Pronunciation by “The Book” or as in “The Wild”

We all know about the stark differences between northern and southern speech: There are word choices, such as “Nar” versus “Nali” and, of course, the whole of “Er-hua” itself, where 儿 is added to the back of almost every breath.

But I’d like to discuss another stark difference in pronunciation that you hear between regions, and that’s the way they pronounce some initial and final consonants. For example, some pronounce the “R” as something like an “R,” while others pronounce it more like an “L.” Some pronounce “Zh” as something like a “J,” while others pronounce it more like a “Zs” or “Ds.” I’ve heard “Rang4” pronounced as something like “Lang4” and “Zuo4” pronounced something like “Jaw4.” There are many other examples, but hopefully those give you the idea of what I’m talking about.

My first impression (based on text books and Pimsleur) was that these alternate pronunciations are just plain wrong, but the counter-argument that was posed to me is that the notion of right or wrong when dealing with differences in native pronunciation is irrelevant because, in fact, it all depends on what region you’re from; therefore, we need to adapt to all variations in order to deal with the variety that we’re likely to come across in the real world. The implication, if this is true, is that Pimsleur, and even ChinesePod, is deficient because it only teaches a particular type of pronunciation, which makes up only a small portion of actual Mandarin speakers. To continue this line of thinking, a program that teaches a variety of pronunciation styles is therefore superior.

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this proposition is valid or flawed? Is one approach (“standard by the book” or “what you hear in the wild”) better or worse than the other? Does your learning level play a role in whether you should intentionally diversify your listening exposure to (and your inevitable speaking practice of) different pronunciation styles?

Past a certain point, I agree with the proposition, but I think it doesn't hold true for beginning material. I can't imagine having made it through even the first set of Pimsleur recordings if they'd introduced ten different pronunciations of each of their sample sentences and expected me to understand all of them. That would be a source of enormous frustration for almost all beginners, I think, and most of them would probably just give up in despair. Further, it's not clear to me that even those who did get through it would be well-served.

In some sense no regional pronunciation can be considered "wrong," but not all pronunciations are created equal. There *is* a pronunciation that's recognized by most native speakers as the standard, educated mode of speech. As a learner, I would much rather pick up an accent that marks me as an educated Chinese than one that marks me as a backwater hick (which, unfair though it may be, I think nobody will deny is an attitude shown toward certain accents.)

That is a different question than what accents someone can understand, but especially in the beginning, we usually try very hard to emulate the accent of the speakers in our instructional material. I am not convinced that having a moving target would be helpful at all -- which one of the ten accents I'm hearing am I supposed to be trying to copy? I'd probably end up with an incomprehensible mix of all of them, picking out the particular phonetic elements from each one that are easiest for me to pronounce because as a beginner I have absolutely no basis on which to know which phonemes fit together with which others.

However, for advanced learners it is obviously silly to continue to stick solely to standard pronunciation. A sufficiently advanced person -- not that I expect to be in this category for many years -- would presumably not only be able to understand a wide range of accents, but change his own speech to make a point, e.g., the way an American might try to shift to a British accent when reading a passage from Shakespeare.

It is also true that many native speakers have a hard time understanding other people's local pronunciation. Obviously any native speaker will be able to tolerate much more variance in pronunciation than a foreigner who has only ever interacted with pitch-perfect standard putonghua, but, for example, an ex-coworker of mine is from southern China and he told me when he goes to visit his wife's family in Beijing, he has to really concentrate to follow the conversation at the dinner table (and this is a guy who's married to someone with that accent!) I don't think that's at all uncommon.

I totally agree with koreth. And I think I can add a little bit as someone who is married to a Mandarin speaker from the Shanghai area (actually Jiangsu province) rather than the Beijing area (the Mandarin of which most instructional material is based on).

Once you learn the standard pronunciation, it isn't that hard to understand the variations, especially if you are exposed to a the speech of a particular area regularly. I am an intermediate-level learner and the learning materials I've been exposed to have been more "standard" northern in accent. When I started going to Jiangsu, sometimes I had trouble understanding things that I should have known, because of the accent. But in time I adapted and if I know the word, I will generally understand the Jiangsu version of it even if it doesn't exactly match the way I learned it.

