North vs. South Chinese Accent 🇨🇳 

north is basically a British accent but Chinese

So Duolingo has been teaching me the Northern accent with all the ers at the end.

Wow! the chinese northern accent sounds "angry" like the spanish north mexican accent 😂😂😂

Hushou..i only heard that word in cdrama 😂😂

I teach English to Chinese students, and I witnessed this phenomenon when a student was writing a sentence in English. He forgot the period at the end. I told the student, "You missed something." Immediately four of his classmates yelled "Dian, dian, dian!" Another ousted herself with her response, "Dianr, dianr, dianr!" The other classmates and I were amused. It is a cute accent.

the girl from Beijing is speaking Beijing dialect but the girl from Fujian is just speaking standard putonghua, without any "southern accent". There are naturally many different "southern accents" not one. Someone whose mother tongue is Shanghainese would have a different accent than someone whose first language is Cantonese. If one really wants to get an idea of the Mandarin accent of those who speak Min languages (the Sinitic languages spoken in Fujian), they can just listen to Taiwanese mandarin. It's similar.

Beijing has even more of an errrrrrhua sound than most of the Northern regions though

I met a woman from China a few years ago. I speak some Mandarin, so I thought maybe I could chat with her a little. I asked her where she was from. She said, "I'm from Hujian province." I was so confused. Hujian? There's no province called Hujian! Finally I figured it out. She was from Fujian - but in southern China and Taiwan, a lot of people have a very soft accent, so the "F" sounds like an "H". There are so many dialects and accents in China that learning "standard" Mandarin in a class or from books and language software (like I did) gets you only maybe 20% of the way to actually understanding real, everyday Chinese the way it's actually spoken.

Please note, this is slight differences within standard Mandarin. It is not northern or southern chinese languages or dialects.

Occasionally, I can hear the difference when I hear nearby college students speaking with each other. "er" sound, I suspect they are northern.

This isnt reallt accurate as the girl sspeaking southern accent is just speaking standard mandarin, whereas the girl with the nothern accent is speaking a northern dialect in an informal matter, while it is interesting to see the difference between the two it might be misleading to compare them like this😅

I prefer the sound of the southern accent, but I might be biased, as I'm learning Taiwanese Mandarin at the moment. 💁🏿‍♂️

The "southern" accent here is basically formal Mandarin while the Beijing girl is showing some regionalism. Fujian people didn't speak Mandarin until about 50 years ago.

Being Chinese myself but living in Canada, the Northern Chinese accent is like French from Quebec compared to the one of Metropolitan France.

I like the southern accent better

This was like a really low budget rewind episode. I loved it.

i like the husuo. 😍

The Norwegian tshirt that the one from Beijing is wearing is so nice!

both of you have awesome clear English! thank you for this video, very cool. I can always hear a Bejing accent, so different than all the rest of those I have heard. Fuzhonese have their own accent which is quite different from Taipei mandarin, love to hear an example of those side by side also.

Ok, got cha, clear as mud.👌

Nî zhen chou😂😂😂😂😂

Your english tho 👌

The other thing the beijinger like to do is dropping sounds. Like in good morning 早上好 zaoshanghao, they'll say zaoerrraor. 😅

Funny how Beijinger looks more like the average fujianese...and the fujianese looks more like Beijing ren

they are so cute goshhh!!

My wife is from Luoyang, Henan and says their Mandarin is most perfect. I cannot speak Mandarin that good, but I know 100% when I hear Dongbei dialect, and it’s awesome to hear people from Harbin. 🐉👍🏻

From James o’ Brian Mystery hour on London radio LBC, i learned that colder places have curled tongue accents and nasal tone due to the freezing cold.

řřřřř for 北京 😂

This is so cute!! Thanks for sharing

The south accent is the one we hear on movies often, I think.

Actual differences in southern pronunciation are that in thick southern accents, n and l are the same and zhi, chi, shi all become zi, ci, and si.

This one is important to understand and to be learned...

This confused me like crazy when I first got to Taiwan, as their accent sounds more southern Chinese to me. 😊

you guys are super cute!!

Im from beijin but I use both accents lol

A lost of the vocabulary part is very specifically Beijing! But it's on TV a lot so it's spread.

as a southern, i hate rolling my tongue

I usually watch Chinese dramad with my mom (she loves it, the best for her) and I noticed that Chinese sounds like English with that "r", but Beijing Chinese confirm it. It's interesting these kind of things.

Invite me on i will show you hongkong mando accent🤣❤

This makes learning an inflection based language that much more difficult

Thank you.

You're making my head hurt... :D

Thank you 🌹

im from harbin and i can confirm this is how we talk lol

meanwhile in a place even more southern than Fujian like guangdong and guangxi. The accent is even more thinner compared to northern china. The accent over there more mimic to vietnamese tones.

I’m from NY and I feel like most of the Chinese I’ve heard here is southern accent. I guess a lot of American Chinese are from Guangdong, Fujian etc, interesting

The Northen accent has that American R sound

我也住在南方（厦门）

I understand what you were saying and I speak Chinese

Wow! Loved these insights. New subscriber.

