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Phonetic confusion - Mandarin

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38 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4
Sun_Wukong
Newbie
China
Joined 5080 days ago

34 posts - 46 votes
Speaks: Portuguese*

 
 Message 33 of 38
03 January 2011 at 2:08pm | IP Logged 
Since you mentioned... I plan on taking an intensive summer program this year. My three
options are: Beijing Broadcasting University (it goes by other name now) - just for the
fetishism of been trained in broadcasting pronunciation; Changchun (several options, all
cheap and I could hire a tutor for extra lessons; plus it's supposed to be the chinese
hollywood and I'm taking a film degree); Harbin (same as Changchun without the movie
industry thing). Any advice?

You mention dongbei accent is slightly different. The reason why I thought about going
there is that people always say it's the closest in natural speech to standard putonghua.
I could just practice on the streets. Would you care to elaborate further? Thanks!
1 person has voted this message useful



lanni
Senior Member
China
Joined 6264 days ago

102 posts - 156 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin*
Studies: English

 
 Message 34 of 38
03 January 2011 at 6:53pm | IP Logged 
to Sun_Wukong:

If I were you, I would choose the Beijing programme. Because you will meet perhaps the best tutors in this field around China. Good models and methods are very much enlightening for your further progress especially if you will be doing self-study and practice afterwards. Only one short summer. In this case, excellent tutoring is more important than cheap&good exposure.

I recommended Heilongjiang only as a second option and only when you could stay there for a fairly long period of time.

Dongbei refers to four parts from north to south: Heilongjiang, bits of inner Mongolia, Jilin and Liaoning. I tick off Liaoning upfront because in some areas of that province the intonations are rather dramatic, and when they speak fast, they don't sound very elegant. Jilin has less problems. As of the bits of inner Mongolia, it depends on which of other three provinces it is close to geographically.

Heilongjiang people are the most clear-tongued among them. Sometimes they would confuse consonants between "z"and"zh","c"and"ch","s"and"sh","r"and "y(i)". For example, the word of 吃菜(eat dishes/eat vegetables), they may say "chi1chai4", or "ci1cai4", or "chi1cai4"(the correct one). Even when they confuse these consonants, they would utter the confused ones clearly and standardly. They would make the vowels of stressed wordgroup longer in each sentence (this feature always makes me think of German people's way of speaking, or visé versa.). And senior people out there tend to pop out a couple of Russian loan words or loan words from local minors occasionally. What else...? I'm afraid these are what I could think of for the moment.
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egill
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5697 days ago

418 posts - 791 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin, English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch

 
 Message 35 of 38
04 January 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged 
Sun_Wukong wrote:
egill wrote:
Like someone else mentioned there's an enormous
amount of variation
across native
speakers, especially for the retroflex and alveo-palatal sounds. Unless you have a
particular accent you are trying to shoot for I wouldn't sweat it too much.

As a side note, I grew up speaking Mandarin and it was only after I learned some
phonetics that I was able to convince myself very begrudgingly that the pinyin
b/d/z/zh/g/j sounds I was making were actually voiceless sounds. It was quite a shock
actually.

Then when I started learning Min which has a three way distinction (voiceless
unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced unaspirated), it took me a long time to
hear
the voicing difference between the two unaspirated sounds. This blew my mind yet again.


This is very interesting, egill! Can you elaborate further?


I'm not sure which part you want me to elaborate on, I'm going to assume it's the
first. I just meant that amongst native Mandarin speakers the retroflex sounds can run
the gamut all the way from being very far back (like touching the hard palate) to
moderately retroflexed, to not being retroflexed at all. In general, southern speakers
often are moderately to barely retroflexed, even in acrolectal speech.

One thing that be useful to note is that Mandarin retroflex sounds are laminal, meaning
they are articulated with the blade and not the tip of the tongue (as in many of the
Indic languages)
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CheeseInsider
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5123 days ago

193 posts - 238 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 36 of 38
04 January 2011 at 7:02pm | IP Logged 
Hmm, it should be very easy to distinguish between all of the consonant sounds, especially if your study materials feature a standard Mandarin accent. Anyways, everybody has given you great advice already. And remember that there are a very wide variety of acceptable Chinese accents all throughout China and Taiwan, so don't worry or stress too too much about pronunciation :) Good luck!
2 persons have voted this message useful



junglegreen
Newbie
Canada
Joined 5074 days ago

1 posts - 1 votes
Speaks: EnglishC2

 
 Message 37 of 38
04 January 2011 at 7:20pm | IP Logged 
I am also new to Mandarin and got confused with pronunciation, however there are great tools such as the pinyin table. It has over 1500 individual sounds. Here is the link a found it very resourceful
http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/

Edited by junglegreen on 04 January 2011 at 7:21pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Arekkusu
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Canada
bit.ly/qc_10_lec
Joined 5382 days ago

3971 posts - 7747 votes 
Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto
Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian

 
 Message 38 of 38
04 January 2011 at 8:55pm | IP Logged 
While q is a voiceless aspirated consonant, j is voiced unaspirated. However, the point where a language separates voiced from voiceless consonants differs, even within dialects, so what Mandarin considers voiced may technically qualify as voiceless in another language's paradigm.

I haven't studied Mandarin in ages, but I certainly remember that the voiced/unvoiced boundary quite differs from that of English and most European languages.


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