 Sinoglot language in China, eclectically
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contact info @ sinoglot · com A tweet by Taiwan-based NZ expat Nick (@riceagain) today (or yesterday, technically, given the time zone gap) brought me back to a problem I had in my own spoken Mandarin a while back. It reads as follows:
Amen. For those of us who’d really like to have native-level Mandarin some day, it’s no small problem. It basically amounts to this: You, a respectable business-oriented expat, who has been known on occasion to wear a tie, sound to them what in English is best described as “valley girl”. Like, oh my god, right? Signs you might be speaking like a girl:
I know this misguided manner all too well. In the infancy of my spoken Mandarin, nearly everyone I spoke to was a girl. I’m just not that into the NBA, and as someone living on an undergrad college campus, my options were to speak to girls or speak about the NBA. My speech was sprinkled with the prolonged aaaa in “对啊” and I was known to have said 烦死了 more than my fair share. I hear this is more so the case with Japanese, but I’ve only known it in Mandarin. Girls speak a different dialect of whatever topolect that they otherwise speak. Yes, a dialect. I can’t think of anything comparable in noticeability in English, at least not the English I grew up speaking. But in Mandarin it’s a real danger to the tough-guy chick-magnet we’re often stereotyped to be. Fortunately for me my friends stepped in and staged an intervention, so now I’m free to go about being rejected for distinctly non-linguistic reasons. plug: I touched on this in December ’08 over at our network blog xiaoerjing. 32 commentsLeave a comment |
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Yeah, I’m also quite lucky in the sense that I was warned early on by friends whenever I picked up any speaking habit that was considered “girly”. For example, the first time I’d used “这个嘛…” while talking, I was immediately told by the person I was talking to that I should be wise to refrain from using that.
I’m not sure I’m familiar with 这个嘛 as common among my female friends. What’s it used for? Is it simply the 嘛 that’s the problem?
Well, it’s a sentence starter when the person answering is unsure about the answer. Like:
“你明天跟我们一起去吗？”
“这个嘛… 其实我要先跟玛丽问一下”
It’s similar to “Well…” or “Let me see…” in English.
@ Karan – sounds like you’re a little unsure?!
My problem is I’ve picked up my boyfriend’s speaking habits, which includes saying ‘fart!’ a lot, and other such uncouth things. Not nearly “girly” enough. In fact I’ve been told of for saying ‘cao!’ before, as apparently it’s not suitable for a girl.
But it’s pretty hard not to pick up on the way other people speak. I do it enough in English… So finding your own voice in a second language is going to take a long time.
This definitely happens all the time with Japanese, even with people who have formal study under their belts. A big problem is that grammatical structures change slightly between genders.
Example: Simple declaration (It’s [blank]!). Some situations require the copula (“da” or “desu”), and some can’t have the copula without sounding feminine.
“i”-adjective (can’t have copula): “[It's] good!”
Good: ii yo!
Bad: ii da yo! (grammatically incorrect)
“na”-adjective or noun (requires copula): “[It's] like that!” (=”I agree!”)
Good: sō da yo!
Bad: sō yo! (grammatically incorrect or feminine)
It doesn’t help that some common “na”-adjectives appear to be “i”-adjectives (especially “kirei” = “clean” or “beautiful”), prompting people to make this particular mistake.
Sorry if this is TMI for you guys
My first tone (and consequently every other tone which I vocalize relative to the first)is too high. This is partly due to textbooks I had that said that first tone was as high as possible (I don’t think it is really) and that all my undergrad teachers were dainty 20 or 30 something girls from Shanghai who were graduate students at my university.
I have to consciously lower the entire tonal scale in which I speak Mandarin. But because it has to be done “consciously” usually two sentences into a conversation I lose track and start sounding like and idiot again.
Arraghdfghsfghsfg.
It’s even more fun when your girlfriend (or wife) speaks a dialect that’s different from the one spoken where you currently live. There was a while (has it ended? maybe not?) when I spoke like a 东北 girl, in Shanghai. Hilarity all around.
That said, though, we do this is our native language too, and people don’t notice all that much. I see it every time I go back to the US, with friends that I don’t see all that often but have known for a while. Many of them have married in the time that I’ve been in China, and their speech contains quirks that are obviously from their other halves. Perhaps it’s just because we’re speaking a foreign language and we’re focusing so much on what we’re saying that we notice it more.
@John: Love the 东北 girl-ness. Though I’d say the quirks are less a gender based dialectal difference than just quirks. I agree we absolutely pick these things up from speakers around us in English. My meaning was that unlike Japanese or Chinese, I don’t know of a specifically gender based division of words used.
@Porfiriy: I know what you mean. My solution was to just drop the stress of all my tones and be über lazy about it. Brought everything into line, if in a somewhat lax manner.
@F: maybe “cao” is in your own voice…
Girly? You can just tell people you’re from a 王小波 novel, where girls say things like “有的人配操我的×，有的人就不配” [where the × is presumably 屄] in response to a civil administrator asking why she wants a divorce.
