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Pronunciation by “The Book” or as in “The Wild”
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roddy -



Quote:

My first impression (based on text books and Pimsleur) was that these alternate pronunciations are
just plain wrong, but the counter-argument that was posed to me is that the notion of right or
wrong when dealing with differences in native pronunciation is irrelevant because, in fact, it all
depends on what region you’re from; therefore, we need to adapt to all variations in order to
deal with the variety that we’re likely to come across in the real world.

Yes and no. China has set itself a standard - Putonghua - and its entirely reasonable for courses
to stick to that. You can't expect anything designed to appeal to the greatest number of Chinese
learners to cover all the variations out there. You'd need different sections on each province.
(Nay, county. Nay again, village. Nay again, those folk down the end of the village speak odd!)

That said, a bit of robustness in your listening is certainly valuable - you don't want to start
shaking every time someone adds an -r where you've never heard an -r before. But I don't think
it's something to spend too much time on - after all, take three heavily accented folk from any
three parts of China, put them in a room together and they're going to have communication
problems. Why should we expect to do any better? Spend some time on any regional variations you
come across regularly by all means, but the whole spectrum?

More valuable probably is to have a very solid basis in the standard, and in working around
problems by using context and a bit of bluffing. That should leave you able to spot when someone
is being consistently off-center and compensate for it without having a complete breakdown in
communication.



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