Do different nationalities have different accents?

[AlexBlackman]

We all know about foreign accents in English.  Without due care, your first language can lead to certain mistakes.

 

How do Australians, British and Americans sound different in Chinese?  What about French and Germans?

[GotJack]

I think this is a really interesting question, and I often think about it. I think the obvious answer is yes, having been in Chinese classes with a range of different nationalities. I often find French and Spanish people are bordering on having farcical Chinese accents, in that the simply speak with their own accent. This often however sparks my paranoia, that i probably am exactly the same!  Visualising what your own accent might sound like though, I find to be impossible, its like trying to imagine what a new colour might look like!  Anyhow Ive had 1-1 tutoring now for around 16 months, so I hope my accent is improving. Im certainly at the stage where whenever I converse mostly understood,

[Basil]

Good question.

 

The easiest way to answer it is to get people from all around the world to speak the same sentence in Chinese and post it on this thread!

[roddy]

Years and years back (maybe a decade) I had, or had seen, a book which went through various nationalities and described the problems they faced with Chinese pronunciation (the French don't have this sound, the Koreans confuse this and that, etc). Think it was from BLCU press and I'm sure I posted about it on here at least once. Can't find any trace of it though. Anyone got any ideas (or something more up to date)?

[Kobo-Daishi]

Watch this episode of 台灣食堂 (Taiwan Taste, a food program that's kind of like the Taiwan equivalent of A Bite of China), it's about new migrants to Taiwan opening restaurants.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48t0_Y4yhJ4

 

They feature a woman from the mainland (Guilin), a Frenchman making pizza, and a guy from Vietnam.

 

You can tell the Frenchman sounds like Inspector Clouseau speaking Mandarin.  

 

The French guy says that the Taiwanese like Hawaiian style pizza with pineapples and ham the most. In a previous post I wrote about Taiwan once being known as the "pineapple kingdom" from this series. The snooty French guy hates it though.  

 

Kobo.

[rezaf]

I also think starting a thread and asking English speakers from different countries to read a short text would be interesting. So far I think Americans are more prone to accent problems in Chinese.

[roddy]

It might be fun, but if you want to come up with anything meaningful you probably need a dozen speakers of each language to sort out what's the 'accent' and what's just someone's own particular issues. I also suspect you'd get a lot of the way there by comparing phonemes in the two languages. 

[ZhangKaiRong]

In my experience there are accents to some extent. When I studied in China, there were Koreans, Russians, Egyptians, Japanese and Vietnamese among my classmates. The Russians and the Egyptians had the most obvious accents, sometimes we couldn't understand them because it sounded absolutely like their native languages, even though they were using putunghua. Koreans also tend to use long vowels, just like in their native language. Vietnamese ignored the sh/s differences

[ChTTay]

I was watching a TV show with my gf and her sister. It was about this French guy climbing some tall building or cliff (or something) in China. Before he started climbing they interviewed him, as soon as he spoke a few words in Chinese I knew he was French and said as much. About a minute later his nationality popped up on screen ... French.

 

However, my girlfriend, who is Chinese, said she didn't hear 'French' ... just 'foreigner' haha

[Michaelyus]

Differing rates of tone production errors based on the L1 are particularly interesting... 

 

The (southern) British accent: the one I'm most used to. Inability to produce -ü consistently is the most persistent fault, merging into either -u or -iu. Often, -u also gets fronted. A flattened fourth tone / 去声 I think is the major distinguishing tonal feature, especially compared to most American accents I've heard. More indicative is the confusion of t- (but rarely d-) with c-, as modern British English tends to affricate its aspirated "t"s now (quite unlike most other varieties of English around the world). The use of the English "r" is conspicuous but rarely impedes communication; so too is the merging of the retroflex and alveolopalatal series (i.e. sh- vs x-, ch- vs q-, zh- vs j-) common to most Western accents (not to mention the 台灣國語 mesolect!).

 

The (metropolitan) French accent is particularly strong. The heavy nasalisation of all -ng and -n endings, the rounding of -ang and -an (into something like *-ong and *-on), the palatalisation of ti- and di- into q- and j- all impede pronunciation. Confusion between Pinyin -ou and -u is quite common, but that's an orthographic thing. I find a tendency to misuse the second tone, reflecting metropolitan French intonation (rising pitch up to the focus of the sentence). But as far as I can tell, keeping the first tone on a sufficiently level pitch to distinguish it from the fourth tone seems to be easier for the average French speaker (compared to southern British English speakers, and from my experience much better than your average Cantonese speaker). Use of the French j- for Mandarin Pinyin r- is a dead giveaway.

 

My experience with Spanish-, Italian-, and German-speaking learners is much less than the groups above; I notice Spanish speakers do have significant trouble distinguishing all those palatal fricatives in Mandarin. But Catalan speakers seem quite comfortable. 

