Accents, Tones, and Learning to Write

sneasel013
 February 25, 2009, 06:03 PM posted in General Discussion

Hey all, I would just like to start off by saying that I love the site. I am on a 7 day trial but I am fairly certain that I will get a subscription.

I have several questions that I need answered, however.

1) What accent does Jenny speak in? I have read that learning a southern accent is better because they use less "er"s then northerners do. But I don't think there is a difference. How much of a gap is there between accents? (within Mandarin, I'm not talking about other dialects)

2) In the dialogue/vocab sections the pinyin does mark tones. However, I am still confused. I know how to read pinyin and tones, but, for example, the site lists zaoshang as zǎoshang. Zao is obviously tone 3, but what is shang? Is it just tone 1 or no tone?

3) I have seen a lot of good sites in regards to hanzi (Skritter, nciku, etc). I would really like to learn to read and write in Mandarin, also. Does anyone have any advice on how to use Chinesepod in conjunction with other sites or courses to do this? I've tried Skritter but it's hard at first because they throw characters at you and don't show you the characters beforehand. There is some overlap with Chinesepod but not always. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you so much!

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pearltowerpete
 February 26, 2009, 03:18 AM

Hi sneasel013

Welcome to ChinesePod! Here are some answers:

1) Jenny is a native of Shanghai. Jiaojie is from Shanxi province, and Connie is from Zhejiang. If you get a personal counselor, they are from all different places. There are differences among the accents, but the hosts all speak standard Mandarin. It's important to learn to deal with a variety of accents in this country which has a large floating population, and mass migration from the countryside to the cities.

2) The standard romanization convention is that when there is no tone mark, the tone is neutral, a.k.a. the fifth tone. This is the case in 早上 zǎoshang, where shang is neutral. This is different from first tone.

3) I find the program Wenlin very useful for learning characters, as it gives you a stroke-by-stroke breakdown and often a detailed analysis of the roots of a word. As you say, there are many different choices out there, so maybe other poddies have different preferences.

We at CPod will be happy to answer any questions you may have. We look forward to seeing you on the message boards!