Justyna Szpakowska - good example of speech?

[Shelley]

I have been watching Justyna Gourmet Journey II on CCTV documentary and the more I watch the more I have decided that I really like her Chinese.

 

She has a good tone to her voice not too high pitched and not too low. I find her easy to listen to. I can also understand some of what she says, I expect if my listening skills were better i would be able to understand more.

 

She won a Gold Prize at the 3rd Chinese Bridge Chinese Proficiency Competition a few years ago.

 

I really enjoy her program, always makes me hungry watching and she describes the tastes well.

 

Would her speech be a good example to try and emulate? I know she is Polish but I can't hear that in her accent but more expert ears may disagree, this is why I ask. Not sure I want to speak Chinese with a Polish accent

[Demonic_Duck]

Doesn't sound exactly like a native, sounds like a foreigner with high-level Chinese and generally good pronunciation. I think listening to her program would certainly be good listening practice, but it might be best not to take her voice as your model for your own pronunciation.

 

She occasionally gets a tone or two wrong, which is something to watch out for (e.g. in this episode she keeps saying “辣椒” as [làjiào] rather than [làjiāo]), but overall they're fairly accurate.

[陳德聰]

When I close my eyes, it sounds distinctly odd, but not "foreign" when she talks. I'm trying to figure it out, but it seems like just a slow version of a native speaker with a bit of a drawl.

[Shelley]

slow version of a native speaker

 

Perhaps this why I enjoy listening to her, I stand a chance of understanding what she says because she isn't racing along at native speaker level.

 

I am glad her speech is suitable for learning from, but as you say DD may not to be best to copy.

[oceancalligraphy]

I took a look at a couple of episodes (thanks for the link Demonic_Duck!). I hear an accent at times, and her pronunciation is not consistent. When she speaks slowly and deliberately, she lengthens the sound, and her pronunciation is more precise. But when she speaks faster, her pronunciation becomes messy. I suppose this happens to any non-native speaker. I would not recommend her voice as a model.

 

I think it was also mentioned in the orator thread of finding female voices to emulate. I came up with a few suggestions. Lin Tan (潭林) is a broadcaster for New York based Sinovision, but started out as an anchor in Beijing. CCTV4 did an interview with her. The anchor and voiceover of 經典天下 on NTDTV are also clear and precise. 沈春華 is a news anchor in Taiwan, and there are episodes of her old talk show, 沈春華 Life Show, on YouTube.

 

As an aside: Just browsing around the CCTV documentaries, the ones on Dunhuang and the Silk Road Theatrical Spectacle look really interesting. Thanks for sharing the channel, Shelley!

[Shelley]

No problem yst, I did a post about CCTV Documentary  ages ago when I first found it.

 

I think it is really good, you have of course to allow for the distinct bias there is but at times the scope of subjects is surprising.

 

I like the fact that it has English and Chinese speech with subtitles too, it is encouraging for me to listen to. There are times when I am not actually watching the TV but it is on and I try to workout whats happening and am pleasantly surprised if I get close

Enjoy!

[Angelina]

Thanks Shelly, she may not be the best person to imitate when learning Mandarin (unless you want a slightly Polish-flavored Mandarin, like a bit of 辣椒 to spice your pronunciation up   ), but CCTV Documentary looks cool, I discovered a show called 成语英雄 now. It's always good to learn more. Plus her Mandarin is great, she can be an inspiration anyway. 

 

When I close my eyes, it sounds distinctly odd, but not "foreign" when she talks. I'm trying to figure it out, but it seems like just a slow version of a native speaker with a bit of a drawl.

 

This is because when our eyes are not closed our perception is multisensory. We can't exclude what we see when processing the information. No matter how open-minded and nice we are, we see her as a foreigner (subconsciously we don't see her as someone who is supposed to speak Mandarin). Therefore, our standards are lowered. When we close our eyes the bias is gone and we can notice the drawl showing up now and then. At least this is my explanation. 