When I first moved to Shanghai, people accused me of talking “like a Taiwanese girl.” Through a haphazard period of shadowing Ge You’s speech in films (and speaking informally / swearing more?) I managed to shake the “like a girl” evaluation. Still, while I often pass for a native speaker over the phone, people still say I have a Taiwanese accent. I blame tv dramas.
One point of confusion for me as a student of Chinese is mixed signals (from proscriptivists, teachers, and random people) about how one ought or ought not speak. I can recall, say, being told that ‘only girls’ use renjia 人家, then hearing an old man say it the next day. I can also sympathize with those who don’t have lots of same-sex friends of a similar age group. I may be tall for China but I don’t like basketball at all (ping pong is another story).
I feel like mastering appropriate registers for a variety of situations is a significant challenge for the intermediate learner. Setting aside too much input from native speakers you don’t want to sound like, two other factors compound this challenge: moving around a lot, and facing different expectations from native speakers than would a local Chinese dude of similar age, class and background.
As for 這個嘛 / 这个嘛, I have definitely seen guys say that on a tv show. How much that reflects real speech is another question entirely.
Kaiwen: Taiwanese shows? I’m a little baffled that I’ve not noticed this before, so I’m hoping there’s a good geographical excuse at my disposal.
After years of female Chinese teachers, hanging out mostly with girls, I feel this. After a certain point and after absorbing different influences and after enough time developing your own second language voice, I think it stops being such an issue– at least, that’s how it worked for me. But I can still flick into pure, absurd 15yearoldchinesegirl mode, instant.
I am in fact a female, but my husband tells me I sound girlier in Chinese than I do in English. I blame it on the fact that my teacher used to teach first graders–and also, she is pretty girly.
Maybe the key is for guys to learn Chinese through watching something like 三国. My kids have been watching that, and I notice that when the male characters speak, they always speak in a rat-a-tat kind of way. The final syllable is always very short.
This post is very good. I hadn’t taken much notice of the differences in speech patterns between the sexes in Chinese.
Interesting. Most of my Chinese friends are girls for various reasons, and I have occassionally affected some of the manerisms of my ex-gf (mainly use of 啊/呀/哦), but I’ve never been told I “talk like a girl”. In fact, most Chinese friends remark that my Chinese is very “standard” or that it sounds like 北京话. Maybe that’s because I’m unusually strongly affected by my initial formal instruction, and my first Chinese instructor made a point of using “standard” speech.
This has occurred in Spanish, too — I still use the general Latin American accent used by my high school teacher, even after years of Spanish in college from teachers with various native and non-native accents.
Obviously, at the outset we foreign males tend to imitate Chinese females in our speech, often because they are our best teachers, i.e., they’re the most patient and tend to enunciate more clearly. I think most males lower their higher tones over time, but we may continue to unwittingly use tags/exclamations that are — to a native Chinese — used largely by Chinese females. Hence the occasional giggle as we speak.
But as to the oft-heard “Oh, you have a Beijing accent!” compliment, that’s another cup of tea. Over the years, I’ve found that most Chinese have a fairly rigid stereotype of how a foreigner “should” speak Chinese: Regular use of the “r” at the end of certain words, hyper-correct grammar, courteous speech, etc.
As long as you keep to the stereotype, everything’s peachy keen. You’re a visitor and acting like a nice one, so everybody feels comfortable. Swearing is definitely in the grey area, however; the occasional “tamade” is kinda cute, but use of other more vile cuss words by a fluent foreigner — which are absolutely run-of-the-mill for many Chinese — may earn you a lot of criticism.
To my mind, when a Chinese says you have a “Beijing accent,” it may well simply be a sincere compliment about how well you speak the National Language. But it may also mean that you are speaking the way we expect a well-educated foreigner to speak…
Good point, Bruce.
Personally I avoid the 儿化音 like the plague. It has no place in my aspiring 江南 accent. But I do know a good percentage of foreigners who learn Mandarin as it’s perceived to be spoken in Beijing. It’s actually this idea that that’s how we ought to speak that’s kept me from doing it. My entire life in China is within a couple hours of Shanghai, so I see no reason not to sound like that’s where my Mandarin grew up.
Then there’s Syz and his “yi ber shū” nonsense.
@Kellen:
What else could you say?
I probably should mention that my speech doesn’t sound so much like “girl” but like 69-yr-old Beijing 老太太, naturally larded with plenty of Zhonglish and sometimes augmented with phrases that are earthy for a 69-yr-old Beijing 老太太 and just plain weird for a foreigner.
Seriously: I’m all in favor of speaking the way you hear it. That will mean Shanghai-flavored Mandarin in Kellen’s area or actual Beijinghua in Beijing. But I think Bruce has a good point about expectations for foreigners. I mostly keep my saucier vocabulary to myself, not just because I fear using it in a way that’s inappropriate for a native speaker, but because even if I did use it appropriately, it might not be perceived as “proper for a foreigner” and could have unexpected repercussions. That’s only natural. Even though some observers think modern English-speaking society has lost all restraint on foul language, for example, I’d suggest that native speakers’ knowledge about when it’s appropriate to throw in a “fuck you” is incredibly nuanced.
