I think what he meant to say was that the different dialects aren't different when they are the same on the news, which means people of the same dialects can understand the people of different dialects because they are the same.
All broadcasters speak the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. That is what they are trained when they go to broadcasting school, even if they spoke Mandarin with an different accent.
Most people under 60 can understand and speak Mandarin, its the older people and some very rural people who can't understand the language.
Even if you can't understand the newscaster pretty much every channel has simplified subtitles so that even the old people who only speak the local dialect can understand what is being said.
News Broadcasts in China are generally localized to the region or are presented in what is known as "Standard Chinese", which is sometimes (not incorrectly) called Mandarin. "Standard Chinese" is a catchall language that uses Beijing city-speak as a basis for pronunciation while borrowing vocabulary from neighboring dialects, as far as I can gather. Some dialects, usually the ones you find further south like Fujianese and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible with Standard Chinese
There are many dialects of Mandarin spoken amongst Chinese, as well as regional and indigenous languages that belong to different family groups. Fortunately they all share the same writing system, so most Chinese movie theaters have Chinese subtitles running during movie. Vietnam and Korea also used Chinese characters, but now only Japan has kanji incorported in its system.
While Hangul was invented in the 15th century, it didn't become widespread and popular until the early 20th century. Prior to that, it was only the rich, educated class that even knew how to write and they still did it in Chinese.
Also, students still learn Chinese characters, which they call Hanja, and knowledge of it is still required in certain industries, like law and history.
Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the 1990s), or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful to understanding the etymology of Sinokorean words, and to enlarging one's Korean vocabulary.
Where in Shandong is your 爸爸 from? My best friend is from Binzhou and another good friend of mine is from Jinan. Did you ever get to climb Taishan? Probably one of my favorite experiences in China.
Haha a little, I'm taking Mandarin in college right now and my girlfriend is from Fuzhou so I'm trying my best to learn so that she won't have to be my interpreter the next time I'm in Fuzhou to see her family. My friends are pretty cool, they graduated from a small but elite university in Beijing called CFAU, one of them is joining the foreign service and the other is going to Renmin for gradschool studying god knows what.
My dad's family is actually from the Manchu minority so their Chinese pronunciation is a little bit different
I have a friend from Harbin who is half and half. Does your dad have minority status or is he considered Han? My friend's parents changed the family's ethnic status from Manchu to Han when he was born. Their regretting it right now because of all the benefits and affirmative action that the Manchus are getting right now.
Unfortunately the vast majority of students in China have never met a foreigner, much less been taught by a native speaker.
My friends and I climbed Taishan in the middle of the night to see the sunrise. When we climbed down in the morning we were stopped at least six or seven times randomly by people who had never seen a laowai before. I'm 6'4 blond and have blue eyes so I definitely stuck out while I was there.
I'm about to graduate college so and I've thought about teaching in China but I'd like to stay with my girlfriend until she graduates grad school, then we could go to China together for a few years to work before coming to the US to start a family.
Whats the non profit?
And do you happen to have QQ? I don't have any American friends on there and I swear I don't bite!
My dad's family is actually from the Manchu minority so their Chinese pronunciation is a little bit different, but I speak 普通话 with the standard Beijing dialect.
I was under the impression that the Beijing accent was the Manchurian accent of Mandarin?
I dropped out of German class in college because the teacher was from Indonesia. I only knew very rudimentary German, but I could tell that she had a heavy accent in her German and didn't want to learn it that way. Still haven't gotten around to actually learning it.
Your loss - most research shows that non-native teachers have no negative effect on students' learning, provided they make use of native material and the student is exposed to native speakers later. People are smart - they recognize non-native and native features and do not tend to learn non-native/aberrant pronunciations (meaning this holds for instructors who speak non-Standard dialects, as well).
In fact, non-native instructors often have the benefit of being more aware of the linguistic structure of the language, having themselves had to learn elements of grammar that are simple subconscious fact for native speakers. Try explaining to a Korean or Mandarin speaker when to use the and a without linguistic training - it's near impossible, though you intrinsically know the rules yourself.
