Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)
Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2019 12:45 am
We talk languages
http://forum.language-learners.org/
http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=9680
ロータス wrote:Was doing Clozemaster and saw this sentence: "有了我,我们已经多一个人了。" Has anyone seen this kind of sentence before? Clozemaster says the English translation is: "And with me, we are yet one more."
Of further interest in the development of regional Mandarins is that, due to regional prosperity and connotations of wealth, upbringing, and trendiness associated with new regional urban centers, many regional Mandarin varieties may, in time, come to command greater prestige than Mandarin spoken in its northern birthplace. Ding (1998) has observed that “many Chinese regard the Beijing accent as pompous,” and notes that his fellow academics have found the Mandarin of Taiwanese newscasters to be more pleasant-sounding than that of their northern counterparts. Zhang (2005) writes that well-to-do yuppies working in Beijing’s international corporate offices choose not to speak with a local Beijing accent, but instead to speak in an accent that selectively incorporates features of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Zhang 2005, 444–458). According to Zhang, the choice of this “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” over Beijing Mandarin is not for the purposes of communication, but to signal a distinction in social status. As these speakers switch between Beijing Mandarin and “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” according to interlocutor, situation, and domain of language use, as Mandarin spreads far and wide to remote dialect regions and these regions give back by replenishing the superstrate language, we are in many ways witnessing the dawn of a new type of Mandarin-based diglossia taking root in the Chinese-speaking world, perhaps the second such cycle in as little as two centuries.
ロータス wrote:Was doing Clozemaster and saw this sentence: "有了我,我们已经多一个人了。" Has anyone seen this kind of sentence before? Clozemaster says the English translation is: "And with me, we are yet one more."
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Can anyone suggest a movie in Mandarin with both Mandarin subtitles and English (or French or Spanish) subtitles? Any genre, any period, animated or not animated. I want to give emk's subs2str method a try.
Axon wrote:MorkTheFiddle wrote:Can anyone suggest a movie in Mandarin with both Mandarin subtitles and English (or French or Spanish) subtitles? Any genre, any period, animated or not animated. I want to give emk's subs2str method a try.
Any Chinese film that got at least a moderate release in the West - so Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, and other Mandarin martial arts films are fair game. You may have heard that the Mandarin in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is weird because the actors are from all over. It's no weirder than you'll hear people speak every day in China. There are some archaicisms to evoke the time period, though. Also, be sure that you're getting subs translated from Chinese, not a transcript of the English dub track (it's very different).
As for everyday films, From Beijing to Seattle, Forever Young, and I Am Not Madame Bovary are all pretty modern, very good, and mostly in Standard Mandarin. From Beijing to Seattle is definitely the most modern and most standard, though the narrator in I Am Not Madame Bovary has an absolutely superb voice.
If there is a Chinatown near you, there's very likely a DVD shop. There you'll probably be able to find HK movies dubbed into Mandarin, and as we know dubs are usually cleaner than original audio to study from. I don't have any recommendations here but just pick one with either two people holding guns or two people looking dreamily at each other. Then, with a bit of effort, you can extract all the subtitle tracks from the DVD directly.
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Thank you for this. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is on MyList with Netflix, and I Am not Madame Bovary was already on order. I know nothing about either, but I remember the former for having a run in the USA and I liked the latter just from the intriguing title. And I like the Two Guns or Two Dreamy Faces advice.