I tend to keep my “saucier” vocab to a very small circle including my wife and her family and one or two very good friends. Bruce has an excellent point about Chinese expectations of foreigners – and I’ve had interesting reactions to things I’ve said or written along the lines of “Wah! he knows some of our Yanqinghua, too!” and I remember my teachers in Changsha occasionally trying to insist on us pronouncing words they way they thought they were pronounced in Beijing (which struck me, and still strikes me, as an utterly absurd attitude, firstly, but not only, because there’s a difference between Beijinghua and Putonghua) – but also one of my French lecturers one day straight up told us “This word means x [sorry, can't remember what the exact swear words in question were]. You should learn swear words so you understand them when you hear them, but you should never use them yourself until your French has reached a very high level”. The reason he gave for this was precisely as Syz wrote: “native speakers’ knowledge about when it’s appropriate to throw in a “fuck you” is incredibly nuanced.”
@Kellen: Interesting. This makes me curious to know your approach to the ch/sh/zh retroflexes. Being surrounded every day (in Shanghai) by people who say zīdào 知道, cī fàn 吃饭, sísì 十四 etc., do you adopt these pronunciations in your own speech as well, or do you stick to the standard?
Ho Sun Yan: if I’m paying attention, I do the retroflexed, probably because it’s expected. Though often in dpeech I drop them about halfway. Sone words like 10 always get the retroflexion dropped though, and I lose certain diphthongs like in 对
An anecdote about my mum when she lived briefly with me in Taipei, light years ago. Back then (1979), there were two key requirements for teaching Mandarin: KMT Party membership + birth in northern China.
My mother’s teacher, a Beiping ren in her sixties, taught her that the word for clothing was “yishang.” You can imagine some of the other useful, modern vocabulary she taught. Mum, a linguist who held a Ph D. in French and spoke German and Russian, found that the locals just couldn’t understand her when she spoke like that. She finally decided to end her lessons (opting for learning street talk instead), and invited her teacher to lunch with me to say “Thanks” and “Zaijian.”
Her teacher couldn’t get over my “Beiping” accent. My mother joined in with her own satirical compliment: “There are only two people in Taiwan who speak Pekinese: You and my son!” A young Taiwanese friend of my mother’s arrived at the end of our lunch, and the teacher announced that he really should learn to speak proper Chinese…like me!
Lunch over, we jumped in a taxi. Mum turned to the taxi driver: “Qing dao ‘sida’ (师大).” Looking at me, she added, “That’s ‘Shida’ to you.” Class dismissed…
I’m told that I sound like a girl, which is fine as I am one. Sad that men feel that they have to sound like asses when they speak Mandarin unless they’re from the South.
Oi-lin: can you expand on that a little?
“Sad that men feel that they have to sound like asses when they speak Mandarin unless they’re from the South.”
I’m not so sure about that. One of the things I’m lucky to have is a lot of time with my father-in-law, who speaks with a pretty straight and strong 东北 accent, but at the same time is quite eloquent. So I’ve learned to express my feelings pretty strongly without dropping TMD-bombs everywhere.
Wow, right now I’m really glad I’m not straight, otherwise I’d have all these hang-ups about how girly I sound (in both languages).
@Carl
I dunno, I have a feeling there are a lot of gay and bi guys out there that wouldn’t want to sound like girls for various reasons.
I’m curious – what reasons do you mean?
I don’t know, the most obvious would be “in the closet” — though that’s an unhealthy situation to begin with. Maybe there are others who would want to sound manly to be the “man” in a relationship, or to attract someone who’s onto “manly men” or the Old-Spice-guy-type.
I dunno, shouldn’t have posted, as I really don’t have any knowledge of the subject. Just a little philosophizing on my part.
Hahaha nice post, Kellen! It never occurred to me that there might be a “female dialect”. I thought maybe some girls use more 的啦 嘛 simply because they watch too many Taiwan tv shows and mixed a bit Southern Min dialect in their Mandarin. Do you think the gender difference in the Chinese language got widened throughout the years in major cities?
Interesting point. but I have not heard many man speaking in that manner. You know what is a good way to rectify the problem if you already speak with girl sound in your Chinese? actually spend time with Chinese men. Chinese girls just love western men, so, you probably found yourself surrounded by them. Reach out and find yourself guy friends~~
This is pretty interesting. I have heard of this problem before, but until reading this, I failed to notice that a similar thing actually happens when people speak English (well, ‘Singlish’) in Singapore. It is very similar to the way people use ‘girlspeak’ in Mandarin, because Singlish contains a lot of the same/similar particles – la, lor, leh, a, ah, ma, meh, etc. It usually occurs when guys are complaining, like my students or even colleagues. You’ll hear an increase in the use of particles, as well as certain particles that are extended (or actual words, for example, ‘it’s always like thaaaaaat’ or ‘really meh? why so like that laaaa?).
Anyway, that is just a quick comment that could probably be developed a bit more, but I think if you’ve been in Singapore, you’ll know what I am talking about.