Language confusion

[mecurtin]

[to the tune of "Land of Confusion"]

I'm only up to Episode 9 so far, but I already have SO MANY QUESTIONS. And feelings!!

As you probably recall, in Episode 6 Zhao Yun Lan says, in the English subtitles:

I don't know!

Just like that

(How does one extract the Chinese subtitle characters for running through Google translate etc? Is there a trick to it?)

Anyway, I was quite startled because what he says while the screen is saying "Just like that" sounds to my ear like je ne sais pas, French for "I don't know". (I am, or used to be, fluent in French.)

Is this a trick of my ears/brain? Is he actually speaking French, as an American might who jokes, "Affected? Moi?" Is there a more idiomatic English translation that "Just like that"?

So many questions! I'm actually really tempted to look for a way to learn ONLY spoken Chinese: I'm over 60, and I don't have the time or neurons to learn Chinese writing.

I've never listened to so much Chinese in a row before, and I'm struck by how different it sounds in Guardian than what I overhear (not infrequently) in central NJ. In particular, the actors' accents seem much less tonal and less nasal than what I hear around me.

In a bit of dialogue from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Michelle Yeoh sounds to my ear as though she's speaking the same dialect (or maybe topolect) as they do in Guardian, while Zhang Ziyi has a little bit of the tonal, nasal quality familiar to my ear. In some "Chinese on the Street" interviews, done in Beijing, there seem to me to be a range of speech styles, mostly much more tonal & nasal than in Guardian.

Is there a distinct "acting dialect" in Chinese, like the old Mid-Atlantic accent in English? Or is my ear just not attuned to what's actually going on?

Comments

[asya_ana]

I'm not sure what ZYL says after "I don't know." I don't recognize the characters used in the subtitles but my reading comprehension is trash and I'm not a good source for that.

I think it's really hard to learn Chinese without learning the characters, because the characters are what distinguish sounds from each other. But give it a shot!

If it helps, I wrote a language primer that talks a little about dialects and accents. They speak Mandarin in Guardian but people have different accents. I think the nasal thing is mostly a personal way someone might speak and not really related to dialect. What you're hearing as nasal is probably just people's personal voices or how they manipulate them. The Chinese on the Street vid you linked, I didn't listen to it all, but everyone I listened to was speaking Mandarin.
https://asya-ana.dreamwidth.org/98581.html

[solo]

As for getting the characters for Google translate, depends.

If it's Zhao Yunlan or Shen Wei (or one of his incarnations) speaking, there's a helpful file with all their dialogue in all the eps somewhere (possibly linked in the resources post in this comm).

If it's someone else, I use Google translate on my phone (the camera OCR), and sometimes that by itself is good enough, and other times, I stick all the bits I get that way into an email to mail to myself and then put into Google translate on the PC.

[china_shop]

The ZYL/Shen Wei script is linked here, fwiw. :-)

[mecurtin]

thank you!

[goss]

Is this a trick of my ears/brain?

Heh, yeah. Funny you should mention that. I am only familiar with basic French from high school, but my ear also hears French phrases in the show even though I *know* they're something totally different, especially "ça va". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[mecurtin]

Yes! it's like our brains are going "it's foreign, it must be French!" and grabbing any French-sounding bits that come along!

[xparrot]

I'm a waaaaay beginner student at Chinese, but I know enough Japanese to be able to look up characters pretty easily, and what he says there is: 顺嘴吧 Shùnzuǐ ba

Which MDBG says to blurt out (without thinking) and my uneducated guess is that ZYL is saying "I dunno, I just said it?"

[mecurtin]

Thank you so much! When I put that in google translate & have it read to me, it DOES sound eerily like "je ne sais pas", said colloquially.

[extrapenguin]

There is, in fact, a special acting dialect of Mandarin! It's apparently basic Beijing-adjacent Mandarin but without all the arrrr'ing, and likely spoken more clearly etc.

As for looking up stuff on Google Translate: I open up Pleco on my phone, scribble what I think I see into the "draw here" screen, and then the easy mode would be to copypaste and place into Google Translate, but I actually just look at the pinyin, open up Google Translate on my desktop, use the pinyin to write the hanzi using Google's IME, and copypaste the hanzi into MDBG. (I have enough grasp of the grammar that this is viable, and I prefer MDBG's dictionary to Pleco's.)

