Taiwanese people's use of Chinese tones

Watched this video ages ago, just found it again as an example of how poorly tones are used here.

The woman is Chinese, her husband is Taiwanese.

Her accent is so nice to listen to.

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Baloney. They’re worse at tones in China.

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I think it depends where

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No it doesn’t.

Obviously it does, but again we go to the problem of what is “proper”

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Well, obviously this woman has her tones down, so wherever she is from must speak properly… so I think it does depend where. I think you are confusing their often hard to understand accents with speaking with the incorrect tone.

Also, when I lived in mainland China, I found people in big cities (not including Beijing) to speak with quite a neutral accent and very accurate tones.

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There are no differences in the tones in that video.

腔 means accent, not only tones.

Some languages like Shanghai completely drop tones in certain situations.

Taiwan slur their words but they do that in China too.

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Please, my guy, watch the first minute of that video.

I watched 1:20.

Where are the differences?

0:38 to 0:46. With the comparison of those words, yes there are accent differences, but he also completely lacks the use of any tones at all.

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There’s no difference in tones. It’s just that her tones are sharper, which is expected.

Both of them are saying it properly.

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When they get into the 40s, the flattening of tones in Taiwan Mandarin is so clear even to me.

That woman, btw, would be an awesome Chinese teacher.

Guy

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That’s what I said when my wife showed it me a while back :slight_smile:

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I watched it my wife now.
We couldn’t still laughing!
Great video!

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Yeah I think they’re just more subtle

I have to agree to OysterOmelet. In terms of tones, aside from the sandhi when saying repeated characters, and right before r, there are 3 or 4 characters that actually have different tones. Most of those are the neutral tone, which in Taiwan we just say it as the first tone.

Overall, I’d say 80% of the tones are the same, and the main difference comes from different ways to pronounce the consonants and ‘-eng’.

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I would say that the biggest tonal difference is in those words (shetou, putao) where Chinese Mandarin uses a neutral tone on the second word, and Taiwanese Mandarin uses the character’s actual tone.

The second biggest tonal difference is in the Taiwanese clipping of the third tone. It never really comes back up after it goes down.

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What’s a “mainland”? Are you from Hong Kong or Macau?

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Well it’s the term used on the video embedded above to distinguish these two people featured in it.

Yes, it is dated. If the term keeps this couple married and happy, I can live with that.

Guy

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Why not say “China” and “Taiwan”, then?