Shanghai/Mandarin Accent

Bump.

Have you ever heard a non-native speaker of a language speak a second, third, etc. language without an accent? They speak the language so well that you'd swear it was their first language?

Such speakers, though uncommon, do exist, and are a testiment to their own language-learning prowess.

A good language learner will pick up the accent of his/her instructor with enough time. This is fact, and I'm sure you can find countless cases online if you dig deeply enough.

The same can be said of learners who pick up "non-standard" accents. Perhaps the most humourous case of my personal experience being a run-in with a small Vietnamese boy who spoke English with an impeccable cockney accent. (The boy's step father was a long-time expat in Vietnam.)

Hi steve

Don't worry. No one would take 课程 (ke4cheng2) for 磕碜 (ke1chen3) even if your pronunciation is a little sloppy. Context is king ..............perhaps.

It's good that this was brought up. I sometimes have trouble distinguishing the 'n' and 'ng' finals in CPod material. I thought it was just my listening skills that were flawed!

Most Japanese can't distinguish "n" and "ng" sounds, me included. So, good or bad, I don't care about the Shanghainese sound, hehe.

For me it just seems that the hosts servce as language model for students to emulate, and as language models their pronunciation should always be as standard as possible so that students can get "perfect practice", as it is not "practice [that] makes perfect", but "perfect practice [that] makes perfect".

I agree that exposure to a variety of accents is fine, and the 中国口音 lesson was great for this. However, outside of areas specifically deemed as teaching unstandard accents, the hosts should try and be cognizant of their pronunciation at all times. Could the recordings not be supervised and edited when errors are made?

I've also noticed in a lot (all?) of the PDF transcripts that 不 when preceding a fourth tone is not changed to being a second tone. 

I know I'm being overly nit-picky here, but I'm a firm believe in learners getting things right at the outset to minimize the fossilization of errors. I can imagine that some learners are unable to pick up on these errors, and are as such learning them as fact.

I think that the mixing up of 'n' and 'ng' sounds is so widespread that you need to get used people stuffing them up.

I would say that if a native speaker makes a mistake, it is by definition, not an "error". Getting used to error-corrected dialogue from CPod is doing you a disservice if in the real world, a large proportion of people make those errors.

maxiewawa, I think the point here is that if you learn from someone with a Shanghainese accent and then add your own inevitable accent, you'll end up with a (for example) Shanghainese + Swedish accent. If you start out with "standard", you'll minimize the accent you eventually get.

Of course, nobody actually speaks standard Mandarin. It's an invented accent that tries to iron out the differences.

So whereas comprehension should be practiced with a variety of accents, speaking practice should not. So I do think stevealex has a point here.

From my interactions with other Shanghainese people and people from nearby provinces, the abbreviation of 'ng' to 'n' is part of their accent.

You point this out in the lesson, 中医面临的危机, which is from 2006. Jenny's accent was still really strong back then.  However, in newer lessons her accent is much more standard. You point out its occurrence during 中国崛起, a lesson from 2009, maybe that was her co-host?

In some sense it's unfortunate that the pronunciation in lessons isn't (artificially) perfect, but perhaps that's a reflection of the situation on the ground?  If anything, I think we need more exposure to non-standard pronunciation, especially in the lesson banter.  I think that's fine as long as the review material has standard pronunciation, which is unfortunately not always the case as I have on numerous occasions been practicing with the Audio Review and WLCP-Vocabulary mp3s when a present native speaker pointed out flaws in their pronunciation.  

Whenever I speak to people in Chinese, from the perspective of a learner, I just take their pronunciation with a grain of salt, depending on their origin and accent.  I would apply that to the lessons too.  I think in all cases it's pretty clear from the outset who has a standard accent and who doesn't.

