More on the “sounds” front: a Beijing dialect vocalization.
Learning what animals say in languages other than your native one is always jolting. Consider, if you will, the utter silliness of Mandarin-speakers thinking dogs should say “wàng wàng” when everyone knows they say “woof woof”.
After a few illogical discussions of that sort, you eventually acknowledge that [...]
A different way of thinking about how to put tones together
Let’s say you’re living in China’s Minnesota, the frigid dōngběi (东北 = northeast). You’ve come to Beijing for a bit of R&R and have met up with syz and his audio recorder. The idea is to talk linguistics and maybe record a random conversation [...]
Special thanks to a reader in the sānlǐtún (三里屯) area for bringing this to my attention and providing the sound clip. You’ll probably recall the local Beijinger uproar last August when it came out that that Legal Mirror was publishing some Shanghai dialect expressions in a grammar book.
Why, they wondered, couldn’t Beijing get equal treatment [...]
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