I would say just learn words the way your books and audio teach them, and down the road if you end up speaking regularly with people who pronounce them differently, soon enough you will pick it up naturally.

I try to keep my pronunciations fairly standard, not veering to strongly toward the Jiangsu Mandarin sound (where, for example, Shanghai is pronounced Sanghai.) I do, however, delete the "er" sounds found in Pimsleur lessons, so I say yidian instead of yidianr. And sometimes I do notice my wife's sounds creeping into my own speech, for example suo1 (speak) instead of shuo1. It's easier to say. Our neighbor, from Tianjin, says I sound ridiculous when I do that.

To continue this line of thinking, a program that teaches a variety of pronunciation styles is therefore superior.

No matter how variable the Chinese pronunciation may appear to be from region to region, they all belong to systems and speakers tend to speak with the accent of a certain system. "System" is the key word here as it allows you to work out the differences between accents systematically and consistently, so that the accents are predictable and therefore intelligible. In contrast, a foreigner whose accent is a haphazard melting pot of various accents would be very difficult, if not totally impossible, to understand.

Hi all,

I do think there is such a thing as a standard pronunciation in Chinese. Chinese students have to pass a test on this pronunciation to get radio or television jobs. I do thing deleting the Er's on the end of most Beijing words is good to. Though I have found other chinese people think the er hua ying is intellectual.

For instance I think some Scichuan people's pronunciation with bad sh, s differentiation, r's instead of Ls and other changes to the standard pronunciation can be called bad pronunciation not just a dialect.

I think it is the difference between the CCTV4 newscasters and the soap opera of the peasant family on the local channel.

In nanjing the only major confusion on pronunciation is when there are 2 l sounds or 2 n sounds in which case they like to switch . so instead of nanpengyou for boyfriend it is sometimes lan pengyou. (i.e. lazy friend) .

When Dashan puts heavy er hua ying into his tv lessons I don't think that helps learners much. What do you think?

Have fun,

Simon:)

I agree with the others. For speaking, stick with standard putonghua, because it will be most widely understood. That's one gripe I had against the FSI course. Different lessons would take place in different places (北京 or 台北) and so some words would change (哪儿 vs. 哪里 for example). It got irritating.

It's quite another thing to learn to understand different accents. This is a very good idea. But trying to speak with different accents makes no sense. I don't change my accent depending on if I'm in Boston or Dallas, so why should I change if I'm in 南京 instead of 北京?

I'm very new to learning Mandarin, but I would like to voice my agreement with most of the replies here. It's best to learn one of the "standard" ways of speaking first if you can. I am supposing that this will make you relatively well understood wherever you go, and if you spend any extended period of time in one region, you will be able to adjust to their speech patterns. It makes no sense to try and tackle all the different accents at once. On the other hand, I have heard from a Taiwanese friend and a Singaporean friend that the -er-ing of words is considered obnoxious and snobbish outside of Beijing so maybe that is a habit to avoid.

To speak from personal experience, I moved to a rural area of Japan with an intermediate knowledge of standard Japanese. Even though they speak a dialect here that is markedly different from the Tokyo dialect, they were able to make themselves understood to me when they wanted to, and had no trouble understanding me. In about a year I was able to adjust to the local dialect and even use it when I want to. I gather that the rift between the different varieties of Mandarin is a bit more pronounced than this, but I would imagine that the same ideas still apply.

Hey Luobot, you might want to look at one of the old posts, in which I expressed a lot of the same thinking as you:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/39-electronic-dictionaries25&highlight=rant+listening+materials

I think that the problem of being only exposed to one accent was pretty profound in my case. I listened to tons of tapes, which are all overly standard, and my wife speaks with an accent that is more “standard” than 99 out of a 100 Chinese people (because her father is from Henan and her mother is from Zhejiang, so she grew up speaking an incredibly standard form of Mandarin as her native accent). So, 80% of all my contacts with listening in Mandarin were with this overly standard, freakish CCTVish accent. I kind of think the situation is a bit analogous to the overly standardized/ slightly artificial accent that the BBC used to try to popularize throughout the old British Empire in the early days of radio. That accent is called “Received Pronunciation”, which is the accent that evil, super devious accent that British villains use in Hollywood movies. Britain eventually stopped emphasizing that particular accent, and in fact, you can hear a variety of British accents on the BBC today. Although that particular analogy has flaws, I think it also has some similarities to the situation of Mandarin in China today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A657560

