Comments | liukaiqin: Where is she now? 3

liukaiqin

Where is she now? 3 - I Love China

Feb 27, 2007 16:50

Guangzhou. The man opposite me in the web den has the eyes they copy when they carve marble boddhisattvas. The woman beside him is delightedly saying into her microphone "I can hear you! I can hear you! Can you hear me?" From Chengdu ( Read more... )

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goreism February 27 2007, 15:10:06 UTC

I hear Qiaotou has been renamed Hutiaoxia to capitalize on the gorge.

Do people on the street in Chengdu and Yunnan speak Putonghua or that sing-songy Sichuan variety of Mandarin that I can't understand? In Shanghai I understand that Shanghainese is becoming embattled.

csn February 28 2007, 03:20:06 UTC

In Yunnan you can hear languages which sound nothing like Mandarin, much less Chinese!

liukaiqin February 28 2007, 04:02:27 UTC

Sichuan Mandarin is well alive! It was great to hear it. My friend and I made friends with a bunch of lovely people in Chengdu and one of them was a local who thought it was great fun to speak Chengduhua to us, like, for our edification. My friend (Shanghainese) had no trouble understanding him and I was surprised how much I understood too - in terms of sound shifts I think Chengduhua is to Putonghua as Cork (Ireland) sheep farmer English is to "received pronunciation". Once I'd noticed that, everything he said cracked me up. Chinese with a Cork accent! His friends were like "For the sake of the foreigner, I BESEECH you to speak putonghua!" but he was having too much fun ( ... )

goreism February 28 2007, 13:59:02 UTC

If ever you pass by Beijing.... one never knows!
florent.bouilliez @gmail.com

bokane March 7 2007, 09:58:52 UTC

Yeah - Chengduhua is still part of the Northern Mandarin dialect family, though there are some sound changes that didn't take place in it. Better a Cork accent than a Louth accent, at least.

I really dug Chengdu when I was there, too. Laid-back city, awesome food, and apparently a growing underground music scene. I seriously thought about moving there when I moved back to China, but the pull of Beijing was too strong, and I'm a bit too much of a dialect snob.

liukaiqin March 8 2007, 13:12:25 UTC

It's got all the right amounts of cool, naff, tea, green, hot, wenming, proximity to good stuff, and chickens tethered to streetlamps.

Didn't realise anyone actually came from Louth :)

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