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Taiwanese Mandarin to Chinese Mandarin


jinjin

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Someone said something about the over-use of 有 here, that seems to come from Taiwanese, not so much from other dialects. Lots of 有 in Taiwanese, if it feels like a sentence is missing something, often adding a 有 (u7) will fix it.

I think it is from Cantonese. :D

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Oh, they do that too? Maybe Mandarin is the anomaly then :-)

Yah, when I'm done with Taiwanese I'll try my hand on Cantonese. After seven tones I'm not afraid of another two (or one less, depending on how you count) and when even the grammar has similarities I know it shouldn't be too hard. (Still hard, no doubt, but not too.)

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Yah, when I'm done with Taiwanese I'll try my hand on Cantonese. After seven tones I'm not afraid of another two (or one less, depending on how you count) and when even the grammar has similarities I know it shouldn't be too hard. (Still hard, no doubt, but not too.)

Cantonese is definitely easier than Taiwanese (at least in my experience) - there's no tone sandhi to worry about!

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No...tudou is not a peanut in Taiwan, it's huasheng just like in China.

The main difference between the two excepting some basic vocabulary differences (it's not xihongshi for tomato, it's fanqie, and it's not boluo for pineapple, it's fengli...don't get me started on the different word for kiwi) is the accent.

"Duo shao qian?"

"Si si kuai-oh!"

"Si si kuai? Si si kuai shi shenme?"

"Si si kuai si senme? Si si si kuai-la!"

"Shi-si kuai haishi si-shi kuai ah?"

"Si si kuai!"

"Whatever here's a hundred."

I don't consider the "er" to be standard Chinese anymore, as the only place I hear it consistently used is northern China. Taiwan Shifen Daxue still teaches with textbooks that incorporate the "er" sound but nobody...nobody! - uses it.

I don't say tudou for peanut in Taiwan, but that is just me. It is peanut in Taiwan. I always use hua sheng mi.

I use boluo and fengli interchangeably all the time when I was in Taiwan. I use fanqie for tomato primarily in Taiwan and xihongshi in mainland. In Taiwan, if you talk to a Nortern Chinese, they still use a lot of "er", and sometimes I would use a lot of "er" to joke with my friends. You need to insert just enough "er" in the right places to make you sound sort of sophisticated, but too much would have the opposite effect. :mrgreen:

If I try to say 14 or 40 yuan and want to make sure my audience would understand perfectly, I will emphasize or say, "yi si4" for 14, or "si4 ling2" for 40 even though I speak Mandarin perfectly and is a native speaker speaking to another native speaker who also speaks perfect Mandarin -- just in case. :mrgreen: For anyone else who has just a slight bit of accent, forget about just say, only "shi2 si4" or "si4 shi2" without qualifying it.

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My computer can't read Chinese characters (on the internet or in any other way) so I have no idea what that says. :(

"This depends on location. It seems to me that 西红柿 is used more in the north and 番茄 more in the south."

I am guessing by the weird symbols my computer uses to replace the characters - don't ask how - that the first set of characters is "xihongshi" and the second is "fanqie". Agreed. Although I lived in Guizhou (the south) and used "xihongshi" even though fanqie existed as a word.

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By the way I have an answer to the tu dou vs. hua sheng peanut issue.

tu dou -

Used generally by people whose families are more "Taiwanese" (have been here a long time) than Mainlander (came, say, in '49).

Used by the older generation in spoken form.

Usually NOT found in written form.

Not commonly used anymore among the younger generation, especially ones who grew up speaking Chinese/guoyu at home and not Taiwanese.

Acceptable as a word, and often the only word "grandma" will understand if she was born and raised in Taiwan, but also not the first word that comes to mind when you ask anyone younger than, say, 50.

Often used in reference to boiled peanuts, a well-known Taiwanese 'xiao cai'. The boiled peanuts here look different from the ones you can get in movie theaters in India, which was where I became acquainted with them. Hence, I didn't connect the two and have thought for a a year now that what are actually boiled peanuts were in fact a kind of pulse.

hua sheng -

Almost always the written word for 'peanut' with only a few exceptions

Used mostly by the younger generation or those who were not raised speaking Taiwanese at home.

Used by families who came to Taiwan from the mainland more recently

Has replaced "tu dou" as the most common word for peanut in Taiwan.

This information obtained from my asking approximately 30-40 Taiwanese people (I asked my classes, asked at the night market, asked the clerks in Family Mart, asked my landlady) over the past few days.

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This depends on location. It seems to me that 西红柿 is used more in the north and 番茄 more in the south.

When I was in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, my cousins used 西红柿 (xi hong2 shi4) and not 番茄 (fan qie2). Hangzhou was in the south, too.

channamasala, your assessment is correct and match with what I know in Taiwan. When I first heard of tudou from someone from mainland China, my first thought was, "This sounds very familiar, but I don't think it's potato." Then, I would remember it's peanut in Taiwan and boiled peanut to be exact. :mrgreen: Now I have a good friend who is from mainland China and likes to eat stir fried tudou, so I finally got tudou=potato firmly lodged in my brain.:wink:

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When I was in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, my cousins used 西红柿 (xi hong2 shi4) and not 番茄 (fan qie2). Hangzhou was in the south, too.

And indeed Hangzhou still is in the south :wink:. Hangzhou is a bit of an anomoly though (along with a couple of other places too, Nanjing being one of them) - the native language has been heavily influenced by Mandarin due to historical migration reasons. As far as I'm aware, the sound system is essentially consistent with neighbouring Wu 吴 dialects, along with some of the grammar, but the vocab (including such basic items as personal pronouns) is more consistent with Mandarin.

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I think Taiwanese Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin is pretty much the same with slight differences here and there in pronunciations and words. In my opinion, it is better to know Taiwanese mandarin because it is more classy than mainland accents and I know that there's gonna be people that will debate me here. But if you're Caucasian, then it doesn't matter what kind of accent you have since people will be impressed even if you're speaking mandarin to them like you're reading pinyin with no tone marks and paying no attention to the correct "x" "r" "q", etc. pronunciations. I always get a kick out of those commercials with these people speaking without tone marks and advertising some product while blatantly knowing no Chinese which I see quite often in China.

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I agree with atitarev. But nowadays many people just don't care much about typing errors. And when you type "de" most probably the first character that turns up is "的", and "well it should be "得" but people understand "的" just as well" so "的" is accepted.

IMHO "的" and "得" are very different. "的" and "地", on the other hand, when used to describe actions etc are fairly interchangeable, although deep down I think "地" is more correct.

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I agree with Atitarev and Skylee and deep down 地 is more correct than 的 if you are trying to be correct. It is a typo and it just takes too long when using a pinyin input method to always make sure you get the right one and so people stop caring and then you get people typing there instead of their...

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