Different foreign accents in Mandarin

[victorhart]

Native English speakers can often identify the national or linguistic origin of a speaker based on his or her accent. For example, you can generally identify if somebody is from France, Italy, Germany, Spanish-speaking Latin America, or Brazil (the latter is an accent I am particularly accustomed to hearing as an English teacher to Brazilian students). 

 

I assume the same is true about foreign accents in Mandarin. I'm curious if native or advanced speakers of Mandarin have any anecdotes or insights into the various foreign accents in Chinese? Are any considered particularly ugly, or particularly endearing, sexy, funny?

 

Just as a curiosity, here are a group of Brazilians who tried to learn Happy Birthday in Mandarin to sing it to me. Only one of them (as far as I know) had actually studied Mandarin previously. 

[大块头]

Unprompted, I've been told that my midwestern US accent makes my Mandarin sound "attractive", which is definitely not an adjective you'd typically associate with a midwestern accent.

[Flickserve]

I guess they can if exposed to that variant of mandarin often enough. However, mainland Chinese don’t have enough experience as there are relatively fewer numbers of mandarin speakers from overseas countries.

 

I speak Cantonese and mainland mandarin speakers say my mandarin sounds like a Hong Kong person speaking mandarin.

 

With respect to Cantonese, Hong Kong people say my Cantonese sounds like a Singaporean speaking Cantonese. But all of my Cantonese was learnt in Hong Kong which was almost totally Cantonese when it comes to Chinese when I first started learning.

 

whether it sounds sexy or not, I really don’t know lol 

[Lu]

12 hours ago, victorhart said:

Native English speakers can often identify the national or linguistic origin of a speaker based on his or her accent. For example, you can generally identify if somebody is from France, Italy, Germany, Spanish-speaking Latin America, or Brazil

I think one can only do this if one has heard enough different speakers of these accents. I can tell apart French, German and Italian people speaking English, but not Hungarian and Polish, or someone from Ghana and someone from Congo, let alone Brazilians - I simply haven't heard enough of such people to be able to tell which accent is which. On the other hand, I can pretty reliably recognise a New Zealand accent when I hear it.

 

The same goes for Chinese. Spend enough time at BLCU and you can tell all the countries apart. A Korean accent is pretty distinctive: they pronounce all yu as wee: Han-wee, kou-wee. I once had a Vietnamese-French classmate and his French-accented Chinese is still some of the loviest Chinese I've ever heard. But again, you need to hear a lot of foreigners speak to hear the various differences, and most Chinese people rarely meet that many foreigners speaking Chinese.

[amytheorangutan]

Lighthearted take on it ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geWie7AS_Yw