Accent vs Dialect

[dakonglong]

Today I was watching "Detention" on Netflix and I noticed that the main male character was pretty difficult to understand. I could pick up what he said sometimes, but 0% of the time when he spoke to his father. His father on the other hand was completely incomprehensible to me all of the time. I assume this is because they are speaking Hokkien dialect? At least I hope so, or my listening skills need more work than I thought.

 

That led me to wonder (if the above assumption is correct). If I find the male main character difficult to understand but still comprehensible when he is speaking with the female main character (who I know is speaking Mandarin), is that because he is speaking with a Hokkien accent, vs when he's speaking with his father they are speaking the actual Hokkien dialect which is why I can't understand any of it?

 

If so, what classifies as a dialect vs a accent? What is Shanghainese for example? How much does it overlap with Mandarin? 20%? 50%? 80%? Unless I am just having personal difficulties with this show, it seems like whatever I am hearing the father speak overlaps 0% with Mandarin.

I have always been curious to learn Shanghainese specifically, but it would be kind of discouraging if it turns out to be like learning a new language from scratch.

 

 

[Lu]

I've learned Taiwanese (Hokkien) for a year once, and took some classes in Cantonese. Yes, the various 方言 are indeed like learning a new language. It's not quite as hard as learning Mandarin for the first time though, because although they are functionally different languages, they are related, much like Dutch and German, or Spanish and Italian. Some grammar is different, much of it is the same. Plenty of words are different, but related, and plenty of other words are basically the same, just with a slight change in sound.

 

An accent is when someone speaks Mandarin but some sounds are a bit different. You yourself probably have a foreign accent in your Chinese, and some amount of a local accent in your main language. A 方言 has a complete own sound system, which is different from Mandarin, and its own grammar, which has some overlap with Mandarin but also some differences. One fun thing about learning Taiwanese was that I suddenly realised that all those taxi drivers with their heavy accent actually spoke very clear, very 标准 Taiwanese.

 

I haven't seen Detention so can't say what's happening there specifically, but I've seen plenty of Taiwanese films that use different languages (Taiwanese, Mandarin, something else if applicable) in different settings or with different conversation partners.

[abcdefg]

Once in Kunming I was sharing a taxi with my ladyfriend and and two of her village pals who were visiting for a holiday. I was in the front with the driver and the three of them were in the back. They were talking to each other, gesturing and giggling, catching up on gossip. At a traffic light the driver turned to me and asked in a low voice (in Kunming-accented Mandarin) "Hey, mister, what language are they talking? I can't make out anything, not even a word here and there." I told him it was Hani language, 哈尼族 and explained they were all from Lu Chun 绿春 in Honghe Prefecture 红河州。

 

The girls overheard us. He asked them good-naturedly how long it would take him, a Chinese native from Kunming, to learn to speak it. They agreed it would take at least 2 or 3 years because they knew people who had moved there to marry and that's how long it took them. I asked (in Mandarin) how long it would take me to become conversational. They laughed, and said "probably never." Explained that they thought a foreigner would probably have to start learning as a child. 

 

Several of Yunnan's minority nationalities speak "dialects" which don't share much in grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation with standard Chinese Putonghua 普通话。Kunming has a well-respected university 民族大学, where the issues surrounding these differences receive lots of close study.   

[anonymoose]

On 6/23/2023 at 4:58 AM, dakonglong said:

If so, what classifies as a dialect vs a accent?

 

An accent is a style of pronunciation. The pronunciation of a particular syllable is a feature of that syllable rather than the particular word it appears in, and the syllable should be pronounced consistently regardless of the word it appears in. For speakers of the same language but with different accents, there should be a one-to-one mapping between their pronunciations of the same syllable.

 

In a dialect, on the other hand, the primary difference is in the vocabulary and grammar.

 

These are two separate things which co-exist. For example, even within a particular dialect, there may be varying accents (and sub-dialects). Shanghainese is not a unified and standardised language. People from different regions of Shanghai may speak with different accents. This is one feature that makes Shanghainese difficult to learn. Whilst there are many different accents of Mandarin, there is a state-sanctioned standard, and you can take this to be your consistent reference. On the other hand, as there is very little learning material available for Shanghainese, you would be much more dependent on people teaching you. But different people will teach you different words and different pronunciation, making it difficult to learn systematically and consistently.

