My father-in-law spoke Mandarin so strongly Beijing. Urrrrrrrr, urrrrrrr, urrrrrrr. Made my skin crawl even before I ever studied Mandarin. Then in class, we learned... I don't know, a kind of generalized version of Mandarin (our first professor was Shanghaiese), and late in 2nd semester he tried to get us to start using Beijing-accent and it was pretty much total class rebellion. We'd do it only if he reminded us, and then drop it again immediately. Maybe that's to do with USian associations with a strong urrrrr-sound? No idea.
But my friend who was trained as radio-person didn't use that -rr ending at all. I asked her once about it, and she just made this slight frown, which was one expression I couldn't parse but I guess there were undertones or statements being made (in the use or not-use, I suppose) that she just didn't want to get into. (We were also in the middle of a tutoring session, so it may've been something that required time she didn't want to be taking away from correcting my pronunciation... when she wasn't giggling and saying I sounded like her relatives from Hunan, that is.)
(The other odd thing was that my professor was constantly, constantly, trying to get me to speak in a higher register. It took me awhile to release the problem wasn't tones, it was pitch -- I'm somewhere around a middle alto, I suppose, and he wanted a soprano delivery. My female classmates with higher-pitched voices were already finding it hard to raise their voices like that, and he wanted me to stretch even farther. I couldn't do it. I sounded like freaking Minnie Mouse in my own ears: unnatural, wrong, too shrill. I asked my friend -- whose pitch was just a hair higher than my natural speaking voice -- and she just shrugged off the professor's demands, and told me to speak at my normal pitch. Maybe it's because she knew the tones were hard enough for me, no reason to add pitch in there, too, or maybe it's because her newscaster training had taught her a lower-pitch delivery. Hmm. Maybe I should email her and ask... heh.)
Also: the Beijing accent reminds me of the British 'public school' accent. There's something rather... put-on about it. Taiwanese trips me up, but at least while I'm being tripped I'm also enjoying a very pretty dialect doing the tripping.
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Date: 6 Jan 2011 02:00 am (UTC)My father-in-law spoke Mandarin so strongly Beijing. Urrrrrrrr, urrrrrrr, urrrrrrr. Made my skin crawl even before I ever studied Mandarin. Then in class, we learned... I don't know, a kind of generalized version of Mandarin (our first professor was Shanghaiese), and late in 2nd semester he tried to get us to start using Beijing-accent and it was pretty much total class rebellion. We'd do it only if he reminded us, and then drop it again immediately. Maybe that's to do with USian associations with a strong urrrrr-sound? No idea.
But my friend who was trained as radio-person didn't use that -rr ending at all. I asked her once about it, and she just made this slight frown, which was one expression I couldn't parse but I guess there were undertones or statements being made (in the use or not-use, I suppose) that she just didn't want to get into. (We were also in the middle of a tutoring session, so it may've been something that required time she didn't want to be taking away from correcting my pronunciation... when she wasn't giggling and saying I sounded like her relatives from Hunan, that is.)
(The other odd thing was that my professor was constantly, constantly, trying to get me to speak in a higher register. It took me awhile to release the problem wasn't tones, it was pitch -- I'm somewhere around a middle alto, I suppose, and he wanted a soprano delivery. My female classmates with higher-pitched voices were already finding it hard to raise their voices like that, and he wanted me to stretch even farther. I couldn't do it. I sounded like freaking Minnie Mouse in my own ears: unnatural, wrong, too shrill. I asked my friend -- whose pitch was just a hair higher than my natural speaking voice -- and she just shrugged off the professor's demands, and told me to speak at my normal pitch. Maybe it's because she knew the tones were hard enough for me, no reason to add pitch in there, too, or maybe it's because her newscaster training had taught her a lower-pitch delivery. Hmm. Maybe I should email her and ask... heh.)
Also: the Beijing accent reminds me of the British 'public school' accent. There's something rather... put-on about it. Taiwanese trips me up, but at least while I'm being tripped I'm also enjoying a very pretty dialect doing the tripping.