Is local dialects an advantage in learning standard Chinese?

[英泰inte]

大家好!

 

My  friend from Yunnan province needs some help knowing how dialects affect foreigner's learning chinese while in China, so she made a survey. It's meant for those of us who are in China or have studied in China. If it isn't too much trouble, can you all help us a little by answering her survey? It's very short. 谢谢for your time.

 

留学生调查问卷1.doc

 

Once you finish, you can email it to: 1075272595 @ qq.com

 

(p.s. sorry if this post is in the wrong forum, its OK to move it if so)

 

EDIT: 

 

Here it is: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P2SFZBF

 

谢谢 Vellocet for suggesting i use surveymonkey

[Basil]

A potentially interesting study, but I think my perceptions of how Chinese dialects have influenced my Chinese level would prove too biased and potentially detached from reality to be even the silghtest bit reliable..

[vellocet]

Put this on surveymonkey.com instead, and you'll get more participants. 

[英泰inte]

好的, I never even knew about that, thanks Vellocet. 

 

Here's the survey on  survey monkey:

 

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P2SFZBF

 

@Basil, it's OK, you can take it anyways! (if you want) 

[Enoxus]

Good day!

 

I’ve read the survey and I’d say that the survey is quite thoughtful. I would like give my two cents about learning Chinese and its dialects.

 

In my opinion, foreigners can treat Chinese dialects as different languages and these languages “happen to” use Chinese characters as its written languages. Even so, some Chinese dialects are not using all the “standard” characters as main written language; Yueyu (粤语 Cantonese) is one of them. 

 

There are many ways to learn a language and the most efficient one would be “live the life with native speakers” as much as you can. No language can be taught 100% by studying it in a classroom; any language can be learned by living with native speakers (educated ones would be better), even without a school teacher.  I’ve learned Arabic for 5 years in college and I could hardly communicate with any one in an Arabic country after I graduated and traveled abroad. Later on, it took me 6 months to be fluent in “Sudanese Arabic” by working and living with locals there. And a real story about my language skills goes like this: I was pulled over by a policeman on an interstate road because he saw I was a Chinese and he heard about some Chinese could speak like a native Arabic speaker in a short time near his area. That happened to be me. He didn’t know I’d spent 5 years to be “prepared” to learn the real language though. And truth is, I could barely understand Egyptian Arabic when I travel to Cairo later even I’d been living and speaking Arabic in Sudan for 4 years. Dialects matter for sure. Unlike other language learners, I would write on a piece of pager in Standard Arabic to communicate with whomever Egyptian or Saudi or Emirati if I happened not to be sure about what they were trying to talk to me, and I started learning very fast that way, with their Real language in life.

 

Dialects do have effects on learning a Standard language but it can be very helpful to deal with the Standard language as well.  It would be very helpful if one concentrates on key words and basic knowledge of the links between a dialect and Putonghua; forget about the pronunciation, it can be “cured” in no time if you want to change it when you throw yourself into a Putonghua world. Drop the Ideological burden about how difficult the Chinese is. Feel the local people, feel the life they are living on, and feel the tones, the faces, the emotions, the gestures, the body movements when they talk, even feel their smiles and sadness, feel the (local) culture. A language lives and exists with its culture, Chinese is nothing special but a language lives and exists with Chinese culture as well. 

 

Spoken Chinese maybe easy, but try to get used to read and write in Chinese characters would be very helpful and important to learn and master this most difficult language in the world. Make some Chinese friends, talk to them, read with them, and write with them. I bet anywhere you go you will find Chinese people are very friendly to foreigners.  

 

Cheers.

[JustinJJ]

It would be very helpful if one concentrates on key words and basic knowledge of the links between a dialect and Putonghua; forget about the pronunciation, it can be “cured” in no time if you want to change it when you throw yourself into a Putonghua world. 

 

 

I'm not sure about that. I don't think accents change much unless you try really hard to correct it, so it's best to not pick up non-standard habits when you begin learning Chinese.

 

My view is that you are better off spending time having someone train you to use the standard putonghua accent at the beginning irrespective of how painful it feels to get a sound corrected 20 times in a row (otherwise you'll use your non-standard laowai accent to pronounce pinyin sounds the way we would say them in English e.g. like Benny Lewis did). After you get used to speaking and listening to standard putonghua (i.e. when that pronunciation becomes habitual) then learn to understand dialects.

 

I understand Yunnan dialect because I hear my girlfriend speaking it with her family on the phone all the time. I'd like to speak it too some day, but I would have to spend a lot of time consciously trying to practise the accent, getting each character corrected over and over again, so not my top priority at the moment.

 

Edit - I can see that you are a native Chinese speaker, so your experiences with Chinese dialects are probably quite different to non-natives.

[Basil]

The difference can be much much smaller than that between mandarin and cantonese and still present a very formidable speed bump. Whether after passing that speed bump subsequently aids acceleration, I'm not sure. My speed bump impacted me for about 2 years. I suppose its for the individual to decide whether they consider that an acceptable delay. I did not.