The Fujian women look like northerners. The northern girl looks like a Southerner.

ahahahahah i cracked when "bruh" appeared 😂😂😂😂😂

I have a friend from northern china that's why I want to learn nortgern Chinese

i'm from the north but i grew up in north america only speaking to my parents in chinese, i just found out last week 墩布 is northern dialect and 拖布 is southern

I love learning Chinese then realizing it’s specific to the region I’m in and universal ahahaha

AWESOME ❤❤❤❤

Fine I'll watch Three Kingdoms again.

Further south in Singapore and Malaysia, we are closer to the southern accent but I feel we sounded more flat and monotonous. Beijing accent has its flair and both are unique.

Lovely!

Beautiful ladies 😊

My late grandmother was born in Xiamen, Fujian but she doesn't speak Putonghua but only Minnan (Hokkien).

I've heard people speak Fujian dialict and it sounds like a different language.

Wow!🤝👍

Southern Chinese 💪

i am chinese too look 我是华人啊！

Your last example ( 胡说 [húshuō] vs 乱讲 [luànjiǎng]) got me really interested in what makes them distinct, yet can both mean “BS.” Looking at the individual character components for context, ‘Hu’ can mean ‘mustache,’ or ‘whiskers,’ but it can also mean ‘non-Han individuals, or ‘Hu people.’ “Luàn” (乱) on the other hand, can mean “riot,” or “disorder,” or “upheaval.” Looking even closer, its component characters mean “hidden tongues” when taken separately. So, a more “literal” interpretation for each one could be, respectively: “Hu-People Speak” and “Reckless/riotous speech.” Anyone with more knowledge of the etymology, please, I’d love to know your thoughts.

My teacher is from Beijing - when I told her I have a computer science degree she went: "Fei1 hua4 zhe hu2 shuo1. Computer science degree mei2 you3 le wo3 bu4 ben4 :) Then I had to confess I'm a post grad fashion designer.

Years ago i used to have trouble understanding my colleagues from Tianjin, not Beijing but still northern with a lot of er. I thought that er ending muddled many words, like photo is zhaopian, she would say zhaopianER, it would take me an extra second to decipher it. It sounds perhaps a bit like Scottish, while southern Chinese is more like English RP in a non rhotic way. But after you get used to it, northern accent is kinda fun and cute, it really comes down to the speaker. I visited Beijing about 10 years ago and boy did i have a hard time understanding their Mandarin. But regional accent could be strong anywhere too even in the southern provinces. China is vast just like the US, people speak different Chinese dialects/languages in addition to Mandarin in their regional accent. Growing up i used to prefer the clearer Taiwanese accent, but after watching more movies from China, i appreciate the standard putonghua accent more

哈哈, 你们聊天 。

my classmates would have and easier time learning in the southern accent most of them cant pronounce the r at the end like instead of liao tianr they say liao tian er

I belong to an ethnic group in the northern Philippines and upon learning that China is diversely united with a lot of ethnic group, looking at their textiles. I got to say I love every cultures.

I like the *southern* accent better❤

I remember the first time I met a dude from northern china, and I told him to slow down dude! Your eating part of our english words. For example, he would say "energg" instead of energy!

That húsūo 的轻声 was so intense! 😆👍 Why am I so bilingual though?! 😅

My family is from Eastern PA. They claim I don't speak English. I'm from Central PA.

Hey I just wanted the combination #9 w the after party special massaGEEEEEEEE

We're making it out of the Zhou dynasty with this one

I prefer southern accent much more ❤

My family is from Malaysia so I guess that have a mixture of vocabulary from north and south China. They also know many dialects. Unfortunately I don’t because I want born don’t. I can for sure say be south more southern speaking Chinese. It’s much easier to understand southern Chinese accent

The Chinese Northern accent corresponds in Brazil to the accent from the countryside

No wonder I'm confused as hell.

So different

The "luànjiang" one in my local language when separated to"lu anjiang" means "You dog" 😂😂

my friend has a northern chinese accent and we say some words differently so sometimes we get a bit confused when talking to each other lmaooo

many oversea chinese would have southern accent like singapore, malaysia

The Fujian Accent, is more like the Malaysian & Singapore Chinese Mandrin.

That's not southern accent, it's just standard "Mandarin"... Southern accent has more feature like lacking "r" and "-h" sound.

That's just a local dialect 😂😂😂😂

That beijing 妹儿好cute!

Sounds like "how are"

I really like the southern accent

Nonono, you comes from Hujian😂❤

Love the shirt! ❤ How did you like Norway?

Southern sounds more soft

我来自福建，厦门

not me a chinese person realising the chances of me slipping up with a hard r is like 60% higher

Then... there's Cantonese

lol i’m learning Chinese in the Southern part of China but they use Northern textbook (BLCU). They teach Putonghua too, but i feel weird for using excessive 儿 at times 😂😂

Interesting thing is that know I know where a song I likes vocalists accent is from. She's from the south based on the r sounds pointed out here. Pretty neat to know now!

Heres a shortcut to having a northern accent, just add 'er' 儿 to basically everything 😭