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[–] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

???

Pinyin has no bearing on people refusing to learn proper pronunciation. When you learn Mandarin, you learn what the actual sounds are that the pinyin corresponds to. This response is incoherent.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Wait until you find out Beijing mandarin is not "standard" and Beijingers sound like they have marbles in their mouths. Made a very unpleasant acquaintance with one this evening and Culturally they're jerks as well as linguistically, not less because they're told from birth that they're right and everyone else is wrong.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like people in Tokyo. "Largest city narcissist syndrome" or something.

    As for variations on pronunciation, yeah, that's true across every language. When you teach a new language to people you just have to pick (or create) a variation that will be intelligible to people who speak it natively. You can't teach the infinite variations of pronunciation, grammar, etc. in a beginner language course. You'd just confuse people.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Or New York City where people assume without explaining the whole world knows the difference between bronx brooklyn and so on. Unless you live there, who cares? And they sneer at us for being "flyover territory" because obviously the only other place that exists is LA. Imagine "standard" English was assumed to be Noo Yawk accent.

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