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Best place for Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Immersion, Schools & Certificates |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 9 of 17 09 November 2009 at 2:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I lived in Hangzhou for a while, and made many trips to Shanghai. Although I found the people to be friendly enough, the accent is not that great. Most people speak the local dialect at home, and learn Mandarin at school as a second language. To learn a Standard Mandarin, you definitely want to be north of Shanghai.
I've heard that Mandarin is spoken natively (with slight variations) across large regions of the north, whereas in the south there are a lot more fragmented languages that are mutually unintelligible, and their accents in mandarin are much harsher (like they reduce zh/sh/ch into z/c/s). Having said that, the chinese program at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou is quite good. My instructors all had excellent standard accents, despite growing up in Hangzhou. If you want an instructional program with lots of class time, then I'd recommend it (and Zhejiang University is well-known as a top university within China). On the other hand, if you want to avoid classes and just talk with lots of people, then Hangzhou is not really that good because of the accent problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6261 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 10 of 17 17 November 2009 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
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The best place to study Mandarin is: The International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University in Taipei It is the most prestigious and rigorous program in the world. http://iclp.ntu.edu.tw/index.php?option=com_content&view=cat egory&layout=blog&id=1&Itemid=1 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| starst Triglot Senior Member China Joined 5516 days ago 113 posts - 133 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Japanese, EnglishC2 Studies: FrenchC1, German, Norwegian | Message 11 of 17 18 November 2009 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I would recommend Beijing, where most people speak quite standard mandarin. And it's easy to find good programs in Beijing. There are quite several famous universities. If you are still a student and not language-majored, you can consider to take part in an exchanging program instead of a pure immersion program.
I make a small recommendation for this one: http://hanyu.tsinghua.edu.cn/English%20web/index.html Xi'an is a famous city for its long history as a capital, but it has a quite strong local accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Linc Newbie Macau Joined 5444 days ago 29 posts - 45 votes Studies: English Studies: French | Message 12 of 17 16 February 2010 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I am not very sure. But one of my friend told me the accent in Harbin is kinda different from Beijing. The Harbin accent is northeastern accent which is fairly standart and clearest.
There was a survey indicated 90%+ of beijingers speak standart mandarin in the national standart. While around 65% in neigbour city Tianjin, but did not say the precentages in southern part of China(i guess quite low :). Southerners generally speak somewhat like "simplified" mandarin, reducing sh to s, ch to c, zh to z ...and varous accents. However, they seem to have no problem in conversation at all. Edited by Linc on 16 February 2010 at 12:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6296 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 13 of 17 16 February 2010 at 2:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps doing a search of best cities in China in which to live and then cross out the ones that will have tons of
foreign students or have too strong of a local dialect. It seems to me that someplace like Dalian or Qingdao would be cool. Nanjing too. If you would like to start from the full form (traditional) characters, Taiwan is a good place. Direct flights to China now means it is easy to pop over for quick trips. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 14 of 17 16 February 2010 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Remember also that there are places in southwestern china (yunnan) where there are apparently a lot of speakers of a very standard mandarin. The "Northern" dialects actually extend southwestward at an angle, and "Southern" dialects are actually more "Southeastern". Here's a map from wikipedia (yellow is Mandarin)
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 15 of 17 17 February 2010 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||
Sorry I only noticed your question now. I have done a 6-week intensive summer course at the BLCU. It is a very big, pretty campus in the Haidian district where the Beijing Daxue is also located. As soon as you leave the campus, you won't see any foreigners anymore, but there are plenty of small shops to explore and there is a good connection via busses and rail to other parts of the city. Even on the campus the majority of students come from Korea and Japan, especially at the higher levels. In my beginner class, there were no more than 2 people from the same country, a very nice experience, even though we could communicate with half the class in English (the Asian students didn't speak it well enough). Surprisingly enough, the staff and the teachers at the BLCU do not generally speak English. From registration to the classes themselves, it's all in Mandarin, though the textbooks post grammar explanations and the like in English along with Mandarin. Lessons are every morning from Monday and Friday, leaving only the afternoon for exploration of the city, and even then you should factor in quite a bit of time for homework, studying new vocabulary and the like, because they do one lesson a day, 25-30 new items of vocabulary every day... On the weekends, the university organizes excursions to the Great Wall, the terracotta army at Xi'an, Inner Mongolia and other places of interest. There is also the possibility of attending courses in Tai Chi (24- step form, fan Tai Chi, sword Tai Chi), calligraphy, Chinese painting and other things on campus, before or after the lessons. In addition, the black boards have lots of postings of private Chinese teachers, private Tai Chi teachers, language exchanges and so on, and they all have very affordable rates, e. g. $2 an hour in 2004 when I was there. That's the reason you may want to just fly to China as a tourist and get a local teacher there rather than signing up with a language school, though the group experience at the BLCU was a lot of fun. Another advantage of the BLCU is that you can get good accomodations cheaply on campus. For the scholarship students the dorms are crappy (sleeping on plain wood, broken mosquito nets, sharing washrooms with lots of people, rooms are hot as hell in summer), but for $7 a night you can live in dorms with real beds, private bathroom, air conditioning and TV, including international stations like CNN, TV5 and Deutsche Welle. Chinese people can't visit you in your room in those dorms though, and I hear it's the same with hotels for Westerners. That's what really annoyed me in China, a system of apartheid against their own people. The other thing is that I couldn't get used to always always being stared at - many see white people for the first time en natura, even at the touristy places, because there you mainly see tourists from other parts of China. If you're thinking about a long-term stay in China, say a semester or a year even, I'd definitely do a shorter trip first to see if you can live there. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5342 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 16 of 17 25 April 2010 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Personally, I like the sound of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, it sounds so soft and cute to the ears...I would advise against learning mandarin in Singapore or Malaysia...
That's personal taste though... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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