Off The Great Wall: Mainland vs Taiwan Mandarin

[dnoblett]

Interesting topic comparing many things between the two, many of our friends are Taiwan Chinese, and my wife has told me many things different between the two versions of Mandarin.

 

http://youtu.be/Cm7mCmncbvA

[Allon]

Oh no. I am not getting into this one. Both sides claim only their version of Chinese is legitimate. Some of these people carry weapons to the discussion.

[Randy W]

There's also different accents on the Mainland. Chinese characters are phonetic in the sense that each character corresponds to a single sound, but there's no indication of what that sound is, unless you already know or learn from other speakers - a Western romanization can help sound it out.

 

I've noticed my wife has trouble with the 'sh' sound - she usually just pronounces the 's'. So it c an be hard to distinguish among 4, 10, and 11 (si, shi, and shi yi - which tends to be slurred together), even when she speaks with other local speakers. I remember a discussion she had with a taxi driver in Beijing where they seemed to be arguing over the 'sh' sound - each emphasized their own pronunciation of words containing that sound.

 

When I first heard the baby's name (Chenxi) it took me a month to figure out what it was (it sounded like she was saying Ten-si). We finally had to sit down at a computer so she could help me figure out what the Chinese characters were, and from that, the corresponding Pinyin.

 

In order to figure out Chinese characters, she'll pronounce the word - I'll guess the pinyin, and input it. The computer generates a list of possible Chinese characters. From that, she can tell if I got it right - if not, she'll steer me toward the correct sound. Once I get the pinyin correct, she'll select the correct Chinese character.

[Allon]

My wife has trouble too with the "sh" sound but the word "xiao" meaning small most of the time (you have to qualify things when speaking of the Chinese language ) she can say with no problem. When I let her know that, she still can't do it. Her favorite cuss word is SIT.

 

Well, that keeps us safe in good company.

[dnoblett]

Randy, actually the characters are pictographs, they tend to not represent phonetic sounds so that no matter what dialect is spoken the written language is mostly the same. PinYin is the phonetic spoken Mandarin spoken in Beijing the Beijing Dialect or official mandarin

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_dialect

 

In Taiwan they speak a variant dialect of Mandarin, also in Taiwan they have a different written phonetic language called BoPoMoFo which my Chinese teacher at my work, uses with beginners to learn to speak Mandarin.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

[Allon]

BoPoMoFo is simply the instruction of the pronunciation of the Mandarin "characters" and not all of them An analogy of its use would be our repetition of the English alphabet -- ABCDE, etc.

 

Taiwan speaks and writes Mandarin in the Traditional style, so it is closer to the original Mandarin than what is written on the mainland. The pronunciation for both is the same. Mao wanted to simplify the written language so westerners could learn it easier, and the People could save a few strokes in writing.

 

Pinyin was also developed by the Mao government, supposedly at his insistence, so that Westerners could more easily learn to pronounce Mandarin. It is Romanized since much of Western language is Roman in derivation. The project started in 1955. It replaced Wade-Giles but had trouble taking off.

[Randy W]

Randy, actually the characters are pictographs, they tend to not represent phonetic sounds so that no matter what dialect is spoken the written language is mostly the same. PinYin is the phonetic spoken Mandarin spoken in Beijing the Beijing Dialect or official mandarin

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_dialect

 

In Taiwan they speak a variant dialect of Mandarin, also in Taiwan they have a different written phonetic language called BoPoMoFo which my Chinese teacher at my work, uses with beginners to learn to speak Mandarin.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

 

 

But each character represents a single sound in any of the dialects (at least the ones I know of). One character = one sound = one syllable. Yes, that's a stretch to call that "phonetic", but I did anyway. In some cases, you CAN look at an unfamiliar character and know how it's pronounced from the radicals it's composed of.

 

That's not the case in Japanese, where the Chinese characters were adapted to an already existing language - they have their own (truly) phonetic alphabets (in fact, two of them). They will sometimes include the katakana characters as superscript to indicate the pronunciation of a relatively rare symbol.

 

The Chinese Romanized version can be different in different dialects. My wife's name, for example, is Wu Jiaying in the Mandarin Romanization, or Ng Gajing in Cantonese. Wang from the Mainland might be Wong in Taiwnese.

[Allon]

It's the nature of Pinyin to be different. It was formed first for Mandarin but as the usage spread, it changed with the dialects. The nature of language I guess. And I had a discussion with Iris Chang's father about family name pronunciations. His is Chang but in the early days when supposedly there were only 6 family names, it was Zhang. And the "ang" is pronounced "aaahhhhng" not 'ang' as in "gang." It will sound like "ong" too. Language is not only tongue but ear.

 

There is a movement to get rid of the Chinese characters and replace them with a more useful language but most agree it will never happen.

 

So we will use a language that is one step above Cuneiform.

[credzba]

It's the nature of Pinyin to be different. It was formed first for Mandarin but as the usage spread, it changed with the dialects. The nature of language I guess. And I had a discussion with Iris Chang's father about family name pronunciations. His is Chang but in the early days when supposedly there were only 6 family names, it was Zhang. And the "ang" is pronounced "aaahhhhng" not 'ang' as in "gang." It will sound like "ong" too. Language is not only tongue but ear.

 

There is a movement to get rid of the Chinese characters and replace them with a more useful language but most agree it will never happen.

 

So we will use a language that is one step above Cuneiform.

 

I am not very capable at Chinese characters, but the 100 or so I have learned are fun.

I find it easier to memorize words when I have some character to attach it to in my head. I guess I am a visual learner.

 

Also, some of the characters are really interesting.

As I said, I have a very limited vocabulary, but one of my characters I learned was a star - xing － 星 。

what I think is interesting is the 2 parts. The top is the sun, and the bottom is life.

How did people come up with a star being a sun with life thousands of years ago ?

 

Anyway, it is much easier to write a Chinese character for many words than to write the characters for that word in English.

 

Its fun, something else to learn.

[Charly1967]

Beijing is where it is at. The Taiwanese might still claim superiority, but on the ground Taiwan style Mandarin is just another Southern accent, considered by most mainland Chinese as not very sophisticated and something that one should not learn unless one wants to live in Taiwan/Fujian.

The best Mandarin they speak in Heilongjiang by the way, though it is -50 there in the winter, so not sure if I will ever get to hear it.