[JustinJJ]

I think the benefit of learning standard mandarin first is that it helps your own accent. Understanding dialects later helps your listening as Chinese people often speak putonghua in an accent influenced by their dialect, so if you are not used to that accent it will be difficult to understand.

[Basil]

There are many people where I live, esp. over 45's, who simply cannot speak mandarin. Up to 50% of the vocab is different.

 

The younger ones can speak it, in varying degrees, but once they realise a listener can just about understand, they relinquish any attempts to speak mandarin.

 

Luckily the younger ones grasp of their own dialect has been so heavily impacted by mandarin, in school, on tv and radio, that they just aren't using many of the words they could be using. But it can still be a chore.

 

So there's the speed bump in trying to understand heavily accented mandarin at the beginning, and then the later, much bigger, speed bump when those same people unilaterally decide, for efficiency's sake, never to speak to you in mandarin again. 

 

It's not like in Europe where people usually decide to speak in the language best understood by the linguistically weakest link. Whenever people gaggle up at social functions, anyone who only understands northern mandarin is going to be ignored and mostly forgotten. 

[Enoxus]

so it's best to not pick up non-standard habits when you begin learning Chinese.

 

I can't agree more with you about this. Indeed, Chinese is a complicated and confusing language even to native Chinese speakers. Learning a language is not like playing Lego or doing a simple math. Any language is held and linked by it's regional culture. Even now, many Chinese people disagree with Chinese to be standardized. My view is, no matter what culture people are living in, at least they need to understand each other if they want to move on and live a better life. I don't care what those people say about one language with 50 dialects, If I can't change their culture and living situation, I change mine. I'm a 80/20 rule believer, I believe that I will benefit nothing unless I put more into whatever linked with my life, otherwise I will be one of 80% of the whole world, which struggle my life between "Standardized" and "Localized". 

 

I can see that you are a native Chinese speaker, so your experiences with Chinese dialects are probably quite different to non-natives.

 

I'm a native Chinese speaker who has been using three mixed languages for almost 20 years. A native language speaker doesn't explain he/she will be an elite or even good at anything automatically with his/her language skills, and even doesn't explain that he/she will be good at his/her own language. I got lost in using Chinese quite some time and that's why I started using some online dictionaries a lot to refresh my mind. I started writing articles, posting threads and replying posts in some forums, and even more, I started writing classical Chinese poems as I did a lot when I was in high school. It did help a lot. I mean practice. I'm probably more familiar with Arabic dialects or English dialects than Chinese dialects in fact. The good thing for me to use mixed language is I'm able to discover more interesting things in this world and I got better chances to live my life better. The down side is I'm not good at any language. Language is just a tool, a language master is like comparing a car driver with an airplane pilot. Both of these operators need to read, understand and use their dashboard, but the difference is an airplane pilot can drive a car (most of them I believe), and few car drivers can fly a plane. 

[Enoxus]

Just for fun:

 

American Speaking Fluent Cantonese and Mandarin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO1H0sJGcI0

Foreigners speak fluent Shanghainese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFMg6a19YiI

American speaks fluent Chengduness ( if this expains the dialect in Chengdu, Sichuan) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW5O-uW1pwA

[Takeshi]

The responses to Question 3 have a different meaning in Chinese and English.

 

3. 你觉得在课堂上的中国话和平时生活中听到的中国话一样吗？
In your opinion, is there any difference between Chinese in the class and Chinese in daily life?

 

The answers in the test are presented as:

 

一样 Yes

不一样 No

 

But they really should be presented as:

 

一样 No

不一样 Yes

[英泰inte]

@Takeshi

 

Xie xie :-3 I fixed the question now! did anyone finish the survey?

[Flickserve]

Just looked at the survey. If you are interested in making it look a bit more 'scientific', you can redesign the questions to give answers on a visual analogue scale. This will give you some more leeway to do statistics on the answers. I have some reservations on using a Likert scale simply because of possible small sample size.

Questions 4-8 and 10,11 can written in such a way.

Designing a questionnaire has its issues!

[Flickserve]

Double post

[Takeshi]

Okay, I did it just to be helpful, but honestly I found the survey to be somewhat offensive/belittling to dialects.

 

For questions like: "Can you understand dialects in your daily life?", there is no option to say "I am well-proficient in a Chinese dialect.", the best you can answer is "Yes,I can get the general idea." I am a fluent and functional speaker of Cantonese, I don't just "get the general idea".

 

Questions like: "Does it impact on your daily life not understanding dialects?" assume that the participant doesn't understand dialects. I just answered it with a mindset of "If I didn't understand the local dialect I would feel this way".

 

Questions like: "Have you ever imitated the natives to speak their dialects?" assume that foreigners aren't interested in seriously learning dialects but only "imitate" the natives as some non-serious play.

 

But whatever, maybe this survey does work for the majority of the population, and I'm just an anomoly for being interested in dialects.