Speaking Mandarin w/o actually learning it

[Ian_Lee]

Actually I guess Sun (Cantonese) and Mao (Hunanese) fell in my same predicament -- They were non-native Mandarin speakers and they had never formally been taught with Mandarin. But somehow they picked them up on the way.

[Mugi]

Not sure about Sun, but I think claiming that Mao could speak Mandarin is at the very least debatable. He may have been able to understand it but many people had a very difficult time understanding him - hence he often had an interpreter (one of his daughters in latter years) with him, at least on formal occasions.

[wushijiao]

Yeah, according to Mao by Chang and Halliday, Mao was never able to speak any foreign languages, other Chinese dialects, or Putonghua. He had to have local interpreters when he was in Jiangxi, for example. If that is true, I think that demonstrates the difficulty of learning other Chinese dialects for non-native speakers, even for Chinese people.

[ala]

My brother speaks fluent Shanghainese at home but never went to school in China. He is in high school today and his pronunciation of Mandarin is horrific (tones are completely off or wrong, vowels are mispronounced, retroflexes are absent), his grammar is extremely bad also, and word choice is questionable at best because he pretty much "translates" Shanghainese to Mandarin on the fly syllable-by-syllable. But the results are very poor, no more than 2nd grade conversational level plus terrible terrible pronunciation. Imagine a German immigrant to the US with limited knowledge of English during the 1880's trying to speak English at the butcher's shop. That's my brother's level of Mandarin.

So I completely disagree that Mandarin can be spoken fluently without actually learning it, unless maybe if you are exposed to Mandarin media and visuals continuously for at least 10-15 years and you have mucho conversational practice. But then, that would be like learning.

[Ian_Lee]

The analogy between Mandarin/dialect and English/German is very inappropriate.

Why? Very simple.

Let's say by learning from media. If you are an English speaker and you are fed with dozens of German movies with both English and German subtitles, most likely you will only know "Guten Morgen" equates to "Good Morning".

That is it. Unless you have taken two courses of Basic German, otherwise you are still ignorant about German.

But if you are a Chinese dialect speaking, after you watch dozens of Mandarin movies with Chinese subtitles, most likely you are capable of understanding 30% of Mandain dialog.

P.S. However, if Chinese language undergoes complete Latinization and do away with characters, then there is no way for dialect speakers to understand Mandarin. And there will be dire political consequence.

[noblsheep]

But if you are a Chinese dialect speaking, after you watch dozens of Mandarin movies with Chinese subtitles, most likely you are capable of understanding 30% of Mandain dialog.

That's how I learned most of my Cantonese anyway...

Another thing, it really depends on how different your dialect is from Mandarin. Many dialects aren't much different from Mandarin at all.

[tsuialex]

yes, I strongly agree with what Ian and noblsheep have said. Let me share with you my experience: I'm also from Hong Kong and Cantonese is my mother tongue. At first, I can't speak Mandarin at all and haven't got any formal training for it. But after watching Phoenix TV (鳳凰衛視) and sometimes CCTV for a year, I can say that now I'm quite fluent in Mandarin and can imitate the Beijing and Taiwan accents. And I'm so pround of such ability!

All in all, practice makes perfect! I strongly recommend learning Mandarin through watching Phoenix TV, as the programmes are of great interest, especially if you are crazy about political issues.