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Ep.2 Clark: Mandarin Chinese, Wu Chinese Dialects, English
49 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of A Language Journey, Clark tells us about his life in China and navigating the many different large and small languages and dialects in different regions across this enormous and complex country. With wonderful care, Clark brings us through the nuances of switching between languages that he speaks and understands, and teaches us quite a bit along the way. Enjoy!
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to A Language Journey, a podcast series where we explore humans, where they come from, the languages they speak, the stories that shape them, and who they are. Today, we are joined by Clark Huang from Shaoxing City and Xiuqiang Province in China. So Clark, can you tell me a little bit about where you're from and the languages that you speak?
Exploring Shaoxing: Culture and Language
00:00:25
Speaker
So guys today I'm gonna talk about my hometown and that one was like an hour next to Shanghai by train it is famous for the type of rice wine named Shaoxing wine which has the same flavor just like sherry wine that city has over 2050 years of history and besides we also use
00:00:49
Speaker
a same type of language just like people in Shanghai use. We call that wu, mandolin or mandolin, Chinese. From where I'm from, the city was used to be a very small town and after that the economy was doing so well back to the 70s. The city now is getting huge and
00:01:08
Speaker
Today there are more than 5 million people living there. Back to my childhood, it was like everybody knew each other because everyone was almost from the same community. So that study was only about half million. So right now you can see how different it is. Today as the most advanced region in China and the richest region because Shanghai is there, we are trying to make a huge city group, which means we are going to put Shanghai city as the center of that region. Then the city is
00:01:38
Speaker
Next to Shanghai we'll be developing very quickly as well.
Mandarin vs. Dialects in Shaoxing
00:01:42
Speaker
Clark, can you tell me what languages do you speak and what is your level of fluency in each language? My mother language is Mandarin. From the old time I was born, the Mandarin teaching level in China was not so well. And the educational skills from our professors, our teachers from the elementary schools, terrible. We used our dialects more than we used the Mandarin back to the old time.
00:02:09
Speaker
Fact time. The spoken Chinese language is usually classified into seven different groups. All of these varieties of Chinese come from Middle Chinese in the 5th to 12th century AD. These varieties include Mandarin, spoken by more than 1 billion people, Wu, dialect, Clark speaks, and Cantonese, and among others. Many refer to these as dialects. However, most of these are not mutually intelligible, and by many others are referred to as separate spoken languages.
00:02:37
Speaker
Today because the educational level is much higher than before so yeah most of people are trying to use Mandarin to take place of some other dialects but many locals just like me refuse to do that because we are more actually familiar with the
00:02:56
Speaker
dialects that's our original language and I guess that that's about who we are because in China a different city or different province has its own dialect it's completely different language that some outsiders couldn't even understand if they are from some other provinces that make us think differently from a
00:03:17
Speaker
compared to the people from some other provinces. So we still want to talk more about our local language. So the language I talk about it's going to be Wu Chinese and specifically based on the city I was born so I speak Shaoxing dialect. It's a part of the Wu Chinese. Under Wu Chinese there are more than I guess eight big dialects and I could speak like three or four of them because I grew up in that town so my parents they speak
00:03:45
Speaker
that one. So that was like the one with my childhood. And my grandma is from Shanghai, so she speaks Shanghainese. That's another big dialect under the Wu Chinese. Then my grandma was very close to me when I was a child, so I mostly talked to her.
00:04:05
Speaker
in her tone. Then when I finished my college in China, I went to Ningbo City, which was another city next to my hometown. And in that city, they also talked differently in a different dialect, still under Wu Chinese. So based on the working situation, I had to learn something from that new city. So I also learned how to talk in Ningbo dialect. So I could actually talk like three
00:04:34
Speaker
Okay, so fact time.