 

Besides, a further question would be what classifies a dialect vs a language? This has been debated in depth here and elsewhere. To cut a long story short, there is no clear-cut definition. Don't assume that just because the various local Chinese languages are commonly referred to as 'dialects' that they are all similar. I mean, there is obviously some similarity because they have common roots, but many of the Chinese dialects are as different from each each other as the various languages across Europe, for example.

[dakonglong]

On 6/24/2023 at 10:31 AM, anonymoose said:

Besides, a further question would be what classifies a dialect vs a language?

 

Up until now I had always just assumed it was a spectrum based on the magnitude of the difference, with accent < dialect < language. But based on your explanation and the others I see here it seems that is not the case.

 

As far as I can tell from the limited examples I have seen, French and Spanish - two different languages - have more overlap than Mandarin and Cantonese - two different dialects of Chinese (someone who knows more please correct me if I am wrong here). On a recent trip to Japan I was even surprised to see how much written Japanese I could understand based on the Chinese I know. My comprehension level was certainly higher than the Hokkien I am hearing.

 

I guess the practical application of all of this is determining which other languages or dialects overlap the most with standard Mandarin? At this point it seems like learning to read/write Japanese would be a smaller project than learning, say Shanghainese (thanks for clarifying that @anonymoose)!

[anonymoose]

On 6/24/2023 at 7:11 PM, dakonglong said:

At this point it seems like learning to read/write Japanese would be a smaller project than learning, say Shanghainese

 

I would say so. Another thing to consider is that as soon as you go beyond mundane topics of daily life, many people will not have the vocabulary to express higher level topics in Shanghainese. That would not be a hindrance with learning Japanese.

[Flickserve]

On 6/25/2023 at 2:11 AM, dakonglong said:

As far as I can tell from the limited examples I have seen, French and Spanish - two different languages - have more overlap than Mandarin and Cantonese - two different dialects of Chinese

Rather difficult to make such a generalisation. Colloquial spoken Cantonese can be quite different but I have had people speak a formal style Cantonese which is less rarely used and follows written Chinese more closely. 
 

Some examples of equivalents:

 

1. 剛剛走 （mandarin) ,  啱啱走 （Coll. cant. = ngaam1 ngaam1），剛剛走 (formal cant = gong1 gong1)

 

2. 明年 （mandarin），出年 （Coll. cant),  明年 (formal cant).

 

 

When I was learning Cantonese and first learnt how to say next year in Cantonese, I tried saying “明年” in Cantonese conversation wondering what the reaction would be - language experiment. I previously had only heard people using “出年” to express next year. My colleagues didn’t bat an eyelid and carried on conversing naturally. 
 

Situations where I hear more formal spoken Cantonese are with highly educated and more senior persons. 

 

 

 

[Lu]

Japanese is a completely different language from Chinese (Mandarin or any other type of Chinese), even from a different language family. As such, it's a lot further removed from Mandarin than Shanghainese or Cantonese, which are from the same language family. However, Japanese wholesale-borrowed a few thousand Chinese characters in the past to write Japanese words. They share a writing system, that's why you can read some of it. All else being equal, it would take you much longer to learn good Japanese than it would take you to learn good Shanghainese.

 

Compare it to German and Vietnamese: Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet (ABCD) and probably has some European loanwords, so it looks a bit like a European language. But it would be a lot more difficult to learn than, say, German, because the grammar and the whole language system is totally different from English.

 

As to what is the difference between a dialect and a language: the saying goes 'A language is a dialect with army', and while that is not entirely true, it's a pretty good definition. Cantonese and Shanghainese are dialects of Chinese, but Dutch, German and Luxembourgish are separate languages -- no logic there.

[dakonglong]

On 6/25/2023 at 2:40 AM, Lu said:

However, Japanese wholesale-borrowed a few thousand Chinese characters in the past to write Japanese words.

