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  Tags: Immersion | Mandarin
 Language Learning Forum : Immersion, Schools & Certificates Post Reply
17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
onebir
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 7165 days ago

487 posts - 503 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin

 
 Message 17 of 17
25 April 2010 at 4:04pm | IP Logged 
doviende wrote:
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)

I lived in Kunming for 8 months a few years ago. Quite a lot of people can speak fairly standard mandarin, if they want to. But:
1) even when they want to speak mandarin, many people mix in words/tones from their preferred dialect to some extent (mapu/suliao putonghua)
2) opportuntities for listening comprehension practice on people in public places (aka eavesdropping) are limited because so many people speak in dialect(s)
3) if you're with a group of chinese who share another home dialect, they'll often revert to it (unless they're used to speaking mandarin to each other).

The Yunnan dialect is closer to mandarin than many others, but Chinese is hard enough without any added confusion. For language purposes I'd stick with the North or North-East.


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