The Government's Language Policies
00:04:36
Speaker
Wu is a variety of Chinese spoken by about 90 million people in China. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, people all throughout China have been encouraged by the government to only speak Mandarin. As a result, Wu has been replaced by Mandarin in the media and in schools. Nowadays, people are discouraged from using Wu in public and administrative affairs. However, many people ignore this as they seek to hold on to their culture, as Clark did mention.
00:05:03
Speaker
I find that very interesting that you speak multiple dialects of Wu Chinese, which are all related to Mandarin Chinese. So my next question is, what are the differences and similarities between Mandarin Chinese and the different dialects of Wu Chinese? And what are the differences and similarities between the dialects?
00:05:28
Speaker
okay so this is a good question as today's mandolin is actually with very short history it was created almost like 150 years ago so based on the fact that at that point the Qing Dynasty they are like the outsiders they they they are not from my nation they're not from today's most of the Han Dynasty's nation so they conquered the old China and they want to create a new type of language so they could take charge
00:05:58
Speaker
and the language would be the bridge so they took some of the words from different provinces and mixed it up they told us that the name should be Mandarin and you could tell from the name Man during so
00:06:13
Speaker
That's man-dynacity. So it's like they did it. Not we did it. We didn't even want that, but they just published it. Okay. And it did make communication easier for us. Just imagine if without the mandarin, today's Chinese people couldn't talk across the Plovins as different Plovins has its own dialect and they're not related. So that's about the relationship between the
00:06:41
Speaker
Mandarin and the local dialects like Wu Chinese. Fact time!
Understanding Chinese: Written and Spoken Variations
00:06:47
Speaker
Although many Chinese dialects exist, the written language is a common form of communication. China is a huge country. Over 300 variations in the languages spoken across different provinces. Even though people are not able to verbally communicate in different provinces, they are able to understand each other in writing. There are three forms of written Chinese, simplified, traditional, and informal or slang versions.
00:07:10
Speaker
There is also a form called pinyin, which is the Chinese language transcribed using Roman letters and spelling. And the next I want to talk about the relationship of the different dialects from Wu Chinese. Even under the same language, we could understand each other kind of easily, but still there are very minor different pronunciations on each dialect.
00:07:36
Speaker
For example, the city I was from kind of keep the very original pronunciation. So the city like Shanghai city, the modern city in China with big population kind of improved a little bit on their pronunciation as there are so many new immigrants from some other parts in China. So can I use a sentence?
00:08:00
Speaker
Okay, so it's gonna be, if I wanna ask somebody in my town, like, have you got your breakfast? It's gonna be, that if I ask the same question in Shanghai dialect, it's gonna be, Can you say those two right next to each other? Okay, so from my town is,
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, you could see the upside down front, the turn difference. And in a different city, like the Ningbo city, I used to work. So the people there, mostly they are islanders, because that's a city with a lot of islands. And most of the people who are living in that city are actually
00:08:42
Speaker
grew up from small islands so on the islands you could you could just imagine that it's very hard for people to communicate if they speak very slowly and not because that that region is very windy if you don't speak loudly nobody's gonna hear you so they have to make everybody to hear them they have to hire their voice and you can see they they talk like in a very rush way in a very tough way
00:09:08
Speaker
You think they're going to fight you, but actually they just want to talk to you. And what region is that again? Ningbo. Something that I find is different from English and something that you describe, the differences between Wu and something that's very prevalent in Mandarin Chinese is tones.
00:09:27
Speaker
Can you describe how the dialects are different in tones? Because I think that's something that English speakers, we don't get a lot of. So can you kind of explain that to us? Sure. So the mandarin tones kind of new. So mostly today we teach that in elementary school and we got told that there are about four tones totally in speaking mandarin. It's like R, R.
