Angela Yu
China Summer Fellow 2016
China
The Chinese language class I’m taking is called Elementary Chinese for Advanced beginners, meaning that it’s a course for students with a Mandarin-speaking background who never formally learned to read or write in Chinese. Though I found the class to be a good fit for my level in Chinese, I found it to be a strenuous class. Since I grew up with Taiwanese parents, I never learned how or when to curl my tongue when speaking Mandarin. Because of this, I spend most of my time in class incessantly and needlessly curling my tongue at every word that begins with “c” “z” or “s”. Hopefully I will be able to master this one day. Since the class is tailored to those of a Mandarin-speaking background, many of the passages in the textbook relate to being a huayi (Chinese born overseas). I particularly appreciated a passage about accents, and how ultimately, as long as we get the point across when speaking, having a different accent is fine. However, the moral of the story abruptly ended being that you still had to speak Putonghua in class (standard Mandarin).
My teacher Wang Laoshi also showed the class a video in class of an actor speaking Mandarin with 18 different accents. Some accents were so different that I wouldn’t have believed they were speaking Mandarin if I wasn’t paying much attention. I was surprised at just how many accents there were, and how specific and unique each one was. Chinese accents should be an entire class. Looking back, it seems obvious that a place as large and diverse as China would have multitudes of different accents. In Taiwan, I am usually ousted at once as a huayi when I speak Mandarin with my Americanized accent. I expected it to be the same result in Shanghai, yet I was surprised when people just asked me if I was from another part of China, such as Guandong. Now I know that it’s because there are just so many different people from different parts of China in Shanghai, everyone with their own unique accent.