User Comments - tingyun

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

I stumbled on this debate – interesting, but I think there are a few issues that could be cleared up.

First, on the importance of Standard Chinese. While accents do abound in China, the idea that “oh well people speak that way so that’s correct in itself” may be convincing at some linguistics conference, but this kind of linguistic egalitarianism is not at all Chinese. Especially among the younger generation, people in their 20s, 30s, having a standard accent is a symbol of education and status. Take a trip into Inner Mongolia and you’ll find a lot of the people can’t even clearly tell where their dialect ends and standard mandarin begins – but talk to a student at one of China’s Universities who grew up in Inner Mongolia and you’ll find they speak very standard (ok, yes, many are recent Han immigrants, but find one from a Mongolian family and the same holds true). Very often, having a bit of a Beijing type accent, is also considered a positive status symbol. And having a strong accent is looked down upon. Jenny herself had a blog post where she described how, when founding her business, she would get a lot of phone calls regarding tax and the like – and she would hang up on the ones with a strong Shanghai accent, assuming they were likely cons, and listen to the ones with a standard accent. China is a country where speaking standard is a marker of education, culture, status.

That having been said, the Chinese Pod team does a good job of keeping their language standard. Yes, there are traces of accent – but they are very small, and certainly within the margin of well-educated people from diverse regions speaking Standard Mandarin. Yes, sometimes the ng and n distinction steers a little too close, and each of the hosts has some words that they consistently mispronounce (I remember one host seems always to pronounce 窥 as kui4 rather than the correct kui1, and another always pronounces 给予 as gei3yu3 rather than ji3yu3, though that’s not so much accent as just a common mistake), but its still very standard. Now, if Cpod was to enlist someone with a typical Shanghai local accent, or a Hunan accent, that would certainly be cause for complaint, but they haven't, outside of that one innkeeper character I remember from the old UI program where someone disappeared (its been a longtime) - and that was deliberate to add flavor.

Second, on tv shows and standard mandarin. Yes, generally high budget TV shows (for example, the recent 三国, or 倚天屠龙记) are considerably more standard than Cpod (though, the difference is probably something like 96 percent to 99 percent, its not dramatic). Now, how is this? Watch倚天屠龙记 and pay attention to the mouths of the actors – its pretty obvious they aren’t moving in line with the dialogue. This is true of many programs – they are dubbed. Often, its because the actor does not speak standard enough, and they use a more standard speaker to dub the lines in (sometimes, they may not even speak Mandarin). Sometimes, the original actor does the dubbing – but in the context of the controlled studio environment, their speech is made more standard and accent reduced.

Side note – I think Western movies dubbed into Chinese are a terrible way to learn Chinese. RCK is correct, they don’t tend to have southern accents – but I think they have something worse. Whenever Chinese dub over a western character, they tend to insert an odd sort of rhythm to the way the character speaks, and how the words are emphasized, subtle, but definitely would qualify, in my opinion, as the worst kind of accent. May not be true in every western movie, but it was in a bunch that I watched, as well as in the Spiderman cartoons…

So yes, TV shows are very standard, and they put some effort in the higher quality ones into achieving this. But, as I said even they aren’t perfectly so. There is a very obvious example – 嫉妒。Virtually every tv show has everyone mispronounce this as ji4du4 (correct is ji2du4). And no, they aren’t trying to say the equivalent meaning word 忌妒 (which is pronounced that way) as the subtitle clearly shows嫉妒. But now try saying嫉妒 correctly – and watch your Chinese friends become totally confused as to what you mean. There are other examples that are usually pronounced wrong (唠叨，束缚, etc) though at least with these pronouncing it correctly doesn’t seem to cause confusion. My point is not to bemoan the situation (I personally just use 妒忌 or忌妒 to avoid the issue), but rather to point out that even in TV shows there is some deviation, though its fairly predictable.

While in an ideal world I’d like Cpod to ascend those final few steps to become even more standard, I think there are enough people here who like the variation that there is a strong argument for keeping it. While I think they are mostly mistaking a very tiny trace of an accent for some kind of real exposure to the varieties of Chinese accents around, there is probably some value left in it. Anyway, at some point one graduates from Cpod and moves on to other things (the reason I haven’t been around in the last year), and at least in my case, about the time Adv and Media became too basic to be effective study tools was also about the time I had kicked out all the other kinks in my pronunciation and it became sensible to more carefully pick materials to mimic (the readers for http://www.justing.com.cn/ are near-perfect, though you really have to be ‘graduated’ from Cpod before you can just pop in one of their recordings and go).

Third point – I do think there is one thing Cpod could improve. Now, Cpod does a good job of producing very natural sounding dialogues – and because of this, as in all natural Chinese, some words in the sentence do not receive emphasis and are said quickly, with their tones somewhat indistinct. This is of course ideal as this is exactly how Chinese is spoken. However, sometimes one of the new words from the Vocab list happens to fall into one of these deemphasized places – and so is said too quickly and lightly to provide an effective vehicle for learning it. Assuming that the new words chosen out of the lesson are deemed targets for learning, it would make sense to make sure that the voice actors put enough emphasis on them – even if it means deviating a bit from what would otherwise be natural.

