem to pronounce a good old "zi" everywhere they can. But you seem to know your subject and that's why I need confirmation.

 

 

(Actually yeah, it wasn't you who said that...)

[renzhe]

The 15% figure was from me, taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Hokkien

Things might have changed since 1997, of course, but it is unlikely to be a majority. The KMT pushed Mandarin rather aggressively for decades, and a large number of Taiwanese are descended from Mainlanders who came over after the civil war.

[OneEye]

my friends all seem to pronounce a good old "zi" everywhere they can

 

Perhaps. Or perhaps you're hearing it that way because you haven't learned to distinguish the difference yet. That's kinda my whole point here.

[Kamille]

But, renzhe, this Wikipedia article says this:

Native speakers
15 million Hokkien (Hoklo) in Taiwan  (1997)

Which is quite the opposite of your "15%" point (of which I didn't find confirmation anywhere). But I sure found this quote on the top right corner of the page.

Plus, 15 million native speakers, that's about 70-75% of the population (knowing that Taiwan now has 23,373,517 inhabitants, that they were probably a bit fewer back in 1997, and that mandarin is constantly gaining speed). That makes a huge majority of Taiwanese-speakers, like I was saying.

 

and a large number of Taiwanese are descended from Mainlanders who came over after the civil war

I don't have the stats here, once more, but I know that they weren't that many actually. Or should I say "they weren't that many compared to the people who were already there". Their arrival after 1949 almost didn't change anything.

[renzhe]

Actually, you're right, I misread that. 15 million is indeed 70%.

I was sure I read the 15% figure somewhere, and assumed that the discrepancy was due to many young people being better at Mandarin nowadays, but it seems like I got something mixed up.

Sorry about that, I shouldn't post when busy...

I don't have the stats here, once more, but I know that they weren't that many actually.

It was 2 million mainlanders joining 6 million Taiwanese in 1949, so it's quite a shift.

[Lu]

It was 2 million mainlanders joining 6 million Taiwanese in 1949, so it's quite a shift.

I believe that officially, about 15% of the population in Taiwan is waishengren, but only a tiny minority of that is people who really were born on the mainland (because most of the people who came over with Chiang Kai-shek have died of old age by now). That 15% includes people like a former colleague of mine: three Taiwanese grandparents, born and raised in Tainan, fluent Taiwanese, but counts as a mainlander because his father's father was one.

But I wonder if you can really say that the Taiwanese whose first language is Taiwanese don't count as native speakers of Mandarin. Virtually all education is in Mandarin, almost all writing is in Mandarin... Everyone in Taiwan speaks lots of Mandarin from at least the age of six. I don't think you can really call that a second language in the same sense that Chinese is my second (well, third) language.

[renzhe]

Yeah, I wonder how many of the 15 million have a better command of Taiwanese than Mandarin.

But I don't expect reliable statistics on this.

[Nathan Mao]

Personally, I think the goal should be to try to have as neutral an accent as possible: i.e., don't imitate the local Taiwanese, but don't imitate the local Beijingers, either.

 

Someone mentioned British vs American vs Australian accents of English.  I think more appropriate examples might be a Bronx accent vs a backhills Georgia accent vs a Cockney accent vs an international news broadcaster.

 

There is no reason to go out of your way to imitate a heavy regional accent, and that's what I consider the Taiwan accent to be in the Chinese-speaking world.

 

You want to minimize communication problems with the maximum number of people, and the best way to do that is be as accent-neutral as humanly possible.