00:09:51
Speaker
r r so it's four tones however in dialects it could be various it could be a lot like from the tone i will screw up i guess it was more than eight more than eight tones and historically i i didn't i didn't research this and i i don't think today's people know how to pronounce that in a very old way back to
00:10:13
Speaker
2000 years ago and in Shanghai dialect they have six I guess because they have more new immigrants the new people they want to fit in the locals they they cannot they cannot speak that well so I guess for making people easily to learn about that Shanghainese dialect
00:10:32
Speaker
the locals kind of improved, modified that dialect. They made that like, today it's going to be five, five tones or six tones. But from some other cities still under the Wu Chinese speaking zone, I guess it could be some regions, some cities could be more than with ten.
00:10:54
Speaker
All varieties of Chinese are tonal. This means that each syllable can have a number of different meanings depending on the intonation with which it was pronounced, just like Clark demonstrated. Here in English, we mainly convey surface level meanings through letters that make words, yet we do convey semantic meaning through tones and pitch.
00:11:09
Speaker
The famous sentence, I never said she stole my money. Depending on the word you choose to intonate, the meaning completely changes. Think about it. I never said she stole my money, or I never said she stole my money. Back to Chinese. For reference, Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has between six and nine, and Taiwanese has seven, each changing the meaning of a given word. Many languages around the world are referred to as tonal languages. These can include languages in Southeast Asia, Africa, indigenous languages in the Americas, and elsewhere.
00:11:38
Speaker
What are the purposes of each tone? Again, I'm trying to wrap my head around how are there different numbers of tones in different dialects? Can you try to explain that? Okay, so let's do this. I'm going to say it in many ways with the same sentence. Have you got your breakfast?
00:11:57
Speaker
Nǐ zhì zào fàn lemà. This just means, have you got your breakfast? The next I'm gonna do, nǐ zhì zào fàn lemà. So you can see at the final of the sentence, I drop it down, which means in this term, usually people feel angry or usually mean something else. It's like you are late for school or you are late for the job. So I doubt you were doing something very badly.
00:12:24
Speaker
So now I want to talk about your life and what languages did you learn at different parts of your life?
Clark's Language Learning Journey
00:12:30
Speaker
All the way up to the present day, obviously you're fluent in English. So try to include that in your timeline. So first, yes, from my timeline, my childhood was without television. The only type of language we could use back to family time, it was the local dialect. Then after that, we learned how to talk.
00:12:54
Speaker
Mandarin at school. That was type of like formal teaching in Mandarin in China. And we got textbooks, we got the videos, we got tabs. Back to that time, I was always doubting like the pre-education in my family was kind of useless because my parents
00:13:13
Speaker
couldn't speak Mandarin well. The only person I could turn to back to my childhood was my grandmother from my father's side and she was well educated with the very old version of Mandarin.
00:13:26
Speaker
not today's version. So today's version was kind of modified after the Chinese Civil War. The type of old version of Mandarin, which my grandma learned about was from her childhood from Qing Dynasty. That was almost 100 years ago. I learned Mandarin from my grandma first, then I went to school. My classmates and my elementary school teacher always laughed at me because some of my tones were actually not right.
00:13:56
Speaker
from today's people thinking. They all thought that I didn't learn well. But I explained all the time I learned the old version. They didn't buy in because they have no idea. They had no idea what the old Mandarin sounds like. Then they always explained to me like, Clark, hey, why? Everyone could just get 100 on the score, but you could always get 80. So they're obviously 20% of the pronunciation was different.
00:14:22
Speaker
And I didn't even know how to correct my pronunciation, because I had been using that for almost five years. Since the first day, my grandma told me how to speak that. Then it was pretty tough. I shifted my tone in Chinese Mandarin for almost three years to fitting that class, or the rest of people just thought I was a widow. Yeah, after that, everything was easier. And what about English?
00:14:51
Speaker
the English. I learned English in elementary school as well it was grade six so it's like the final year of the elementary school teaching and back to that time I guess yeah it was kind of
00:15:06
Speaker
The influence of the Cold War was still there, and the relationship between perhaps the US and China was not so way of back to our time. Then the Chinese people prefer to learn English from Hong Kong, which means the English-English. Yeah, so back to that time, the pronunciation was kind of...