Final point - actually, there is a much more extreme version of this. Most of my classmates working on PhDs here in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard insist on reading 车 as ju1 when working with classical texts, reflecting a belief that this preserves a more correct sound and the modern che1 is a corruption. Ok, yes, Tang poems are more likely to preserve rhymes if you pronounce it ju1...but unless you are going to read the whole thing in a reconstructed middle chinese, it just seems a little silly to me. There are alot of examples of these reading pronounciations - ie 李白 pronounced Libo, 骑 and 治 preserving archaic alternate readings of ji4 and chi2 that alternate with the current qi2 and zhi4 depending on grammatical role, etc. Now, I refuse to follow these - but then again I'm willing to preserve a pronunciation of wang4 for 王 when used as a verb (as the old Confucians liked to use it) and you4 for 有 when used in classical constructions like 二十有一 (it means 21) , and I will insist that 数 has a pronunciation of cu4 with the meaning of 'small net', even if the only place it comes up is in one of Mencius' analogies. So really criticizing too harshly would just be 以五十步笑百步. And then there are purposeful deviations - 般若 is pronounced bo1re3, NOT ban1ruo4, to better resemble the original Indian pronunciation (yah right), 吐蕃 is tu3bo1, not tu3fan1, to better resemble Tibetan, and in 陈寅恪 most educated people will purposefully 'mispronounce' 恪 as que4, not as the 'correct' ke4, in order to imitate Chen Yinque's dialect and how he himself pronounced his name. Pronunciation is a very complicated matter, and there are different choices one makes in determining what is correct. Though most of these are basically irrelevant for quite awhile, and you can worry about them (or choose not too) after you graduate from Cpod.

Posted on: 国产大片

The vocab section has 情结‘s translation confused with 情节. 

Posted on: 人类的起源

It was an upper intermediate lesson, called Stargazing

Its not a terribly good way to learn the names of the planets, as it doesn't seem to do much with them (beyond naming them at various times）. In the dialogue, you could switch around where some of the planets are named and not destroy its coherency (ie saturn, mars, jupiter, mercury, etc). Thus, listening to the dialogue doesn't really help you learn the names of the planets (except to the extent you are conciously saying "mars, mars" to yourself as the dialogue comes 火星). I think to be effective in teaching new vocab, its meaning has to be part of its use in the dialogue. You'll probably more easily learn the word for Mars from one of the dialogues that have someone saying "你是不是火星人？连这点常识都不知道。 " or something to that effect．

I remember there being a media lesson on the controversy over pluto being a planet - now, that would be a good way to get 冥王星 imprinted in your memory.　

Posted on: 多音字

Small correction on a point in the dialogue (haven't listened to podcast yet so I don't know if it was pointed out there) - but 为 also has a 2nd tone 介词 usage, when it is used in a similar meaning as 被 in marking the passive voice.  For example - 。。。不能为世人所接受的。

Question - My understanding is that 只得 read "zhi3de2" is the techincally correction reading of the word - when people read it instead as "zhi3dei3" is this a technical (but colloquial) mistake, or is it simply reading the charecters as being two seperate words and thus correct?  Any distinction in meaning or feel to the two readings (beyond the first being more formal)?

Posted on: 望子成龙

周洪 wrote an interesting criticism of the 望子成龙 attitude - check out this link for an excert from his discussion of his book 我平庸，我快乐 titled 为什么不能让孩子快乐一点儿（or you could just search 周洪 望子成龙 and a bunch of sites housing an excert will show up)

http://www.eduzhai.net/youer/351/374/youer_130013.html

Posted on: 中国企业国际化

I can't seem to get the audio files to play (except for the last two) in the expansion.  I haven't had trouble with the other lessons, are the links working?

Posted on: 中国IT外包服务

Actually, since I discovered the dialogue tab (As a result of your question actually - I didn't know it existed before) I've stopped using the pdfs. The dialogue tab is such a wonderful development - the ability to hear the dialogue line by line pronounced in a super clear voice (sometimes the dialogue mp3 is a bit mashed together for realistic effect, but nice to have the clarity when learning initially), the ability to scroll over words and grab the pinyin and definition, and the fact that the dialogue tab seems more up-to-date than the pdfs in accuracy...not to menotion the advantage of hearing everything pronounced in a second way has for learning.

Posted on: 北京奥运会的筹备

Interesting, thanks for clearing that up! :)

Posted on: 中国IT外包服务

Oddly enough, if you go to the dialogue tab, it has english translation on this lesson (but no pinyin...)

Posted on: 网络游戏

lily,

谢谢你的帮助- 其实我说的‘只当’是另外一个词语，是‘就想象是这样’ 的意思。 比如说，‘只当世界上只存在着我们俩’，或者‘阿，你的男朋友跟你分手，那就只当他早就死了。’ 当然我的例子有可能存在着些问题，如果是这样，我很感谢你的改正。

班廷筠