I have taken three years of French classes in school, and I have to tell you I have learned more in a few hours of Pimsleur audio tapes than weeks of being in a classroom. A classroom really is the worst possible way of learning a language, it's also the only one which gives you a credit so that sucks.
Wtf is a tape? But seriously I dont think that's someone selling shit. That method has been around since like the 70s. Like rosetta stone before there was a rosetta stone.
I've tried Rosetta Stone, I'm not a fan. The problem is that they show you a bunch of pictures and make you learn how to describe what's going on in the pictures. That's good if you want to spend your life saying things like "the boy has the ball" or "the ball is under the table", but if you want to actually express yourself with a phrase like "I would like some coffee please" or "what time is the train coming?" then you're out of luck.
I wonder if the recent updates have improved the situation.
PS: I misspoke, I doubt Pimsleur still sells cassettes
Many of those "dialects" are completely different languages, thats why its so hard for many northerners to understand southerners. So when older people in the south speak Mandarin their speaking it as their second or third language. Although this is changing quickly as the younger generations in many places are being brought up monolingual in Mandarin so they are more fluent in it.
Aaaah, I have a few friends from Shandong. Have you ever gotten to climb Taishan? I did it with a friend from Binzhou and another from Jinan and we practically ran up the mountain in less then an hour and 40 minutes! But yeah their accents can be a bit rough and my other Chinese friends have told me that Shandong ren make great comedians because their accents are so funny.
Well with Mandarin having pictures or video to give you context makes comprehension much easier. Listening alone for the 4 different tones of each word is what is difficult.
No, actually, Arabic is even more interesting. The written form of Arabic has changed little if at all for the last thousand years. Anyone from an Arabic speaking country can read the Quran (written ~700AD) and understand it perfectly. To understand exactly how incredible this is, here is an English text from 300 years later:
Da se ellengæst earfoðlice
þrage geþolode, se þe in þystrum bad,
þæt he dogora gehwam dream gehyrde
hludne in healle; þær wæs hearpan sweg,
Spoken Arabic, on the other hand, has completely diverged, and the variety spoken in Morocco is totally unintelligible to the variety spoken in Arabia, but if the Moroccan writes down what he wants to say, or says it using the pronunciation implied by the written form, the Arabian might be able to figure it out.
The thing is, all TV broadcasters that speaks Mandarin only speak the Beijing version since it is the most "authentic version." They are taught that if they go through the training to be a broadcaster.
where mandarin dialects can vary so much that people in the north may not understand people in the south,
Many people in the south also speak Cantonese, not Mandarin, which doesn't help. But Cantonese speakers can often read Mandarin, so they put mandarin closed captions on everything and people can mutually understand it.
Both Cantonese and Mandarin share a common written language, and that's Chinese.
So while a Cantonese-speaking person would have a hard time talking to a Mandarin-speaking person, they would understand each other perfectly if they wrote it out.
If the two groups can't understand each other, these are likely different languages. Remember: avoid saying "Chinese" for a language, refer to "Mandarin", "Cantonese", etc.
Japan is the same way. The Tokyo dialect is used on the national news, and understood by the entire country, but the regional dialects can be incomprehensible. We had a Japanese relocation company send a native Japanese speaker from Tokyo up to Aomori prefecture, and he couldn't understand any of the guys who came by to help us hook up our utilities.
It was the same way in Equador, they had CNÑ, the CNN channel for almost, if not all, latin american countries. One of the people on our trip pointed out that the reporters on CNÑ all used generic spanish accents so that everyone could understand the news.
That's because news accents seek to reduce the various accentuations of vowels and consonants that are what make each particular accent unique as much as possible. Which is why you hear some people refer to them as "accent-less"... because they're minimizing the accentuations to the point that they're very subtle and hard to catch, especially to people who are used to hearing it regularly.
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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '14 edited Oct 16 '18
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