Guangdong province migration

[Rhonald]

Whats the beef with dialect anyways - we got our problems with English. A fag is something I try to stay away from but those jolly Englishmen across the pond stick them in their mouths. :-/

And why can't I spell it "colour" without my dam word processor changing it to color.

[feisnik]

Here's the great thing, across most dialects, the written word is the same, it is only the pronunciation that changes! for instance, my wife's family name of Liu becomes Lau is Cantonese or as the Mandarin-speaking Chinese call it, Guangdonghua!

[Willy The Londoner]

What I found in Zhuhai is that there is sometimes a wide difference in the sound of words than the way it sounds on teaching CDs etc.  In Mandarin I learned 'Char' as tea now I have to get used to 'Tar' as tea.

 Maybe thats the way I make it!!!

Willy

[feisnik]

What I found in Zhuhai is that there is sometimes a wide difference in the sound of words than the way it sounds on teaching CDs etc.  In Mandarin I learned 'Char' as tea now I have to get used to 'Tar' as tea.

 Maybe thats the way I make it!!!

Willy

In ZhuHai, you hear a lot of Cantonese/GuangDongHua. That "r" at the end of many words is just the BeiJing dialect of Mandarin. (Kind of like how the British dialect of English adds "r" sounds on a lot of words like "China", making it sound like "Chiner" everytime I listen to the BBC.) Tea is "Cha" in many parts of China.

[Danny]

There are 56 different ethnic groups in China. I had no idea within these group how many dialects or sub-dialects there are. There are variations of pronunciation from even the same dialect!

People’s Republic of China . . . (has) 55 official minority nationalities total 123,330,000 or 9% of the population (2005) . . . The number of individual languages listed for China is 293. Of those, 292 are living languages and 1 has no known speakers.

Source:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=cn

[Vince G]

?? Very easy to fix all of this different dialect problem? Say these words, "DO YOU SPEAKY ENGLISH"

[David5o]

I think you hit the nail squarely on the head , with that observation Vince.
At our age, trying to learn a language as complicated as Chinese is a non starter, besides.......
Don't everyone speaky the Englishy ?? .....Well they should do then!! ...hahaha!!

David......