Chinese Accents Explained in 15 Minutes

哎呀,這一點兒也不好玩兒,又不便宜,咱們看看別的吧。 但是我想看一下,你看清楚它的價錢了嗎? 說不定比我們想的還要便宜啊。 不是,我看得很清楚,你看,這挺貴的呀。 好,那我再找一下別的。 As you just heard, I was speaking Mandarin Chinese, but it sounded pretty different because I was using different accents. Today we're going to talk about why there are different Chinese accents, and what some major differences are between Northern and Southern accents. 我們開始吧! To better understand native Chinese speakers, remember that native speakers all have their own original accents. And what you're learning in your textbook is Standard Chinese, also called Standard Mandarin, which is based on the sound system of the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. But why do we need Standard Chinese? Why can't people just speak their own original dialects? Well, the reason is that China has so many different dialects, 方言, and many of them are not mutually intelligible. This makes communicating with people from different regions pretty difficult. So a common form of the language is needed. Of course, just like any language, people still speak with their own original accents. To understand the differences between Chinese original accents, it's useful to know a bit about Chinese dialects. So let me give you a quick overview. In general, Chinese dialects can be divided into Northern dialects,北方方言, and Southern dialects,南方方言. 北方方言,Northern dialects, are the basis of Standard Chinese, so they're closer to what you learn from textbooks. But they're still different from Standard Chinese in the vocabulary they use, and their tones may vary as well. Let's look at an example. This is a Northwestern Mandarin dialect from Xi'an. Its tones are different from Standard Mandarin. So in the future, if you hear Mandarin spoken with unfamiliar tones, it's likely one of these Mandarin dialects. Northern dialects are generally mutually intelligible, whereas Southern dialects differ much more from one another, and are often regarded as distinct languages because they're largely mutually unintelligible, and they're commonly divided into six groups. You might have heard some of the Southern Chinese languages like Cantonese, Hokkien, or Shanghainese. Even if you speak fluent Mandarin, it's still hard to understand them. So across Chinese-speaking regions, Standard Chinese serves as a common language, but many people also speak local dialects or languages, which influence their accents when speaking the common language. Since Southern Chinese languages differ greatly from Northern ones, Southern accents of Mandarin Chinese tend to share features that make them sound quite different from Northern accents. Let's now look at the major differences between them. Chinese speakers from Northern China tend to curl their tongue more when speaking. For example, in Mandarin, we have sounds like that require us to curl our tongue, and the Northerners tend to curl it more backward than the Southerners. 知 吃 失 日 知 七 失 一 And also, Northerners use more er suffix in words. For example, 聊天 一點 好玩 In Mandarin Chinese, there are some words that have the neutral tone in the last character, like 第一反 The neutral tone is pronounced lightly and shortly. In Northern accents, people pronounce the neutral tone more, whereas in Southern accents, people tend to pronounce the full tone instead. For example, In Beijing and some other Northern areas, when w appears before a and a, it's often pronounced as w, which doesn't exist in standard Chinese. So for example, As we mentioned, many Chinese speakers from the South don't curl their tongue that much. So 知 吃 失 日 would sound more like 知 失 一 And the er suffix is not used that often, or it's not even used at all. Here are some other common features of Southern Mandarin accents. In many Southern accents, are not distinguished when they follow the vowels ㄧ or ㄡ This is called the back nasal sound. In Southern accents, many people don't really pronounce this back nasal sound. So 能 sounds like 能 明天 清楚 So when you're listening to a Southern accent, the distinction between ㄣ and ㄥ in some words is often not clearly pronounced. And listeners may rely mainly on context to tell them apart. In Southern accents, when ㄣ combines with ㄅ ㄆ ㄇ or ㄍ it usually becomes ㄥ For example, 好 To sum up, Northern accents have more tongue curling which makes the overall pronunciation feel fuller back in the mouth. So it often sounds fuller and thicker overall. Southern accents, on the other hand, 讓聲音更平坦 聲音通常會更前傾、更柔軟、更輕盈 好的,希望這段影片能幫助你瞭解 中文語言的差異 因為本土語言的每個語言都有自己的本土語言 所以很重要練習你的耳朵 去理解不同種類的語言 如果你想進步你的中文 透過真實的材料 包括本土語言來自不同的背景 歡迎到我的Patreon By joining, you can learn real-life Chinese with me and get some additional learning resources that go along with my YouTube videos. I hope to see you there! If you're interested in learning more about Mandarin accents, I have several other videos where I talk about the Beijing accent, Taiwanese accent, Malaysian Mandarin and more. You can find the links to these videos in the description below. 那如果你喜歡今天的影片 別忘記按讚、訂閱和分享喔! And also, if you'd like to learn some daily Mandarin expressions, check out my Instagram, Grace Mandarin. 那我們下次見囉! Bye bye!