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Thread: Comparing languages

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[quote=TOMSPENCER,258874]Completely forgot to address the question about learning Mandarin from a native Cantonese-speaker. At my school the Chinese teachers were not from Guangdong and had fairly standard Chinese. When I would get into a taxi the drivers often remarked about how good my pronunciation was - which made me feel very pleased with myself, I must say.

One of my good friends, however, went on to work in Beijing and spent the first three months re-learning how to pronounce just about all that he had learned. Instead of moving to Beijing, I moved to Guangzhou, and here, too, I have people tell me how good my pronunciation is. Really, though, I know it's just good compared to the pronunciation of the person congratulating me. Listening to newsreaders on CCTV1 will give you an appreciation of how Chinese ought to sound. Listening to a Cantonese speaker struggling to remember how to pronounce words in Mandarin shouldn't reassure you that you have managed to learn Chinese well.

I work in an office full of Cantonese speakers, who communicate mostly in English for day-to-day purposes. When we are meeting a client, however, who cannot speak English, then we must all speak Mandarin. It can be painful, at times, to hear my colleagues struggling so much and making so many basic mistakes. It could well just be a certain proportion of older Cantose people who never learned Mandarin properly. I imagine younger Cantonese should have no problems with Mandarin.

This theory may, indeed, have been borne-out in the first city where I worked - many of the old people spoke their local dialect and nothing else, but the younger generation all spoke fluent Mandarin.

Still, though, you'd come up against the question of accents. My friend who went to Beijing was basically riddiculed for sounding like a farmer when he spoke. Unless you study in Beijing this may be difficult to avoid. You have to ask yourself whether it really matters. I remember a case of an overseas student being denied an application to study English in the UK on the grounds that she had applied to a university in Scotland and the authorities judged that she could not reasonably expect to learn any useful form of English in Scotland. It was quite a stunning case, at the time, and sticks in my mind even today. How many Chinese do you know who speak English with a thick, Scottish accent? Would it be a bad thing if they did? I think it would be fantastic, and that's why I'm happy to carry on learning in Guangzhou (I just make sure my teacher isn't a local).[/quote]

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