My experience today - Shandong accent

[ouyangjun]

Just sharing an experience I had...

 

Today at work I hosted a group of 15 people from a customer we have in Shandong.  They came down south to Jiangsu Suzhou to see us and I spent the day with them.... 

 

Let me preface this by saying that most of my normal day is spent speaking Chinese with my team, I even have one Shandong-ren on my team.  The most difficult one on my team to understand is a guy from Guangzhou, but I work with him enough that it's not an issue anymore.  

 

The guys from Shandong on the other hand... well that was the most difficult day I had today in a long time.  The main guy had such a heavy accent and he mixed in some words from the local dialect or used putonghua in a "different way" than what I was used to... I had a real difficult time understanding him.  

 

It really sucks when that happens... in the middle of a conversation realizing "I'm completely lost at what he's trying to tell me", is really frustrating (probably for him also).

 

During one of the breaks I let my team know that I was having a really hard time with his accent, so they started to support me in times of trouble by translating his Shandong putonghua back into the standard putonghua I'm used to.  

 

In business I'm used to dealing with people who speak a pretty standard putonghua.  Today that was not the case and it was a good reminder that the Chinese language is really vast and diverse (even in Putonghua).

 

Chalk that one up to a 8 hours of exposure to a heavy Shandong accent and hopefully next time I'll be a bit better.  

 

What accents have you recently run into trouble with?

[anonymoose]

Having travelled around China, it seems that people who speak in their local accent/dialect, even if it's a branch of mandarin, are hard to understand in most places.

 

I noticed in Chongqing and Chengdu recently that its almost impossible to understand locals as they speak to each other. In fact, most places are like that.

[陳德聰]

This experience isn't a problem unique to foreigners in China, so hopefully you aren't too down about it.

My boyfriend's best friend from Guiyang has come to stay with us and it has reminded me how frustrating it can be to understand everything but the part of a sentence needed to know what's going on. But usually the accent I have the most trouble with is the Minnan-infused Taiwanese accent.

[mouse]

 

This experience isn't a problem unique to foreigners in China, so hopefully you aren't too down about it.

 

Nor is it unique to Chinese. I often tell Chinese friends who feel bad about not understanding English* accents that the film Trainspotting had to be re-edited with different dialogue when it was released in US cinemas, otherwise Americans wouldn't have understood what anyone was saying.

 

* That is, accents of the English language rather than accents of England

[歐博思]

Back in the day I worked the drive-thru at a certain fast-food restaurant. One day a man with a thick, maybe South African, accent came through to order food. Bear in mind there aren't too many different possibilities at your typical fast-food joint, but after having him repeat his order three times, I blamed the microphone/speaker -- saved some face-- and had him pull around to order face-to-face where I almost couldn't understand him a fourth time. 

 

In your case, nice application of Chinese culture skills pulling him aside at break. Nice!

[studychinese]

Another question is why this fellow could not change to a more standard putonghua. I have seen people do it all the time so the question is why couldn't he?