17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3
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) |
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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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