Greetings from drizzly Shenzhen, where I find myself this fine morning sitting in a Starbucks and experiencing culture shock. If the purpose of a chain cafe is to produce the same atmosphere in any unit in the whole world, Starbucks has succeeded; this one here in the Shekou district could be airlifted and dropped in the middle of London or New York and would not be the slightest bit different.
Shenzhen, of course, is in Guangdong Province, but to refer to it as a “Cantonese” city would be inappropriate. Unlike other cities in the province where the looping Cantonese language dominates, Shenzhen is actually a fairly good laboratory for textbook Mandarin Chinese.
The explanation for this phenomenon is simple- nobody in Shenzhen actually comes from Shenzhen. Within the same Starbucks, for instance, the Hunanese girl taking your order barks rapidly to the Sichuanese guy brewing coffee beside her. Without a common dialect, they communicate in pu tong hua, and your correspondent was delighted to have understood them.
People who come to China to study the language worry a great deal about where in the country the language is spoken in its “purest” form. Shenzhen might seem an unlikely answer, but based on my rather unscientific inductive reasoning, it could be a contender.
Agreed! I’ve spent some time visiting friends in Shenzhen and had the same experience. Sure beats Shanghai or Beijing for clear and simple Mandarin.
I was having a discussion along similar lines last night as I struggled to make do with local 方言. Even places like Nanjing offer better and more frequent putonghua just from the number of people coming from elsewhere.
Even Shanghai is better than most smaller towns for that reason.
From experience, I can tell you studying Mandarin in Shenzhen is terrible. Yes, more people speak Putonghua in Shenzhen than most cities, but they refuse to believe foreigners can speak any bit of it and will insist on speaking English that is much worse than most foreigners’ Chinese. There are a few exceptions, but you have to get out of any area that has ever had ANY foreigners.
And Starbucks in Shekou has some of the most annoying foreigners I’ve ever encountered in China. There are many better places to get coffee and talk with people in Shenzhen (like Andes Cafe).
Ha, what Starbucks in Shekou? We have 2 within a block of each other. I would agree with Chinamatt that learning Chinese in Shenzhen is hard, but it is doable. I found Taipei a really easy city to speak in. Here in Shenzhen I am almost never understood, but during a short trip to Taiwan I was suddenly near fluent. A very strange feeling. Maybe they are more used to hearing laowai butcher tones there?
fÄngyán 方言 (dialect)
@Kellen,
most people who study Chinese don’t learn the characters. So it’d be helpful if you also wrote in pÄ«nyÄ«n 拼音
If you want standard 普通è¯, it doesn’t get more standard than Harbin. Seriously. There are two, very very minor sounds they mispronounce (“po” as a bit more like “pe”, and a slight twang on the “ing” final), but other than that, it’s pretty freakin’ æ ‡å‡† in these here parts.
I agree with Chinamatt with regards to putonghua in Shenzhen. What the original poster stated is true that there are many people in Shenzhen from all over China, but the thing is… where in China are you gonna get this so called “perfect putonghua”? I’m tired of traveling to a Chinese city and hearing that my putonghua is off.(beijing foreigners are notorious for this in my exp) China has a million and one dialects and you need to know it if you live in that area. There is a common language, but who can rely upon it? Know the local lingo in the area you live and represent. Putonghua is for the tourists.
I was a bit unclear in that last post, what I mean is the pronunciation of the final sounds “o” and “ing” can sometimes be nonstandard. Also, you get a lot of å•¥ instead of 什么 and å’‹ instead of 怎么.
@ Nedzer: Most people who study Chinese don’t learn the characters? I don’t think that’s true at all. I’ve never met anyone who’d been studying Chinese over a year who didn’t learn characters too, the only people I know not learning characters are expats who are “learning” Chinese but haven’t got past “Ni hao” because their study is extremely halfassed. Why wouldn’t you learn characters?
Sorry, you misunderstood. I speak read and write Chinese. That statement in itself can also misunderstood
I speak –
I can say what I am thinking and still make errors in tones and grammar but can be understood by most people. i’m not butchering the language but still make many mistakes.
I write –
If someone does not understand me, I oten can write it. However, I’m limited in what I can write. I know slightly over 1700 characters (can read) but can only a write little more a 1000.
I used a acombination of the Heisig method and the dull old rote method. For new words i write flashcards and carry them with me for the day. So far I have 2000 handwritten flashcards.
I took a four hour test to see how many character I know, 2 weeks ago. I had to write the character from the definition in pīnyīn.
