Here’s a sound file of someone saying “The Republic of Iraq” in Arabic. I found it hard to hear the consonant between “al-” and “Iraq”:
I don’t think the fact that she herself might speak with a Southern accent affects her credibility in critiquing Standard Mandarin speech. You can easily imagine someone with a strong Southern U.S. accent–or any U.S. accent–critiquing an actor’s portrayal of a standard accent–or indeed, any accent–of any English accent or dialect.
Look at this guy for example. He has a particular American accent. Yet, he critiques English language accents from all over the country and all over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A
Everyone has an accent of es own. That doesn’t mean that person can’t be a reliable source of information regarding accents other than es own.
I just remembered this. This is Ben from Off the Great Wall in a skit about being an egg. White on the outside, yellow on the inside. I’ve cued it up to my favorite moment: https://youtu.be/-9AFM77JYig?t=39
I’ve posted that he’s said to speak perfect (scholarly) putonghua, Beijing Mandarin, and to my untrained ears, his Cantonese is really good too!
Can I weigh in please? Broadcast Mandarin or the Mandarin taught to radio and TV newscasters, is broadly considered to be either “standard” Mandarin or the bar to which “standard Mandarin” aspires to. This is NOT what is spoken in Beijing.
I knew one graduate from a “broadcast Mandarin university.” He actually hailed from Shanghai, and Shanghaiese was his most native language. That said, what he explained is that 90% of the graduates were not from northern China. In fact, it was pretty difficult to get Mandarin speakers from Northern China to correct themselves to proper accentless “broadcast Mandarin”. The northerners essentially had a lot more difficulty losing their local accent vs someone that grew up speaking a distinct Chinese dialect at home and on the streets.
Many people erroneously think that Beijing natives speak the most standard Mandarin. This is total and complete BULLSHIT. Beijing natives speak a local dialect. It is no where near “broadcast Mandarin” standard. Two native Beijingers speaking amongst themselves with Beijing rhyming is largely unintelligible to native Mandarin speakers from elsewhere. It’s akin to listening to a couple of locals speaking in rhyming cockney slang.
Northerners speak with a heavy “r” sound at the end of their words. “Southern Mandarin” doesn’t have that “r” sound. And there are hundreds of gradients in between that still qualify as “native” Mandarin speakers. And “broadcast Mandarin” is somewhere in between this really crude delineation.
This one is laughably simple just from listening.
Olympic gold medalist Ailing Gu speaks with a Beijing accent and uses Beijing vernacular. Which she should since her mother is from Beijing and Ailing spent her summers growing up in Beijing with extended family. To my ear, Ailing has a northern accent and that Mandarin is not her native tounge. She’s really good and natural, but I think most Chinese would ping her as an ABC or someone that didn’t actually grow up in a Mandarin first environment.
To my ears, when she critiques the speaker and repeats the words in “Standard Mandarin”, it has a distinctly Southern accent, which is not putonghua, Beijing dialect. Listen to the Southern Mandarin speakers, not counting the speaker from Guangdong and the speaker from Beijing. To my ears, it’s distinctly different, especially when you read the explanation of the tonal differences.
I absolutely love Jesse, but I wouldn’t want her to be my Mandarin teacher and wouldn’t want anyone to take her pronunciation as putonghua.
Another bit of trivia. I took a couple of introductory Cantonese classes and in one of the classes were a couple of girls from Taiwan (Hi Rae and Chen Yen!). It was so cute that they had a harder time pronouncing the words than those of us who didn’t speak any Chinese dialect or language.
My favorite actress is Joey Wang Jyo Yin (Cantonese), Wang Tsu Hsien (Mandarin), Ong Jyo Hen (Taiwanese) and I could hear what many said was her Taiwanese accented Cantonese.
Glad you liked! Got them all right. Pretty good for an Okinawan/Japanese huh? 
Lovely Jessie gave Ailing / Eileen a positive review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb8capcpiK0
Do you agree with my uneducated assessment of her (Jesse’s) Southern “twang”?
Edit: Also, just a guess, but does Angel Huang [the creator of the Southern vs Northern video] have a Taiwanese accent? Guessing from her English & Mandarin pronunciations.