[mecurtin]

I figured there *had* to be a stage dialect. It sounds like it's a variant of Standard Chinese, but spoken especially clearly.

[naye]

Could it be that you're hearing Cantonese around you? It's more nasal (to my European ears), and has more tones than Mandarin, which is what the speak on the show. My Mandarin-speaking wife hears lots of different accents on the show (Zhu Yilong sounding pretty "rural" & southern, Bai You having a Beijing drawl).

For screen grabs of subtitles, tinny introduced me to Copyfish, which automatically copies characters from subtitles. It's AMAZING.

[trobadora]

I wish I could get Copyfish to work for me! But all it ever does for me is throw error messages.

[tinny]

Really? It had a stretch where it didn't work, when they upgraded to a new version, but I haven't had any trouble since.

Or are you talking about offline videos? I never got it to work for offline videos, despite following the instructions.

But it works for me in both Firefox and Chrome. (And I have severely limited scripts, I use a lot of script blockers, so I think it doesn't have any weird requirements.)

What is very hit and miss is the translation. But it at least captures the characters mostly correctly, so I don't have to handwrite them all but can paste them into google translate to get a better/second attempt at translation. (They all suck, so... it doesn't help much. )

[trobadora]

No, it was online stuff. I have no idea why, but it just refuses to work for me.

[mecurtin]

I think it's undoubtedly Cantonese for the most part. I should get up the nerve to ask the people at the local Chinese restaurant where they're from--their food is very mild (we keep asking them to add more Hot to the Hot&Sour soup), and they want to put shrimp in *everything*. Or would asking be considered rude?

[china_shop]

I'm actually really tempted to look for a way to learn ONLY spoken Chinese: I'm over 60, and I don't have the time or neurons to learn Chinese writing.

I haven't succumbed to trying to learn Mandarin yet, but I know what you mean about the characters. An alternative might be to learn Pinyin, which uses the Roman alphabet. You'd still have to learn it, because the pronunciation is quite different from English, I believe (plus tones!), but at least it's phonetic?

I'm only up to Episode 9 so far, but I already have SO MANY QUESTIONS. And feelings!!

\o/!!! :-D

[foxghost]

Bai Yu's Zhao Yunlan speaks with a northerner accent that I can barely understand without the chinese subs, and I'm not sure how much of it is his voice, bc I can't understand Han Chen from Memory Lost either. I can understand standard mandarin --- the stuff that comes out of Da Qing's character's mouth --- pretty much perfectly. I've been told that this is because Da Qing and a large part of the side cast was dubbed.

And what he said there "It just went along with my mouth" could best be interpreted as a shrug and, "I dunno, I just said it I guess."

(Good luck, if you ever decide to actually learn Chinese. I've been told the hardest part is the grammar, but I'm still picking up new words because people keep making up new ones so i swear the hardest part is SLANG.)

[mecurtin]

Da Qing and a large part of the side cast was dubbed

Why? Because the actors were just so terrible? Or because the sound work was so terrible?

Are you a native speaker of Cantonese (or similar)?

Just watching ZYL I can tell that in an American version he'd have a New York accent.

*Spoken* Chinese is supposed to be no more than medium-hard for native English speakers. The writing system is where State Department officials, etc., really have to put in the time.

"At least it's not Japanese", they all say.

[foxghost]

Why were they dubbed?
I have no clue. Since Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu are both original voices, they obvs were setup for sound work. Guardian has a weird combination of some characters original voice, some characters dubbed, and everyone had parts of their lines overdubbed because names of places were changed to pass censorship and it's a bit of a mess.

I am a native speaker of HK cantonese, where everyone's expected to also learn Mandarin (but pronounced in cantonese) and English at the same time, so I picked up pronunciation much later and i still get pinyin wrong a lot when i type. there's a higher expectation for reading ability than listening ability since China is huge, many regional dialects, absolutely everything is subtitled by law.

At least it's not Japanese: It's true. We have no verb forms or tenses. Monday to saturday is numbered 1-6 and all the months are numbered without special pronunciations. :3