The pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan is very clear and crisp which makes in easy for foreigners to learn in here. Unfortunately, the reason for that is because local dialects were forbidden, discouraged, mocked, and even punished from the 1940s until the 1980s so the accent in northern Taiwan (Taipei, New Taipei, Keelung, and Taoyuan) in particular is quite easy to learn since it isn't influenced heavily by dialects.
These videos are great for learning Chinese! Looking forward to the next upload. Retroflexes aren't a problem for me, but I struggle with the rules for when the third tone becomes second tone.
Love these kind of videos. Would love to see more cultural and language differences between northerners and southerners and between different provinces.
Thank you for your comment. We DO have one video with similar topic from the Taiwanese team, which will be released soon. Look forwards to seeing your comment then!
As a Japanese, I have always found it strange that people from the provinces, who still retain a strong dialectal accent, can speak Mandarin and still have a conversation with people from Beijing. Even if some words in a sentence are pronounced incorrectly, a native speaker of Chinese would immediately understand what is being said in context, so even if a foreigner like me gets the four tones wrong on this subject, unless he is mean, he should understand what I mean.
Thank you for sharing your experience. And, I have got a quite interesting experience with people from Beijing. Cos, I found the local Beijingers' accent is hard to understand even though they're supposed to speak standard Mandarin, due to the fact that they roll their tongues too often while speaking.
I think it will be harder to interpret foreigner off tones compare to local speaking it. When a local speaks mandarin, he/she will have a consistent or predictable pattern of off tones. So it is easy to guess what are he talking about. a foreigner off tones is so unpredictable. Native Listener still can understand but in very very very hard way.
My main pronunciation issue isn’t so much sounds, but tones. Specifically when to use a different tone for 一 or when to convert third tones to second tones if there’s an uneven number of them back to back.
Yeah, it is really difficult for most Chinese learners to master tones. However, what I can say is just keep trying. Most of time, tones won't stop you from talking to others in Chinese.
Very interesting video thank you! Can you mention in the next videos whether you're in mainland China or Taiwan and the region or city you're interviewing people in? Thanks for the videos!
