Mr. Leung's blog post on "Foreigners speaking Cantonese" inspired me to do some further research to assist my own little ongoing 'project' which started sometime last year.
Earlier this year while I was back home for the first time in three years, I noticed an increase in foreigners (by this, I mean mostly white people). There's foreign exchange students around TWTC, Caucasian men (teachers, sons-in-laws, expat...), and even Muslim girls at the supermarket.There's a popular nightly talk show which features "foreign brides" as guests on TV, and even a Taiwanese (Min Nan/Hokkien) language teaching program co-hosted by an American.
It may not seem like such a big deal in this multicultural society, but bear in mind that I'm talking about a country with 23 million people (similar to Australia), of which 98% are ethnically Han Chinese and 2% Aboriginal. Rarely could you spot a white guy on the streets outside of certain areas of Taipei City (excluding Mormon missionaries. Many of them travel to Taiwan around 18 years of age).
Anyway, back on topic.
I've gathered some videos found on YouTube for my own reference and anyone else interested. For the moment, I did not include the many videos of people practicing Mandarin songs (some of them are quite interesting). I also did not include videos of people from language backgrounds other than English.
I will continue to update further info/delete dead links whenever I can be bothered to.
My notes are written primarily for myself just as a reminder, so there's absolutely no offense intended even though I may comment on some speakers' pronunciation...etc. (From a general linguistics point of view, there are no right or wrong anyway).
This guy (Chris) speaks near perfect Beijing accent. He has a YouTube channel and he's teaching people how to learn Chinese in some videos.
In one of the videos he asked people to comment on his pronunciation to which some people said they were impressed with how well he pronounced the fourth tone (sharp fall). Apparently it is one of the obstacles for mandarin learners. Interesting.
(Last year one of my classmates who is (was?) doing speech pathology and linguistics told me that one of the reasons English speakers face difficulty in learning Chinese is that it's a tonal language. For example the sound 'ma' has different meanings as you pronounce them differently in Chinese (mum, hemp, horse, to scold), but the English speaker would just become confused and think they are the same words repeated.)
I believe this person speaks in a Taiwan accent (at least the people he's speaking with are from Taiwan, but they're obviously in another country). His intonation is very natural. I wonder how many years he's been learning/living overseas? It is unlikely if he has never lived in a Chinese speaking society (possible, but unlikely).
http://people.wku.edu/shizhen.gao/Chinese101/pinyin/tones.htm
http://www.chinese-outpost.com/language/pronunciation/tones-of-mandarin-chinese.asp
Brief Introductions to the five mandarin tones. (Basically only 4 are in use nowadays).
(Other dialects such as Cantonese or Hokkien have more tones.)
http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/worldcup-trader/article?mid=46&prev=47&next=44
This is an article (written in Chinese in 2002) on Constructivist teaching which was quite a hot topic when it was first implemented into the primary education of our little island. The author uses examples to demonstrate the argument that Constructivism theory is based on American/ English speaking society ('plus' culture), therefore will face significant obstacles when transferred into a Chinese speaking society ('minus' culture).
Last updated: 01/02/2011 --
Unfortunately no new info will be added for the time being, because all of the many links and information I collected & stored on my PC were lost before this post could be updated :'(
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