Putonghua enlightenment
March 26, 2008 – 8:15 amYesterday I’ve been to the Hump Bar, which is a popular foreigner hangout. After a while I recognized a girl sitting lonely at some table so I went to her table and started a conversation in Chinese.
Well I can practice my Chinese every day, but this experience was total different. The Lady was not a local, but from Beijing. She’s here in Kunming for travel. I’ve been talking to many people who claim to speak Mandarin Chinese, but this time I could clearly understand all her tones and words. Her speech crystal clear and I could clearly distinguish every word she said.
This is so different when talking to locals. When I talk to locals, I’m trying really hard to just get the topic of what has been said. I don’t have the chance to see how they construct their sentences. However with this Beijing Lady I was able not only to understand the topic, I was also able to see how she builds up the sentences, even these small interjections suddenly became visible to me. To sad she’s already leaving town in the next days. Maybe I can find another woman who actually speaks Chinese here in Kunming. Maybe I can find a nice local woman here in Kunming to help me learning Chinese.
I definitely recommend, if You want to learn Chinese, and You are still a beginner, or intermediate, it is worth to go to the northern regions, especially Beijing. Try a university to learn Chinese. Beijing is very high on my priority list now for future visits to China. It should be on Yours, too.
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2 Responses to “Putonghua enlightenment”
Well now you have see that every region speak chinese a little bit different, sometime as you said will be difficult to understand them, the region speak clearly Chinese are only in the big city like Beijing and Shanghai, that’s all. Well anyway try hard, I think in couple month you will be possible to understand them.
See you, Henrik
By Pei Yao Shen on Apr 3, 2008
One of the general problems here is the people reduce the “sh” sound to a “s” sound. Then they don’t distinct between “ng” and “n” endings, both are the same here. The “ou” sound once in a while shifts to “e”.
Apart from that some of the words are different than in putonghua, but I don’t want to learn the local words for the moment. I have to learn a serious amount of words in putonghua first. I really don’t want to mix this up for now.
By Junjie on Apr 5, 2008