 

I really would like to know whether the tonality of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and even northern England's English affects progress. It certainly is true that they do not suffer from the flattened fourth tone as much, and keep first tone level much more consistently than southern speakers.

[Demonic_Duck]

The easiest way to answer it is to get people from all around the world to speak the same sentence in Chinese and post it on this thread!

 

I also think starting a thread and asking English speakers from different countries to read a short text would be interesting. So far I think Americans are more prone to accent problems in Chinese.

 

Thread created.

[Lu]

Of course people from different backgrounds have different accents. That probably goes for every single language in the world: L2 learners from different linguistic backgrounds will have different accents.

 

It's nice that there's a thread, but anyone who has studied Chinese in China in a class environment will know this already from the various ways their classmates speak/spoke.

 

As to what: English speakers have trouble saying yu and nü and such. Koreans pronounce yu as wi (Hanwee, kou-wee). Japanese tend to barely open their mouth. French have a French accent (I quite like how it sounds, French-accented Chinese). I don't know what Dutch people do, probably because I do it too. I once had a Taiwanese teacher tell me that Russians have the best pronunciation and that even Russian speakers with generally bad Chinese have good pronunciation, because their own language has so many sounds that they already know how to make all the Chinese sounds. (In my ears they still have an accent though.)

[ZhangKaiRong]

"I once had a Taiwanese teacher tell me that Russians have the best pronunciation and that even Russian speakers with generally bad Chinese have good pronunciation, because their own language has so many sounds that they already know how to make all the Chinese sounds. (In my ears they still have an accent though.)"

 

Really? I think people with Slavic language tend to have a quite heavy accent. And they cannot pronounce the Chinese r, because they completely miss this sound in their native language.

My native language is quite close to Chinese in terms of sounds, the only thing we miss is the Chinese i in "ri" "si" "ci" "shi" etc. (we have a similar sound, but it's still a little tricky for beginners to differentiate between re and ri). But a lot of my classmates have a quite strong accent as well.

[li3wei1]

Years and years back (maybe a decade) I had, or had seen, a book which went through various nationalities and described the problems they faced with Chinese pronunciation

 

I've got the equivalent for English, Learner English, a teacher's guide to interference and other problems, by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith. It's very useful if you're teaching English to people from many other languages. I'd be very interested in the Chinese version.

[Shelley]

I sort of asked that question here http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/48283-justyna-szpakowska-good-example-of-speech/

 

I was also interested if some language's sounds lend themselves to easier pronunciation of Chinese sounds.

[Michaelyus]

Ah, that Mandarin -e! In my experience, in southern British English it's quite secure, usually taken as the -ir /ɜ/ in stir. Definitely unrounded, very centralised (much more so than your average Beijinger, whose -e is quite far back and more closed). In French speakers, you get the pronunciation of the enunciated e muet, which tends to /œ/ when stressed, and can be quite heavily rounded.

[LiMo]

Just uploaded my recording to the other thread. After listening to it countless times I can definitely hear my accent :/

I think it's not too bad though all things considered. I spend almost no time on speaking at the moment. Time yet for improvement!

[coolnicholas]

I think you can check a talk show from Jiangsu TV "世界青年说”

[AlexBlackman]

Do Australians overuse 二声？
 

The (southern) British accent: the one I'm most used to. Inability to produce -ü consistently is the most persistent fault, merging into either -u or -iu. Often, -u also gets fronted. A flattened fourth tone / 去声 I think is the major distinguishing tonal feature, especially compared to most American accents I've heard. More indicative is the confusion of t- (but rarely d-) with c-, as modern British English tends to affricate its aspirated "t"s now (quite unlike most other varieties of English around the world). The use of the English "r" is conspicuous but rarely impedes communication; so too is the merging of the retroflex and alveolopalatal series (i.e. sh- vs x-, ch- vs q-, zh- vs j-) common to most Western accents (not to mention the 台灣國語 mesolect!).

You are right! I grew up in Oxford and I found distinguishing and producing v and u really hard in the begining.  I found 'r' hard, but had no problems with the rest. I haven't tested my fourth tone.

Ah, that Mandarin -e! In my experience, in southern British English it's quite secure, usually taken as the -ir /ɜ/ in stir. Definitely unrounded, very centralised (much more so than your average Beijinger, whose -e is quite far back and more closed). In French speakers, you get the pronunciation of the enunciated e muet, which tends to /œ/ when stressed, and can be quite heavily rounded.

Very interesting, I had no idea I was mispronouncing it.  I'll go and practice now.

Thread created.

Thank you, I'll record something tomorrow morning.

I think you can check a talk show from Jiangsu TV "世界青年说”

Thank you.