00:15:25
Speaker
the British English, and we didn't change that until I got high school. Yes, back to my college time in China, it was like the Beijing Olympic Games time. We adopted American English in university English teaching. Before that, it was all British. I come to America in 2015, so that time was a little bit tough for me to shift some tones and word choices from
00:15:54
Speaker
using British English to use American English. Fact time. Simplified Chinese is primarily used in China now. Simplified Chinese is taught in Mandarin Chinese classes internationally as well. These characters are simpler. For instance, it has less pen strokes than traditional Chinese characters. Just looking at it side by side, you can see the stark differences between some of the characters.
Challenges and Changes in Language Education
00:16:17
Speaker
simplified characters have existed for hundreds of years, but only became officially acceptable in formal writing after the founding of the People's Republic of China in an attempt to improve literacy among Chinese in China during the 1950s. The Ministry of Education in China claims that the overall literacy rate has gone from 20% in 1950 to more than 85% today. What do you see as the major differences between British English and American English? What aspects are easier? What aspects are more difficult?
00:16:47
Speaker
this is a hard one so in american english usually people use the r sound but in britishia they just use very very subtle r sound or it's not even sound like r so would that make british pronunciation easier for you? yes easier for most of people in china or in asia
00:17:07
Speaker
From my understanding, the R sound is quite absent in Mandarin Chinese. Is that also true? We do have R sound in Chinese Mandarin, but usually that's at the last of the word. Yes, or it's going to be at the last place of a sentence. So if you use the R sound like middle,
00:17:28
Speaker
somewhere, if it's not at the last, it's going to be kind of hard for Chinese people. What do you find difficult about English in general, and what do you find easy about learning the language?
00:17:42
Speaker
In English, you have to talk about where, when, who. If you don't speak that clearly, then people are gonna be confused. However, in China, most people use very short sentences. Some sentences even are not related to each, not related to the current conversation, but they're gonna read the whole paragraph to get understand what you are talking about. Because Chinese language is usually, how we say that?
00:18:10
Speaker
high high contact yeah so it means you don't really mean what you are talking about you let people to guess what you want to say and in english it's like you have to specifically talk about what you want what this person needs and yes for for chinese people we sometimes don't like to use time or the places into a sentence because we think that's not the major deliverables we want to talk about
00:18:36
Speaker
I've heard Mandarin Chinese is a timeless language, whereas English, we have our tenses. There are other languages that have tenses. In English, we have, I believe, 12 or 13. That's what I teach in my classes. But if you compare it to Chinese, you don't necessarily have the tenses. You have to give more context in the sentence so that we understand what time you're talking about.
00:18:59
Speaker
Yes, yes, exactly. Like for the verbs, we don't change the verbs due to the time. And we use the same word, ta, to describe she and also same time describe her and describe it if it's an animal.
00:19:15
Speaker
So did you find, do you find that difficult when you're learning these aspects of English? Yeah, early on when I was in middle school, yeah, it was pretty hard because everybody makes mistakes and especially I guess Chinese people may make all the mistakes when they are trying to say who is actually doing what because it's always about tā. They could use tā for everyone. It's just funny.
00:19:38
Speaker
Can you speak a little bit more about what you mean by high contact language? Okay. So by high contact language, we are going to talk in the way that only the people who are educated or only the people who grew up with the same stuff, very similar family history. So it's like you could use something else to refer what you want to say in today's mentoring. Like you give a very short phrase instead of using a long paragraph.
00:20:04
Speaker
as you know that the person you want to talk to knows that as well, because you have something in common. Yeah, that's mostly what we use, why we describe Chinese Mandarin as high contact today. Do you find that the conventions in English that you need, the words to introduce or to conclude, are those kind of extra? As a Chinese speaker, do you think that that's not necessary sometimes? A lot of what English
00:20:32
Speaker
You know, we're very linear, you know, we're A, B, C, D, E, F, G. We have to follow a pattern. Whereas in Chinese, maybe you say even less than what's needed because it's high contact. Do you find that the conventions that you have to use in English are extra?
