one language at a time!
13 Dec 2010 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouThe 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.
no subject
Date: 14 Dec 2010 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 Dec 2010 04:33 pm (UTC)Oi, they don't teach you stuff like this in school, y'know! How can you tell a non-native speaker? They haven't the faintest clue of any slang, let alone how to cuss*. My understanding of Mandarin -- like my understanding of French -- is clean and neat and slang-free. Bleah.
* Unless you pick up the language from dockworkers and sailors, like someone I live with...
no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2010 02:48 am (UTC)There's this twdrama where the main character starts referring to himself as 'watashi' in contexts where he's being grandiose, which kept making me grin since he's really more of an ore-sama type character, really.
(PS. If you don't mind watching TOTAL INANE IDIOCY, both Smile, Pasta and Hana Kimi are actually very easy to follow with minimal English subtitles. Also, frantically struggling to follow the Chinese might just be the only way one can actually watch most Taiwanese idol dramas without weeping.))
no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2010 03:10 am (UTC)At the risk of generalizing very broadly, the Japanese dramas seem to be more likely to be overly hammy, while Taiwanese dramas are more likely to be just plain wooden. Don't know why it is (theater tradition? something else?) but Korean actors and actresses are head and shoulders above Taiwan, Mainland, and Japan, on average. Just more naturalistic and subtle performances, overall, but sometimes veering into hamminess (and almost never going wooden). I've watched first episodes of a bunch of Taiwanese pop-idol dramas and oh my god my EYES my EARS my BRAIN those are hours I've lost I CAN NEVER GET BACK.
But all the same... the Taiwanese delivery is really much gentler -- as someone who didn't grow up listening for tones, I have real trouble with them. The Mainland dramas emphasize tones way more, and sometimes that's just... I don't know. Maybe because it reminds me of doing the repetition in class when the teacher would emphasize the tones and we had to all repeat it? It doesn't sound inflected (emotionally) to me. The lack of tones, or just gentler tones, in Taiwanese-accent... allows for more inflection. Maybe? Not sure.
they not only code-switch into English, but also Japanese as issenllo has said, and quite a bit of Taiwanese as well (which is just similar enough to Penang Hokkien that I can catch the switch in languages and don't put it down to weirdly advanced Mandarin
The English I can get, because that's almost always put in English in the subtitles, like 不OK unless it's a more complex concept (or a technical term). The Japanese I'm learning to pick up by sound, and so far I haven't run into Japanese in the dramas I'm watching right now, which aren't idol-dramas (so maybe that has some impact). Alright, fine, I am catching up on Black & White and so far I've heard Mandarin, French, English, Russian, and I think there was a quick bit of German in there... eheheh.
The switch to Taiwanese...? So maybe that's why sometimes the pronunciation doesn't sound like what I expect? And it's not just me completely forgetting all my vocabulary? wahh! *leaps for joy* ... on the other hand, if that is going on & I've been missing it, no wonder there are subtitles on everything.
Oi! I am this teeny bit closer to enlightenment! Thank you!
Only twenty-nine more light years to buddhahood!
no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2010 09:37 am (UTC)In general my perception is that Korea is a much more successful cultural exporter in wider Asia than either Japan or Taiwan are. I have this odd feeling that Taiwan doesn't have enough cultural capital to really export its dramas well, if that makes sense; it is not enough its own thing. Also it's a small country and doesn't quite have enough talent to get things going. China, otoh, has spades of acting/directing/writing talent, but they're all in Hollywood or, I dunno, outlawed by the Chinese government or stuck making thoroughly censored shows. Either that or we never actually see the good stuff from China - very little work from the mainland is fansubbed or even easily found, now that I think about it.
because I fail at finishing sentences
Date: 18 Dec 2010 09:39 am (UTC)