 

Your explanation makes a lot of sense, but this sentence is what makes me wonder

 

I have heard lots of people mention that by far the hardest part of learning Japanese is the kanji, which (I think) imparts most of the meaning. If I know 3,000+ Chinese characters, I assume that includes all of the kanji already (I think there are around 2,000 total?) The tricky part is that I would need to learn traditional characters, and wouldn't be able to read out loud or speak at all, since I don't know any of the readings for those kanji.

 

Basically, I wonder if it would be possible to learn (1) traditional characters, (2) hiragana, (3) katakana and (4) some basic vocabulary in 2 and 3 and have some decent ability to read basic Japanese for meaning only. That would give me a foothold to continue learning.

 

By far the thing I'm most worried about though is trying to learn the readings for the kanji and getting it confused with the Chinese, thereby negatively impacting my Chinese.

[honglam]

Linguistically the different Chinese dialects could be treated as different languages, but the linguistical division of languages should take cultural factors into account. Basic to some linguistical assumptions, some Chinese dialects differentiated millions of years ago and have been developing respectively for ten centuries or more.(And according to many historical materials this is likely to be the truth.) The geographical burden between different regions (Mountains, rivers, distance up to 2000 km or more) determined that the dialects, once separated, has no chance to communicate with each other (so that they can keep the same) at all. And the time when some Chinese dialects separated from the "Standard language雅言/官话/..." is far earlier than the time when several Germanic languages (at least they are regarded as different languages now, like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) said goodbye to each other. It is the same writing system and cultural philosophical sensation (and more things that is hard to be fully listed, but the given ones are the most important in my opinion) that kept the Chinese people together. So in short, actually the relationship between Chinese dialects is like the one of French, Italian and Spanish, not the one of London English and Lowland Scots.

[CulturalClimber]

That's an interesting thought about using your Chinese vocab knowledge to get a head start in Japanese. While knowing kanji would help with reading, you're right that without knowing the on/kun readings, you wouldn't be able to understand it when spoken. It might be a good proof of concept though to see how much basic material you could get through just recognizing characters. As for mixing up pronunciations, going slowly and focusing on reading/writing separately from listening/speaking at first could help prevent that. Might be worth a try if you're curious!

[Lu]

On 6/25/2023 at 8:45 PM, dakonglong said:

I have heard lots of people mention that by far the hardest part of learning Japanese is the kanji, which (I think) imparts most of the meaning. If I know 3,000+ Chinese characters, I assume that includes all of the kanji already (I think there are around 2,000 total?) The tricky part is that I would need to learn traditional characters, and wouldn't be able to read out loud or speak at all, since I don't know any of the readings for those kanji.

 

Basically, I wonder if it would be possible to learn (1) traditional characters, (2) hiragana, (3) katakana and (4) some basic vocabulary in 2 and 3 and have some decent ability to read basic Japanese for meaning only. That would give me a foothold to continue learning.

The kanji are the most difficult part for people who have never learned them. For you, someone who already knows characters, some other part would be the most difficult.

 

Knowing characters is helpful in learning Japanese, but even more so in learning Shanghainese or any other Chinese fangyan; they're all written with characters. Sometimes with a few extra ones, or a few modified ones, but that's not a big hurdle if you have already learned hundreds or thousands of characters for Mandarin.

 

All that said, learning 2000 kanji + hiragana + katakana + some basic vocab can be completed in 6 months or so, if one is reasonably diligent (and already knows characters), so you could just try it out and see how far it gets you.

[honglam]

On 6/26/2023 at 2:45 AM, dakonglong said:

I assume that includes all of the kanji already

I think the majority of Japanese kanji are included, though is hard to say "all". Basically there are several characters invented by Japanese so they'll not appear in Chinese languages(except when translating the name of Japanese people or places). eg. 凧-たこ-Kite，辻-つじ-crossroad. Meanwhile there are some Japanese kanji that you can seldom see in modern Chinese. They are mostly used in Chinese classicals nowadays. Still there are not a great number of such characters. So generally speaking it's helpful if you've already learned many characters before learning Japanese. Yet it can be a barrier as well, since the standard ways of writing issued by Chinese and Japanese ministry of education are different.