I do not believe it is a matter of literally not hearing sounds in Cherokee or Arabic, just that the listener’s ear does not ascribe importance to those phonemes. You would have to start practicing the language to pick up on those distinctions reliably.
Didi44, I think you are conflagrating two dissimilar things. First, what is spoken in Beijing is the model for standard Mandarin.
This is incorrect. Simplistically speaking, Mandarin spoken in Beijing is often and usually erroneously referred to a standard Mandarin. Two obvious issues are a) local Beijing dialect of the hutongs is effectively a dialect and far from standard Mandarin, and b) if it is spoken with a relatively lightly “r” sound, it is still not broadcast mandarin.
Second, I would argue that broadcast mandarin is the model for standard Mandarin. Which is much more like those that speak dialect free / accentless Mandarin found along the central seaboard.
Beijingers call anything that doesn’t have the “r” sound southern dialect, like it is one standard way of speaking. This is so broad a definition as to be meaningless. Those truely in the south, especially the Cantonese speakers, have a very distinct accent when speaking Mandarin.
I’m no Henry Higgins, but it is pretty easy to peg if someone is from the north, cantonese speaking south, fujian speaking, and the greater shanghai area.
Northerners are at a distinct disadvantage because what they speak broadly falls into mutually intelligible grouping known as “Mandarin”. They didn’t grow up speaking a mutually unintelligible local dialect, and therefore don’t naturaly hear the broader range of sounds/words that multi-lingual people here.
In fact, one should think about Chinese as having more distinct languages that across all of Europe. Because there is a shared writing system (which historically had a literacy rate of about 3%), these have all been lumped together into Mandarin dialects which are mutually incomprehensible to native speakers.
I don’t really know much about Chinese languages, but the point I am making is that one can be an expert in a standard/standardized language/dialect and still have a regional accent of some kind. And a standard/standardized language rarely has a specific standard accent. And even if it does, that pronunciation is usually based on the pronunciation of a particular social group, not a region based local accent.
And Acsenray
When I think of and when someone says Standard Chinese, I’m going by the official designation of Putonghua, Beijing dialect as the Official Standard Chinese / Mandarin.
I agree that it’s an artificially derived designation, which in theory could change and historically has if the government changed and the rule and capital moved South. But it’s what we have, regardless of what we perceive it should be, in a country with a diverse and beautiful dialects and languages.
Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ ; lit. ‘modern standard Han speech’)—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin [7][8][9] or Standard Beijing Mandarin ,[10][11] in common speech simply Mandarin ,[12] better qualified as Standard Mandarin , Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese —is the dialect of Mandarin Chinese that emerged as the lingua franca among speakers of Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese (Hokkien, Cantonese, et cetera) in the 20th century. It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is based on the Beijing dialect.
Apropos of nothing, I personally find taiwanese mandarin (not to be confused with the taiwanese language, I just mean people in Taiwan speaking mandarin) to be the clearest and easiest to understand.
And, on the mainland, many devices and sat nav personalities have the taiwanese accent. Now, of course, that’s more because mainlanders find the accent pleasing, rather than necessarily easy to understand, but it does indicate that it’s close enough to standard mandarin that it’s not considered difficult to understand.
You know, when I read that, my brain hears it in Speedy Gonzalez’ voice.
Certainly not a scholar. Just someone with a profound love for the language developed over 30+ years of watching Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) videos and listening to music, as well as following news about certain celebrities. And has bumped into many walls, including those appreciably erected in this thread.
I’ve learned a lot, especially from China_Guy, Mahalo from Hawaii! And will leave this thread with my final comments as I think we’ll never completely agree with regards to my limited understanding of the subject at hand.
Because there is a shared writing system (which historically had a literacy rate of about 3%),
I found out the hard way that hanzi isn’t completely universal for all Chinese dialects/languages. When I first started watching Hong Kong Cantonese movies, I tried to match the dialog to the hanzi subs, which at the time was a requirement for all Hong Kong movies. I finally discovered in those pre-internet days that Cantonese is highly colloquial and sometimes is impossible to translate into hanzi that makes sense.