00:20:49
Speaker
Well, if I talk to an English speaker, yes, I will use the English way to talk. If I talk to Chinese people, there's no way that I will use the English way. Like I talk about everything in detail, then they are going to think this guy is crazy. Why is he talking about that much? It's impossible. Or they are going to just assume I'm not educated well.
00:21:10
Speaker
As yes, people, today's rich families in China, or the high class, high middle class, they are all busy. So they have very less time to talk. They'd rather to use very short sentences or very short phrases to make the conversation as accurate as possible. So they just skip a lot of basic stuff. Perhaps people think that that's not respectful as they speak in the way they like, not the way the rest of people like.
00:21:37
Speaker
Before you had talked about the civil war in China and that was the Qing dynasty.
Historical Influence on Chinese and Japanese Languages
00:21:43
Speaker
It was. So today's Chinese, today's China, the name of China is People's Republic of China. And before that it was Republic of China. So then they, they, they got civil war and took loose for people fought and the Republic of China went to Taiwan. So my question is what happened during the civil war in China?
00:22:04
Speaker
And what were the language implications? What changed with the language after that? You had mentioned something about how the government introduced a new language. So can you kind of give us the history of what happened? What happened afterwards?
00:22:19
Speaker
Yes, it's kind of interesting as I didn't got that until I got America, until I talked to some of the Taiwanese students as we all speak mandolin and they are very little different. I feel they are not talking using the same type of mandolin my grandma used to use. I also did some research. It was like before the World War II, just one type of mandolin.
00:22:44
Speaker
That was the old version. Then after the World War II, China got a civil war. So there were two major groups. One was the nationalism, I guess. The second one was communism. Then the nationalism part got Taiwan. They kind of defeated by the Chinese Communist Party. Because after that, two regions declared that they were the real China.
00:23:08
Speaker
And the name of the country, there was China on each side. So yes, I think it was a time that they want to make a difference. So like, you have your language, I have my language. Then they changed the name of Mandarin. Today's Chinese people call it Pu Tong Hua. In English, it's going to be like normal language or basic language. And in Taiwan, they call Mandarin Guoyu.
00:23:33
Speaker
which means national language so they changed the name they made some of the tongues a little bit different if you compare that to the old version micron must speak it was kind of childish yeah they just want to show people they are different they even though the language is actually the same taiwanese yeah taiwanese they did that chinese also did that yeah both sides they they changed a little bit
00:23:58
Speaker
So talking about the Taiwanese language, how much of that language can you understand? Can you speak it? Can you write it? Yeah, I could mimic. I could do that. I could do the accent as their accent is very similar to one province next to Taiwan from Chinese mainland side.
00:24:16
Speaker
and that province is next to the province i grew up so i know how to say that it's just uh compared to today's mandolin we use in china the mandolin in taiwan will sound smarter or let's say it's it's faster it's kind of southern sound but we still could mimic that as it's not a big deal for a southern guy fact time chinese is written with characters that represent both sound and
00:24:39
Speaker
Words in Chinese can be made up of more than one syllable, and each syllable is represented by a single character. Mandarin contains about 1700 syllables. Compare that to English, which has over 8,000, and some put that number over 10,000. Yet, Mandarin Chinese has tens of thousands of characters. As a result, there are multiple characters for each syllable, and each of these has a different meaning.
00:25:01
Speaker
Talking about the Japanese language, you told me before this interview that you also could understand some of their characters. Tell me about that. Yeah, because Japanese people, they didn't have their own characters until they realized that they could actually borrow words. They could borrow characters from old China. That was perhaps back to a thousand years ago. So they had dialect already. They were missing characters. So they just got that from China.