[oceancalligraphy]

 

When I close my eyes, it sounds distinctly odd, but not "foreign" when she talks. I'm trying to figure it out, but it seems like just a slow version of a native speaker with a bit of a drawl.

 

This is because when our eyes are not closed our perception is multisensory. We can't exclude what we see when processing the information. No matter how open-minded and nice we are, we see her as a foreigner (subconsciously we don't see her as someone who is supposed to speak Mandarin). Therefore, our standards are lowered. When we close our eyes the bias is gone and we can notice the drawl showing up now and then. At least this is my explanation. 

 

When I was evaluating the video, I did close my eyes to listen, but it was to listen closer, with the idea that decreasing one sensory input would enhance other senses. That's when I noticed the difference in her pronunciation during slow and fast speech.

[Angelina]

That's definitely true and has been proven. Is it also possible that our vision is bringing some "she does not look like a typical person who can speak Chinese" information and this subconsciously alters our perception of her speech? 

[Guest realmayo]

The easiest way for me to detect a foreigner speaking is if he or she is easy to understand. Watching a talk show with that guy Jonathan Kos-Read who was mentioned recently, I could understand him but there were some comments from the two Chinese people that I didn't get at all. But I think this is at least as much a vocabulary/grammar/colloqialism thing as it is an accent thing.

[tooironic]

I think that's true if the foreign speaker already has a good grasp of the language, but if they are at the beginning or intermediate stages, I sometimes struggle to understand what they are saying, especially if their tones are wrong.

[Angelina]

Or if their first language is a language you are not familiar with. 

[Guest realmayo]

Don't think that applies to an advanced speaker, Angelina, the accent shouldn't be strong enough. From classes a few years ago, though, it's nice being able to pick out Korean/Russian/Viet Chinese

[Demonic_Duck]

The easiest way for me to detect a foreigner speaking is if he or she is easy to understand. Watching a talk show with that guy Jonathan Kos-Read who was mentioned recently, I could understand him but there were some comments from the two Chinese people that I didn't get at all. But I think this is at least as much a vocabulary/grammar/colloqialism thing as it is an accent thing.

Watching Jonathan Kos-Read made me want to laugh out loud, not because his Chinese is bad, quite the reverse, because he sounds so damn 地道. There were a couple of places where I thought "hmm, maybe a native Chinese person would phrase/pronounce that slightly differently", but I honestly couldn't say.

 

That wasn't the impression I got from listening to Justyna Szpakowska - even though I was listening to it in the background without watching the visuals, I could still pick up a few 毛病s in her speech (though I wouldn't for a minute suggest that my own speech isn't peppered with exactly the same kind of 毛病s - I probably have ten times as many as hers, just in different places).

[Shelley]

I wonder if her first language being Polish affects her ability. Maybe the sounds in Polish are closer to the sounds in Chinese.

 

Where I live there are a lot of Polish people, in fact the Polish Club is right across the way, and my dentist is Polish. I hear a lot of Polish and have noticed a couple of sounds that sound similar, such as the ts sound.

 

Wonder if there is a language that has closer sounds?

[Demonic_Duck]

I can't speak for Polish, but I think having previously learnt a bit of Russian (another slavic language) helped me to some extent with Chinese phonetics, particularly pinyin [sh] (and by extension [ch], [zh] and [r]), and pinyin [x] and [q] (and by extension [j]).

Equally, there may be a certain amount of L1 interference which she suffers which native English speakers wouldn't - for instance, in one place I noticed her pinyin [r] almost sounded rolled, which a native English speaker would never do (even if they'd pronounce it incorrectly in other ways).

I can't imagine there's any Indo-European language which would give a significant advantage over other Indo-European languages as a mother tongue when learning Chinese; they all have their own unique features, some of which would be a help and others of which would be a hindrance. Sure, some may have more of the former or more of the latter, but I imagine for the most part they more-or-less cancel out.

[Shelley]

Yeah I guess your right DD it probably is not much help overall. Interesting though.