Off the Great Wall’s Carmen and Ben demonstrate this verbally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e73btaVo868&t=285s
In fact, one should think about Chinese as having more distinct languages that across all of Europe. Because there is a shared writing system (which historically had a literacy rate of about 3%), these have all been lumped together into Mandarin dialects which are mutually incomprehensible to native speakers.
IMO, too broad a brush stroke to say that …Mandarin dialects which are mutually incomprehensible to native speakers..Some/most? dialects are similar enough as to be generally intelligible by listeners due to context. Jesse demonstrates and explains this in her review of Ailing/Eilieen Gu: https://youtu.be/qb8capcpiK0?t=98
There were (I believe they’ve all been shut down since the takeover) Cantonese language newspapers in Hong Kong which to my understanding would be unreadable by a Mandarin speaker.
And as I’ve posted above, the ancient Chinese classics are written in a way that is closer when pronunciation than Mandarin.
Final thought about Mandarin dialects/languages. I fairly recently learned that some/most? Mandopop is sung without tones, making it generally mutually intelligible by most Mandarin listeners.
How do you sing in a tonal language? Most language learners are curious about this question. The answer is: it depends on the language.
For Mandarin Chinese, especially in modern pop music, the melody usually takes over and the four lexical tones are ignored. Native Mandarin speakers will still be able to understand the meaning of the song by the pronunciation of the words even without the tonal information. Words in the lyrics cause confusion only occasionally.
https://dlsdc.com/blog/how-to-sing-in-a-tonal-language/
When I’d sing along with my Taiwanese friends, they’d laugh at my pronunciation. I’ve since learned that part of that ignorance is because the lyrics when sung are toneless!
Final trivia. When I would ask for videos about my favorite Hong Kong actors and actresses, I was asked a few times, “Why do you speak with a Hong Kong accent?”. I laughed and explained that I learned the names from Hong Kong award shows!
Once again, Mahalo (at least I know I can say that right!) to all for your educational comments!
I think this might be confusing the point a little bit, as the topic of this thread is explicitly Mandarin.
Yes, in China there are a number of dialects, which are really languages, as many are as different in spoken form as English is to German, or maybe even more.
Under this classification, Mandarin is one dialect. As illustrated in this thread though, there can be difficulty in understanding different pronunciations and accents within Mandarin. But anyone that can speak Mandarin can understand “standard” Mandarin, e.g. news programs in Mandarin.
And again, you underestimate the active role that the brain plays in shaping, creating, perception, across many modalities.
See this phenomenon-
https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/mcgurk-effect
Varying visual input alone is enough to activate different top down priming and results in a different sound being heard.
Though this one is more precisely what happens:
These sounds that we have not experienced as phonemes are effectively noise. If the sounds we expect (in words or tones) are interrupted by noise we literally suppress their perception and instead fill in the gap with an illusory continuity. The unexpected “gap” caused by the “noise” is simply not heard and the expected sound is created as that which the individual hears.
Not at all discounting psychoacoustics!
However, without being able to hear anything at all, how is it that adults are able to learn those languages and suddenly distinguish those consonants and vowels? Also, I clicked on your link with native (presumably) Cheyenne speakers pronouncing words and I did not hear nothing at all, though I do not claim I would score 100% on a quiz identifying those vowels in unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar language without any exposure to it. Also no sound is expected or unexpected when I hear that recording as I do not know those words at all, so it’s all “noise” to the part of my brain that is supposed to parse it into words.
Vietnamese is also tonal. I had two co-workers who worked in the same area, both named Hoa. One was a man and one was a woman whose names were pronounced differently but hell if anyone but the Vietnamese people could hear it. They both sounded like “wah” to us.
With a bit of southernish bias (since both sides of my family hail from southern China,) I tend to think of southern Chinese as being accent-free and northern Chinese as being to southern ears what Americans think British accents are.
Of course, I’m sure the northerners think it’s the other way, just like I’m sure Brits think they are the accent-free ones and it’s those hillbilly Americans who butcher the tone!