hong kong putonghua

[Dav-X]

Just wondering if anyone, without cantonese background, could understand the putonghua spoken by this hong kong star....

http://bbmedia.qq.com/media/yule/2005/050417_lee_shan_shan.wmv

I've met a lot of hong kong people and most of them can speak perfect putonghua nowsadays. But this clip reminds me of the awful experience ten years ago, when hong kong was about to handover and their putonghua was just awful like that.

[skylee]

Also this -> 莫文蔚廣東國語闖禍

一年一度的台灣金曲獎前晚在高雄市舉行，當莫文蔚頒發「最佳國語男演唱人獎」時，因發音錯誤，把原先得獎者「黃立行」讀成「王力行」，令王力宏一時誤會是自己而衝上台，場面極之尷尬，司儀之一的林志玲見狀即擁抱王力宏來打圓場。

[florazheng]

我的老板的名字叫黄某.前不久我接到一个电话, 打电话的人是香港口音, 她说她要找王某. 我说我们这里没有人叫王某. 她就挂了电话了.过了三秒我才反应来,原来她要找的是我的老板....

[florazheng]

带口音山东的普通话也很难懂. 有一次我打电话到山东找一个人, 那个人不在.我问他的手机号码, 那个接电话的人说的数字,哗,我至少花了五,六分钟和她确定还是没弄明白,我以为是我自己老啦耳朵也不好用了,就让我的同事帮忙听一下,我的同事也听不懂....

[florazheng]

还有一次一个老外打电话过来, 他说的普通话也让我听不懂, 我就直接和他讲英文...虽然我的英文很不好,可是比他的普通话起码更好懂一些.....

[wushijiao]

Personally, I don't find Hong Kong-style putonghua spoken by pop stars to be all that hard to understand because the wacky pronunciation is offset by a slower talking speed and fairly easy vocab.

For me at least, the hardest stuff to understand might be people who speak a dialect of putonghua that native speakers might normally understand, but slow foreigners like me wouldn't, perhaps like florazheng said, rural Shandonghua or something like that.

[geek_frappa]

Personally, I don't find Hong Kong-style putonghua spoken by pop stars to be all that hard to understand because the wacky pronunciation is offset by a slower talking speed and fairly easy vocab.

do people like the accent when they sing in putonghua in general? some singers try to lose the accent. does the accent distract people very much from the song? i've been wondering this.

[xiaomawang]

Also this -> 莫文蔚廣東國語闖禍

skylee, 在哪兒可找到片段?

[Quest]

I have it here. (news review) 4.4MB

I clipped the original version too, but it's 12MB, I will post if you want to see the original.

[Harpoon]

so how exactly is it wierd?

[xiaomawang]

Thanks Quest, very clear. So I think the first word was wrong, but the last one was correct. Maybe the scene was really too noisy.

Before listen, I thought Karen read the Huang Li Xing as Wang Li Heng which could be really confuse with Wang Li Hong. But now I know she was not that bad.

I like Li Hong very much, and that's really embarrassing. Anyway, it's past tense now.

[wai ming]

so how exactly is it wierd?

In the clip posted by Dav-X, the actress (李珊珊)'s putonghua is very Cantonese influenced. Some of her words are just pronounced incorrectly, eg "fong1 fa3" instead of "fang1 fa3" for 方法 and "kong ji" instead of "kong zhi" for 控制. She tends to put a lot of Cantonese-sounding particles, such as "ah" and "lah" on the ends of her sentences, which also doesn't make it sound like standard putonghua. Basically, it just doesn't sound like the way a putonghua-native-speaker would speak putonghua, it sounds like a Cantonese speaker speaking putonghua with Cantonese sounds instead of putonghua sounds. Hope that makes sense.

[Quest]

In the clip posted by Dav-X, the actress (李珊珊)'s putonghua is very Cantonese influenced.

I dont think "influenced" is the right word. It's just bad putonghua skill. Many people seem to complain how badly some Cantonese speak Mandarin, but geez what do you expect when someone tries to speak "another tongue" with minimal training. Like many HK people, she probably had no training in Mandarin at all. The fact that she can even speak in "understandable" Mandarin is amazing.

[Altair]

One thing that I hear is that the range of her tones and her intonation sounds more like the style of Cantonese than of Putonghua. She also speaks in somewhat of a monotone pitch level that sounds like someone artificially producing correct tones, as opposed to someone speaking naturally.

For me, the weirdness boils down to hearing someone speaking rapidly, but in somewhat of an artificial way. As Wai Ming says, the speaker than seems to throw in particles in a Cantonese manner to try to make her expression natural, but ends up producing a strange-sounding mix.

[yuet_sien]

All of my (female) chinese friends like the way Hong Kong stars (people) speak putonghua, even if they can understand a word because of the wrong pronunciation. They say it sounds sexy. Is it? Can it be compared with speaking English with a French acccent?

[tigerx9]

non-cantonese speakers shouldn't have problems in being able to understand most of the mandarin being spoken by a cantonese speaker (who's mandarin is not 100% fluent). i think people find it different, wierd, or funny, because it doesn't sound like the norm (as with any language) same as if a mandarin speaker who's not fluent in cantonese, try to speak cantonese, in which cantonese will label the accent as "ham soi", literally meaning "salt-water".

Personally, I don't find Hong Kong-style putonghua spoken by pop stars to be all that hard to understand because the wacky pronunciation is offset by a slower talking speed and fairly easy vocab

yep. and mandarin is the common chinese dialect, most chinese speaker understand it these days. so when a cantonese speaker speaks it, most can be understood.

[megastepxo]

yuet_sien: sexy? that's cool haha..

I am a Cantonese speaker.. so I guess I can understand pretty much what she's saying but while trying to listen, I was trying to compare her with a Mandarin speaker.. and yes, it does sound ...unfluent? But like some of you said, it would be pretty good considering that she tried and yeah.. maybe she has no training as well.