Anyway, nway has already answered most of your questions very well, but I might be able to add a footnote or two. Message 5 of 1330 January 2012 at 8:24am | IP Logged Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician With respect to your thread title, Ari generously fulfilled your need one week in advance: Cantonese resource threadĮdited by nway on 28 January 2012 at 3:23am If by "perfect Mandarin" you mean standard Mandarin, probably only the ones from Beijing, if even.
How many of them would you overhear speaking perfect Mandarin for example? Most Western immigrant communities have generally spoken Cantonese, but recently there's been a massive influx of Mandarin speakers, but many of these are international students who will eventually be moving back to China. Putonghua is the standardized form of Mandarin, modeled on the Beijing dialect. Is the everyday speech of Chinese immigrants in the West Mandarin, Cantonese, or putonghua? Yes, so long as by "China", you mean the Mainland. There are plenty of Hong Kong people who already speak decent English, and while most Cantonese speakers are learning Mandarin, few Mandarin speakers are learning Cantonese. The language that "everyone" is rushing to learn, whether they're Chinese or Western, is Mandarin. Guanzhou Cantonese allegedly has 7 tones, and Hong Kong Cantonese allegedly has 6, although distinguishing conceptually distinct tones would yield 9 tones in total (again, 2 or 3 of which sound indistinguishable from other tones). Conceptually, there are distinct tones that, in reality, end up sounding the same. This is a complicated issue, because there can be tones both in a conceptual and a practical sense. The lowest estimate I've seen is 56 million, but this was from 1984. The highest estimate I've seen is 120 million, but I doubt this, and the estimate is undated. Either way, neither Cantonese nor Yue are a dialect of Mandarin, and if anything, both Cantonese (or Yue) and Mandarin would politically be considered dialects of some generalized, non-specific "Chinese language". It's essentially a separate language, just as Mandarin is, although, technically it's considered to be a dialect of Yue, which would be the equivalent of Mandarin as a language in its own right. It's definitely not a dialect of Mandarin. I am still confused on whether Cantonese is actually a separate language, or a dialect of Mandarin. Message 3 of 1328 January 2012 at 3:22am | IP Logged Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian Speaks: English, French*, German C1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Is the everyday speech of Chinese immigrants in the West Mandarin, Cantonese, or putonghua? How many of them would you overhear speaking perfect Mandarin for example? Would the language skills of a Westerner fluent in Cantonese be more in demand than one fluent in Mandarin, since Mandarin is more widely studied by language students?Īren't most Cantonese speakers in China also fluent in Mandarin? Is it true that Cantonese has 8 tones? (by the way, how many tones does Korean have?) What is the explanation for this? I am intrigued by Cantonese because it is thought to be more difficult than Mandarin. Foreign Service language difficulty scale, even though I believe it has 200 million speakers. Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press.Message 1 of 1327 January 2012 at 7:16am | IP Logged A Cantonese Syllabary-Index to Soothill’s Pocket Dictionary: Incorporating All Cantonese Colloquial Characters and their Meanings. A Glossary of Common Cantonese Colloquial expressions. The Student’s Cantonese-English Dictionary. Hong Kong: New Asia/Yale-in-China Language Centre, Chinese University of Hong Kong. A Practical Cantonese-English Dictionary. Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press: New Asia – Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center. English-Cantonese Dictionary: Cantonese in Yale romanization. Cantonese Practical Dictionary: Cantonese-English, English-Cantonese. A Chinese Dictionary in the Cantonese Dialect. Character Index for Sidney Lau DictionaryĮitel, E. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.ĭew, James E. Ten Thousand Characters: Cantonese-Mandarin-English, an Analytic Dictionary.
0 kommentar(er)
