one language at a time!
13 Dec 2010 05:51 pmThe great thing about watching Taiwanese dramas is that -- finally -- I don't have to be looking at the screen constantly. I can catch/comprehend about, oh, a good half of any basic conversation, at least until the conversation gets into technical terms or higher-level vocabulary. Okay, I admit that in some cases, the Taiwanese accent -- at least, I'm guessing it's the accent -- throws me, so the hanzi subtitles are useful for clarifying. Things like 是 -- which I was taught to pronounce as shi (or shurrrrrr, if your textbook is from Beijing) -- drop the 'h' sound in the Taiwanese accent. So 是 sounds like ssuh and 老师 sounds like lao-ssuh. Even the zh sound has little 'h', so 知道 sounds like zeh-daow.
Tones are a lot softer, too, but that means context matters even more. Still, once I got used to those minor accent issues, I can at least catch some. (More than I can in Japanese, which after all these years of listening + subtitles, I still can't do much more than register formality via verb-endings.)
What stumps me is when there's code-switching. I'm just not good enough to handle it, like my brain can't think on two tracks. Oh, I can get it when it's just a tagged-on loanword, like replying "yes" or "okay" instead of 是 or 要 or whatever, or sweet-names between lovey couples (like "honey" and "baby").
It was when a character said what sounded like buohkay that I think my brain broke. Backed up and checked the hanzi subtitles and sure enough, it said: 不OK. A second listen with eyes closed and I still couldn't get it. I'm just not good enough to switch that fast, or maybe it's the slurred nature of the vowels that I couldn't differentiate between the 不 and the ohhh, or maybe it's that my vocabulary isn't big enough to know for certain that ohh and kay do not form a Mandarin combination. I end up hearing "okay" and struggling for a second to figure out whether I'm supposed to hear what I think I'm hearing.
But just now, a series with school-age kids are poring over a fashion magazine, describing the pictures as 可爱喔 ... I could recall that 可 isn't just "can" or "may" but is sometimes to mean 'certainly' (uhm, right?) -- so I figured, okay, 'certainly lovely/loveable' instead of 'possibly', given context. But the 喔, I hadn't the faintest.
Then I hit play and realized: the characters are all saying something that sounds an awful lot like keh-wai... except that the final syllable is more like ohh than eee. Brain sez: wait a minute. That's... oh, cripes, now I'm dealing with Japanese loan-words, too?
Although I admire the creativity of it, since the pronunciation the actors use is pretty close to the Japanese but with a consonant switched -- what should be more like keh-eye-woe is said more like keh-wai-oh. The near-duplicate sound comes by tagging 喔 on the end, which (after much dictionary searching!) turns out to be an onomatopoeia for a crow's cry. Sound-wise, it's close enough (thanks to the switching of the consonants) that it ended up in the box labeled "things that require thinking in more than two languages at once."
On the other hand, I took a break from watching this afternoon and was messing around on the web, and came across several trailers for some BBC production. Couldn't understand a bloody word -- until I realized, it was because I've spent so much time recently trying to tune my ear to parse Mandarin that as soon as I heard anything even remotely obviously-not-American, my brain kicked into Mandarin-parsing-mode.
Which, obviously, doesn't get you anywhere when the characters are from Manchester.
Tones are a lot softer, too, but that means context matters even more. Still, once I got used to those minor accent issues, I can at least catch some. (More than I can in Japanese, which after all these years of listening + subtitles, I still can't do much more than register formality via verb-endings.)
What stumps me is when there's code-switching. I'm just not good enough to handle it, like my brain can't think on two tracks. Oh, I can get it when it's just a tagged-on loanword, like replying "yes" or "okay" instead of 是 or 要 or whatever, or sweet-names between lovey couples (like "honey" and "baby").
It was when a character said what sounded like buohkay that I think my brain broke. Backed up and checked the hanzi subtitles and sure enough, it said: 不OK. A second listen with eyes closed and I still couldn't get it. I'm just not good enough to switch that fast, or maybe it's the slurred nature of the vowels that I couldn't differentiate between the 不 and the ohhh, or maybe it's that my vocabulary isn't big enough to know for certain that ohh and kay do not form a Mandarin combination. I end up hearing "okay" and struggling for a second to figure out whether I'm supposed to hear what I think I'm hearing.
But just now, a series with school-age kids are poring over a fashion magazine, describing the pictures as 可爱喔 ... I could recall that 可 isn't just "can" or "may" but is sometimes to mean 'certainly' (uhm, right?) -- so I figured, okay, 'certainly lovely/loveable' instead of 'possibly', given context. But the 喔, I hadn't the faintest.
Then I hit play and realized: the characters are all saying something that sounds an awful lot like keh-wai... except that the final syllable is more like ohh than eee. Brain sez: wait a minute. That's... oh, cripes, now I'm dealing with Japanese loan-words, too?
Although I admire the creativity of it, since the pronunciation the actors use is pretty close to the Japanese but with a consonant switched -- what should be more like keh-eye-woe is said more like keh-wai-oh. The near-duplicate sound comes by tagging 喔 on the end, which (after much dictionary searching!) turns out to be an onomatopoeia for a crow's cry. Sound-wise, it's close enough (thanks to the switching of the consonants) that it ended up in the box labeled "things that require thinking in more than two languages at once."
On the other hand, I took a break from watching this afternoon and was messing around on the web, and came across several trailers for some BBC production. Couldn't understand a bloody word -- until I realized, it was because I've spent so much time recently trying to tune my ear to parse Mandarin that as soon as I heard anything even remotely obviously-not-American, my brain kicked into Mandarin-parsing-mode.
Which, obviously, doesn't get you anywhere when the characters are from Manchester.