Adventures in Mandarin: Part 7
Girl walks into supermarket and attracts attention of young, wide-eyed shelf stacker man (who had previously been rustling through the lollies in aisle three).
Girl: 请问, 电池在哪里? (Excuse me, where can I find batteries?)
Shelf Stacker Man: *looks confused and gabbles something incomprehensible*
Girl: *displays alarmed face*
Shelf Stacker Man mimes something that could be anything, and points towards a nearby shelf, at a spatula.
Girl: 不不不, 我想买电池. (No no no, I want to buy batteries).
Shelf stacker man: 电池? (Batteries? ["dian chi"])
Girl: 对阿. 电视的电, 游泳池的池. (Yeah, the “dian” in “dian shi”* and the “chi” in “you yong chi”**).
Shelf stacker man looks around for salvation from this foreign girl speaking in tongues, but none is forthcoming. He mutters something about waiting a moment, and hurries off. Girl looks into her shopping cart and wonders if she could use the shampoo bottle to bludgeon somebody.
Shelf stacker man returns with grizzled superior.
Grizzled superior: 你想买什么? (What do you want to buy?)
Girl: 电池! (Batteries!)
Girl rips electronic dictionary from her bag and points at the battery compartment, and all is revealed.
Grizzled superior: 阿! 电池! (Ah, batteries! ["dian schi"])
Shelf stacker man flees the scene and while Grizzled Superior guides her to the supermarkert’s stock of triple A batteries, Girl is left to contemplate the fact that she in no longer on mainland China and can’t hold it against the Taiwanese for having a Mandarin accent that’s not out of a Beijing audio book.
Even if they’re all wrong!!!!!!
*Dian shi = Television.
**You yong chi = swimming pool. Because Mandarin doesn’t use a written alphabet, putting the individual words that make up what you’re trying to say into a clearer context is the same as spelling them out. Supposedly.
What I want to know is: why did the stacker boy point hopefully at a spatula? The most common words for spatula do not sound anything like ‘dian chi’, do they?
LOL! I remember the first time I met someone from the Fujian province, where there is no “sh” or “x” sound and I got terribly confused. Fujian is the part of China that’s closest to Taiwan.
hobielover: I’ve heard that the Taiwanese dialect is close to the Fujian dialect, so that could also be a factor. It’s a bit sad though when foreigners have more standard Mandarin accents than native speakers.
Most of the Hokkien I’ve heard is from songs so I’d have to hear either something about love or something else from a song to be sure for myself on the similarity. I should be able to understand some basic and practical phrases like, “Don’t hit my mom anymore.” XD
I think that in any language there are different variations as far as accents (but not dialects). I’m sure a Chinese person who learns English from a British man would make similar claims about Americans and Australians. A lot of times I’m told that I speak better Spanish than an actual Spanish speaker because I don’t chop words apart, but it’s harder to fit in anywhere when you don’t have any particular accent.
You’re right, and there’s really no “correct” accent in any language, it’s just that some are privileged over others. And as my linguistics teacher always used to say: “a language is just a dialect with an army”.