00:25:30
Speaker
They changed it a little bit because the Asian Chinese words were kind of difficult for people to understand, so they made it easier for them. They didn't change that much. From today's Chinese view, we could still understand the characters, the Japanese characters, like more or less 30% to 50%. We couldn't speak Japanese, but we could just guess the meaning from the words.
00:25:55
Speaker
English to me is a very rapidly changing language. There are a lot of speakers of English that don't speak English as a native language and that contributes to the speed of change. So is Mandarin Chinese changing? Is Wu Chinese changing?
00:26:12
Speaker
In Mandarin Chinese, we used to use that as a Qing Dynasty, or the late Qing Dynasty, where the Mandarin was used by most of Chinese people at that point. People greeted each, they greeted each with very weird way. Today we just say Ni hao. It's very easy, very short. Everybody understands that.
00:26:29
Speaker
What's the easiest translation of Niho? It could be anything. It could be anything. It could be, are you fine? Are you okay? It also could be, oh, you look good. I like you. Oh, it's a nice day. It could be anything. It could be, how are you? It could be anything. So we just keep words short. Instead of saying a long sentence, we just keep it short. Make you guess what I want to say.
00:26:50
Speaker
It's not funny, it's just that we wish you to think in a positive way. We want you to think, I'm saying 你好, but the real thing I want to say is, I wish you all the best. But some people also do that, like your enemy, he probably can also say 你好. But in that situation, you're gonna guess this guy is definitely not saying something good. His 你好 means something, he want to kick my ass, perhaps.
00:27:14
Speaker
So in that situation, is it kind of a second meaning of Ni Hao? Yeah, I guess so. It's just a high contact. If somebody like my enemy told to me like Ni Hao, then I guess he's going to do something very badly and he's trying to bully me at least at this point, or he's actually thinking about it.
00:27:34
Speaker
Now I want to know what are your next steps in
Future Language Aspirations and Global Influences
00:27:37
Speaker
language? What's your next language that you want to learn? Why do you want to learn that language? My next language I want to learn about will be the language that bring me profit. I think based on what I introduced my region in China, we are famous for doing international business. There are a lot of developing countries in the world and most of the developing countries are using the type of language, Spanish.
00:28:01
Speaker
And they are developing and yes, I think it's the type of opportunity I should get. I'll try to learn at least to reach the business level. Do you know any Spanish right now? I learned that a week. I could say alcomo estas. Bien? You do class, yes. Amigo, puedo, taco. That's it.
00:28:23
Speaker
Burrito taco, burrito taco, sorry, burrito, I just emphasized the T. I don't usually do that. Burrito taco, those are so common, they're actually English words now. English absorbs thousands of words into its language probably every year.
00:28:38
Speaker
just because there are so many people who use English from another language. So are there words that are borrowed from Chinese that go to English? What about the other way? The other way in China, as most of the Western stuff was very new to us. So we adopt the original pronunciation, then yes, we made the words like here people use sofa, then we say that sofa.
00:29:03
Speaker
Some of the English names, like your name, Ken, in Chinese, that's Ken. And Molly, that's exactly the same, Molly. I have noticed that Ken is a common name in Asian countries like China. Is that true? It could be a name. Maybe more so in Japan. So you're saying that Ken is transferable to Chinese as a word or as a name?
00:29:25
Speaker
as a name. Thank you so much for telling me your story. There's a lot to know about Chinese. I think we've just scratched the surface of language learning in China. It's a huge country and you speak a few of them, which is interesting to me. So thank you for kind of sharing the languages you speak, the differences between them and also your experience with English. I really appreciate it. Thank you for talking with me. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to A Language Journey. My name is Ken Walker.
00:29:54
Speaker
I'd like to thank my guest, Clark Wong, for sharing his stories with us today. There are over 7,000 languages spoken all over the world. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about just a few of them. That's it for me. Be well.