Today, a whole generation has or two grown up in the era of TV and radio, making many people native speakers in areas of regionalects (throughout China, but especially down south). I really think that there are now de facto recognized prestige accents spoken by educated members of the south, and the majority of the people growing up in those areas have no desire to adjust their accents anymore. I used to think that China just had a few thousand 家乡话 (accents/languages of a particular city) and then China had one overreaching standard that all should adjust to, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There seems to be a whole group of businesspeople, professors, and politicians that speak a form of Mandarin that differs from CCTV’s, and they aren’t going to change it anytime soon. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

But, in a sense, one might think: if you were an ESL learner in the 30's, would you it make sense to solely listen to RP, while ignoring the other main accents of English that were used at the time?

So, I still think that making listening materials in non-standard forms would be a good idea. (Of course, whoever would want to take on such an enterprise would have to make it crystal clear that the listening materials should be used as a device for beginner/intermediates (and up), and not as a model on which CSL learners could emulate their own pronunciations).

I think it would be a good idea for a few reasons:

1) The vast majority of Mandarin speakers, even many educated ones, still speak in way that is differs from the standard.

2) Trying to bridge the gap between overly standard and non-standard Mandarin is often more difficult than it seems because the poor laowai can often only understand the general gist of a fast-paced conversation, and therefore s/he can’t consume his/her energy on noticing the intricacies of an accent. For me now (with a little more than 5 years of studying under my belt), the differences in the pronunciations of prestigious Shanghai-style Mandarin and standard Mandarin seem pretty small, but they seemed pretty formidable back in the day when I struggled to understand what the hell was being said. 我就四缩, well-made listening materials that focus on bringing realistic, comprehensible, and useful speech to a foreigner would really help learners (especially the thousands of laowai’s who live in China).

3) The relative “harm” done to one’s speaking accent, I think, could be minimized to almost nothing, assuming that the foreigner knows that he/she shouldn’t mimic the dialogues, with the hope of eventually obtaining that accent.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I think it should be made clear here that "listen to understand" and "listen to emulate" are two very different things. I advocate listening to as many accents as you can but emulate just one. The one to emulate is preferably the most common, standard one but it doesn't have to be so.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I think it should be made clear here that "listen to understand" and "listen to emulate" are two very different things.

Is that really true? I find that after a pretty short time in a different English-speaking area, I start to pick up traces of the local accent even though I am making absolutely no effort to emulate the locals. Sometimes I don't even notice it until I come back and friends point it out to me. I'm going to Dalian for a month this summer and I fully expect that by the time I come back, my Mandarin-speaking friends will laugh at the funny accent I've picked up without realizing it.

However, it may well be that I'm unusual in that regard, and/or that being exposed to the same local accent day in and day out is totally different than listening to a variety of local accents on a regular basis.

My first impression (based on text books and Pimsleur) was that these alternate pronunciations are just plain wrong, but the counter-argument that was posed to me is that the notion of right or wrong when dealing with differences in native pronunciation is irrelevant because, in fact, it all depends on what region you’re from; therefore, we need to adapt to all variations in order to deal with the variety that we’re likely to come across in the real world.

Yes and no. China has set itself a standard - Putonghua - and its entirely reasonable for courses to stick to that. You can't expect anything designed to appeal to the greatest number of Chinese learners to cover all the variations out there. You'd need different sections on each province. (Nay, county. Nay again, village. Nay again, those folk down the end of the village speak odd!)

That said, a bit of robustness in your listening is certainly valuable - you don't want to start shaking every time someone adds an -r where you've never heard an -r before. But I don't think it's something to spend too much time on - after all, take three heavily accented folk from any three parts of China, put them in a room together and they're going to have communication problems. Why should we expect to do any better? Spend some time on any regional variations you come across regularly by all means, but the whole spectrum?

More valuable probably is to have a very solid basis in the standard, and in working around problems by using context and a bit of bluffing. That should leave you able to spot when someone is being consistently off-center and compensate for it without having a complete breakdown in communication.