Chinese mistakes that can be avoided if you know English

Not a mistake per se but it’s a matter of standards. Sure you can say “lan hou” when you chat with your neighbor and he wouldn’t bat an eye, but you would never hear a newscaster say it. Do you hear newscasters on BBC speak with a cockney accent?

Congratulations! You’re a certified Taiwanese.

Well I don’t watch BBC, so I’m not sure.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, though. To me it sounds a bit prescriptivist, like you are saying that there is a ‘right’ way to speak the language. If we follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion (for Mandarin), then the only ‘correct’ way to speak the language is how a native Beijinger sounds.

If you’re talking about the written pronunciation guide not matching actual pronunciation, then take that up with the KMT, or Wade-Giles, or whoever else. I would also say any attempt to write down spoken language will be imperfect, and I’d remind you which language we’re currently using to communicate :grin:

Actually, you can hear newscasters talking like that these days. Standards have definitely slipped (I mean standard in the sense of “standard Mandarin,” not that there’s anything wrong with the non-standard kind).

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Politics play a big part in all of this. If Taiwan wants to forge its own identify, it’ll likely continue to distance itself from everything Chinese, including language. But I do miss the Mandarin that was considered standard not so long ago, as that’s what I was taught. If you’ve ever listened to 李艷秋 announce the news, you’d know what I mean. Like I said earlier in the thread, the language has been bastardized.

The reason why that version of Mandarin didn’t stick around longer is that itself was an artificial construct. Most of the Taiwanese people didn’t speak Mandarin at first, and most Late Immigrants that came with the KMT didn’t speak that way either. Even the two Chiangs didn’t sound anything like that. Most Late Immigrants were actually from Zhejiang, so a majority of the Late Immigrants sounded just like the Chiangs. So fore the majority of people who grow up in the 50s through out the 80s, even if they picked up Mandarin really well, they would have sounded more like they are speaking with a Zhejiang accent.

There is absolutely no standard in how Mandarin should sound like. The Li Yangqiu version sounds nothing like how people spoke in Beijing. It was just something that a small minority of Northern dialect speaking late immigrants in Taiwan decided how Mandarin should sound like.

Of course, KMT brain washing was at its peak efficiency in the 80s, so plenty of that generation picked it up to varying degrees.

Bastardized seems like a strong word. It’s natural for languages to diverge after long periods of separation. It would be weird if American newscasters all spoke with received pronunciation, wouldn’t it?

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Well, call me brainwashed then. That’s the standard I was taught to follow, and that’s how I prefer to speak. No, it’s not how people speak in Beijing, and I’m glad about that.

This seems like an overstatement. There may not have been a precise standard, but I think a kind of de facto “cha bu duo” standard did emerge…a kind of reimagining of a standard northern accent with a few modified vowels and no 輕聲 (yes, obviously influenced by a Zhejiang accent). The way an educated speaker would sound…mostly, but not all, waishengren. A lot of the newscasters and radio announcers sounded pretty similar in the eighties and nineties.

It’s as “standard” as the Mid-Atlantic accent.

If you listen to Li Yanqiu, she only used the modified vowels for eng→ong, but not for ing→in

By the way, she sounds nothing like that today

Listen to how she said 整 @0:40 XD

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We need to tell Taiwanese to learn English to be better in Mandarin! :thinking:

Because the first would be acceptable in “standard Mandarin,” and the second wouldn’t.

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Check out my updated post on how Li actually speaks when she isn’t playing the role of a broadcaster.

Confession time. Growing up in Taiwan, I had a hard time telling en and eng apart. I always get it wrong on my Zhuyin tests, and I thought the distinction was totally stupid as no one says it that way and ㄈㄥˊ (which I only know as /fong/) sounds nothing like /feng/.

It was not until I started learning English and Taigi that it finally clicked. My wife use Zhuyin as her preferred Chinese IME. Till this day she has trouble with guessing whether a Hanji ends with /en/ or /eng/.

So, yes, there is a ‘standard’ Taiwanese Mandarin accent, in the same way that there is (or at least there used to be) a ‘standard’ American English accent (and also British). Seems like it is maybe declining in use in Taiwan. But regardless, in every case, that does not make the way a layperson speaks incorrect if it is different from the ‘standard’. So as hansioux said, if you care about differentiating -eng/-en or -ing/-in, then knowing English or Taigi might help, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t differentiate them. (Unless you meet Incubus on the street, I guess.)

It shouldn’t matter, but people will still make value judgments about you depending on whether you speak “standard Mandarin” or “Taiwan guoyu.”

If Li Yanqiu can comfortably pronounce 整 as 枕 on a magazine interview, I’d say standard Mandarin in Taiwan includes p/f-eng→p/f-ong, zh/ch/sh-eng→zh/ch/sh-en and ing→in. That isn’t what’s considered Taiwan Gouyu, at least not in the sense of speaking with a Taigi accent.

Of course there’s a scale that goes from very standard Mandarin, to a more relaxed pronunciation, to a very strong Taiwan guoyu accent. Straying too far to either end and certain people will start making those judgments.

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Definitely true… unfortunate, but true.

That would never happen as we’d be speaking in English. :wink: But this is just something I personally follow as I speak Mandarin, and I don’t hold it against other. Or else I’d be peeved all the time here.

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That’s why I like to speak Mandarin with a hard Beijing accent, and then randomly switch into flawless Taigi. Gotta keep 'em guessing.

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