Reading –
I’m constantly frustrated when I try to read something as there as so many blanks in my understanding of characters and although I can read many, many compounded words, it still often leaves me bewildered. I can read menus, street signs , signs instructions. Hand writing is still dificult, often impossible for me to decipher.
Listening –
I’ve no problem with that. Although idiomatic expressions still cause me trouble and also the od homophone but listening is situational so not many screwups there.
My experinece wtin Laowais learning Chinese is that they their speaking is always stronger than their writing. So writng pīnyīn helps clarify in postings. Also it helps, because the characters can be similar too.
Nice conversation going on here.
I have been in Bejing and Shenzhen and for learning the language both cities have their advantages. First of all the climate is totaly different, Shenzhen hot nearly all year round and Beijing freezing at least in the winter.
@Chinamatt
I think if you look around there are loads of people in both of the cities who actually DONT speak any English, actually the majority of people … if anyone has the problem that his friends dont like to chat in Chinese, change your environment a little bit (e.g. woulndt many Chinese ppl in Starbuck be going there to have a chance to practise their English?)
What I find great in Shenzhen is that people are so excited about the fact that foreigners CAN speak Mandarin, and they do respect you more there than in Beijing. Also, Shenzhen is next to HK, it is much more materialistic, and foreigners must be rich.
Unfortunately most Shenzhen ppl come from Hunan/Hubei and their Mandarin is not the best. They always confuse S and SH, Z and ZH, L and N, etc. so if any of you want to learn decent Mandarin go North!
@Phil7
I almost never go into Starbucks, and avoid a large number of foreign-populated areas. It takes a lot of patience to find the places that will acknowledge a foreigner speaking Chinese in Shenzhen (best places I’ve found have been Xinjiang restaurants and Lanzhou noodle shops). I have friends who are fluent and get stares of confusion from people around here.
Haha, that’s true. Shenzhen is one of the youngest mega cities in the world, Chinese who live there now just arrived a few years ago from their little town somewhere in South China and often have quite strong regional accents, actually rarely speak to people who use pure putonghua. The first foreigners who went there were working for oil companies, they all didn’t speak a word of Chinese. So you can imagine, Shenzheners don’t believe foreigners can speak it, many of them don’t even try to listen. In fact if a foreigner can speak decent Mandarin his level is higher than a large parts of those Shenzhen ex-farmers, of course not including the young people and the more educated folk.
As the verbal part of Chinese is my strong point I rarely had problems there but friends of mine got frustrated many times. Taxi drivers are good to chat to… unfortunately most of them have strong Hunan accents, haha.
Interesting discussion…want to inject my 2 mao
Firstly, I am of the opinion that where one can find standard Mandarin has much more to do with the social class and education level of the persons in question, rather than their geographic location, which of course would also explain, as Matt brings up, why there is so much standard Mandarin in Shenzhen. That being said, when you equalize the social class variable, you will generally find more standard Mandarin in the North than the South.
Secondly, I think there is a common misconception among many foreigners that being surrounded by only putonghua is the best way to increase one’s Chinese level. This would certainly be the case if one only wanted to learn Chinese to watch CCTV and communicate with college graduates from Northen Chinese cities. I spent the majority of my Chinese learning years in Fujian (one of them with Matt), and believe that all that exposure to non-standard putong with a cornicopia of various accents was much more beneficial to my overall ability to understand spoken Chinese (the vast majority of which is not standard) than had I studied in…say…a university in Beijing.
funny, i am a chinese and i am happy to see this, foreigners want to improve their putonghua, the best way i think is practice, as we chinese study in english, you hear it everywhere, say it all the time, then you would be better and better.
well, i am in shenzhen and i think it would be great if someone who wants to study in chinese and i am happy to get a foreign friend, would not be charged, by the way.
🙂
I recognize it was a very interesting submit thanks for writing it!
No ones is actually from shenzhen? It was one a fishing village and natives from there are Cantonese/Hakka.
I think you missed the point. Obviously there isn’t a spot in China that someone isn’t “from”… but the millions upon millions of people who now make Shenzhen worthy of including on a map are not from there. Thus actual, ancestral “Shenzhen ren” are a very rare breed.
I have lived in Shenzhen for almost twenty years,and my sence is the advantage to Shenzhen or Beijing as a site for learning Mandarin is connected to one’s linguistic goals. Northern cities, such as Xi’an, Harbin, and Beijing are great for cultivating a “standard” accent, full of “r’s” and “ch’s”, for example. However, Shenzhen is a fabulous place to learn how to adapt to the diversity of Mandarin accents, which differ in vowels and constanents, but have consistant tones. That said, I’m a fan of linguistic diversity, and enjoy North Carolina English as much as I do Brooklynese.