I know it is a faux pax for a professional language training platform to do so, but I wish CPod had more un-standard accents so that we can be prepared for the real China.  Furthermore, I would be happy (or at least amused) if someone said my Chinese accent sounded a little influenced by the local dialect.

stevealex,

you said:

"For me it just seems that the hosts serve as language model for students to emulate, and as language models their pronunciation should always be as standard as possible"

I think they do a great job of staying as accent neutral as possible. You will not find any standard speech on the street in china so what is the point? Accents are a fact of life we need to deal with.

you also said:

"I've also noticed in a lot (all?) of the PDF transcripts that 不 when preceding a fourth tone is not changed to being a second tone"

I believe the standard convention is to leave the tones unchanged in written text even though it is pronounced second tone in this case. CPOD follows this convention to avoid confusion. You just need to know the rule. Its part of learning Chinese.

I'll copy/paste what I said above, since people seem to have missed it:

I think the point here is that if you learn from someone with a Shanghainese accent and then add your own inevitable accent, you'll end up with a (for example) Shanghainese + Swedish accent. If you start out with "standard", you'll minimize the accent you eventually get.

[...]

So whereas comprehension should be practiced with a variety of accents, speaking practice should not. So I do think stevealex has a point here.

For example, if I learn Chinese with the Shanghai accent, and thus turn 'ng' into 'n', and then because of my own deficiencies mix up the 'e' and the 'a' sound, suddenly, telling someone "你太棒了!" (nǐ tài bàng le, you're really awesome) might come out as "你太笨了!" (nǐ tài bèn le, you're really stupid). If I had learned "standard" pronounciation, I would sound like "nǐ tài bèng le", which would certainly be an improvement.

This is the danger of learning from people with a non-standard accent. Of course, with comprehension, it's a different matter altogether. Nonstandard accents are great here, at more advanced levels.

simonpettersson has reiterated my underlying argument spot on--learning standard Mandarin is tough enough, let alone trying to learn it through a--though what seems rare--un-standard medium.

Chinese isn't an easy language to learn. As many posters here have mentioned, there are a variety of accents everywhere, and hearing super-standard, CCTV Mandarin on the streets just doesn't happen all the time.

My anal-retentive use of an overly large magnifying glass here isn't to attack the site (I think it's the best out there content wise), but simply to point out what should be for the CPod staff easily identifiable slip ups which seemingly wouldn't take much time to correct/edit.

As educators, the objective should be to teach the correct way of doing things. For many users who do not have the privledge or luxury of living in China and listening to Mandarin everyday, CPod is their only medium. Little errors here and there go unnoticed simply because the learner does not know any better. This harms the integrity of the site later down the road when the learner is confronted and made aware that he/she has been learning the wrong way of doing something for so long.

I'm sure that I fall into a very small minority of CPod users who, as another poster said, "quibble" over such small things, and that it's not worth the CPod Team's time to read or address my issues. Indeed, more important things are deserving of mine and others' attention. It just seems a bit silly that the hosts wouldn't be able to correctly pronounce a word that they use everyday at work, or that no one has brought attention to it in the past.

I'll stop my bantering here and move on to devoting my energies elsewhere. However, I just hope that in future Advanced lessons I can hear the word 课程 pronounced properly. I don't think that's too much to ask for someone seriously considering subscribing (i.e. paying money) to the site.

Simon, Steve,

I think being aware of the issue (as you are) is the best defence, but I agree that the staff should make their best effort. Lets hope they take note. I just dont plan on losing any sleep over it. Maybe as I advance it will mean more to me.

The whole conversation is predicated on the assumption that learning language from a speaker with an accent creates a worse accent for the learner.  Is that true or is it rationalization?  

Don't mistake me, I'm not a linguist, so I'm not expressing an opinion one way or another.  I was just wondering if there is any reliable source to back up the initial assumption?

@Steve

You live in China, right?  And you are quibbling about the accents on ChinesePod?  There are bigger things to worry about in the Chinese-learning world.  

BTW I agree with the comments on n and ng - Shanghai people apparently can't hear the difference.  Makes them kind of human.   :-)