# How is Mandarin Chinese taught in non Mandarin speaking regions of China?



## panjabigator

How is Mandarin Chinese taught in non Mandarin speaking regions of China?  Is it immersion or is taught by comparing phrases in one language to another?  Or do people generally have a grasp of it through contact (a Mandarin speaking relative or immigrants in the city...maybe TV).


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## john_riemann_soong

In some rural villages there's no access to TV at all, and people go to neighbourhood schools. I don't know how the PRC system is currently (so I don't know if there is a government-imposed syllabus and central regulation of those schools), but I think a large amount of children are taught in their native tongues and don't pick up Mandarin till much later in life, given that only 52% of the country speak Mandarin natively.


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## gao_yixing

panjabigator said:


> How is Mandarin Chinese taught in non Mandarin speaking regions of China? Is it immersion or is taught by comparing phrases in one language to another? Or do people generally have a grasp of it through contact (a Mandarin speaking relative or immigrants in the city...maybe TV).


 
I can only understand but not speak Shanghai dialect until I'm 12. I learned everything in Mandarin.


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## vince

Probably the same way ESL is taught in North America to kindergarten kids who grow up in a non-English speaking immigrant family: they just teach them Mandarin until they start speaking it natively. But one of my friends speaks Mandarin with his parents (but Nanchang dialect (Gan language) with his grandparents)  so probably most already know Mandarin when they get to school.


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## kastner

You are forced to speak Mandarin in school.

actually, non-Mandarin speaking regions is too rough, you might need to know that Mandarin could mean 2 things
1) standard Modern Chinese language
2) official language before/in Qing Dynasty

some so-called Mandarin speaking regions, like Zhongyuan Mandarin, Xi'nan Mandarin, the "Mandarin" here means 2)
In those regions, they speak today's "dialects" (compared to Beijing Hua).


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## avlee

I don't think we're answering the question. Maybe someone from the minority areas shall come to the rescue.


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## kastner

avlee said:


> I don't think we're answering the question. Maybe someone from the minority areas shall come to the rescue.



no, i think he means the regions where people have their own native language - dialect maybe.
in Wu, i have no doubt that Suzhou Hua is your mother tongue, just like Shanghai Hua as mine.


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## kareno999

panjabigator said:


> How is Mandarin Chinese taught in non Mandarin speaking regions of China? Is it immersion or is taught by comparing phrases in one language to another? Or do people generally have a grasp of it through contact (a Mandarin speaking relative or immigrants in the city...maybe TV).


That depends.

I come from the so-called Mandarin Region, Shandong Peninsula, but my native tongue is quite different Putonghua, which is based on Beijing dialct. 
As a kid, I didn't speak Putonghua at all until I went to the primary shool, where I learned all the characters and their pronunciations(dark time), in Beijing accent of course. But the medium language used in class was still my own dialect. (I heard nowdays teachers have to speak Putonghua in class. Really against this.)
Years later, when I went to college in another city when I have to speak Putonghua to communicate with guys from all over China, I just spoke it out naturally, like it's my mother tongue.

In bigger cities, kids begin to pick up Putonghua before they went to school. I would call them bilinguist.


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## Staarkali

I know here in Shanghai, when walking down the streets, I find some parents speaking to their 3-4 years old children in Mandarin; as far as I understand, the children are much more likely to learn Mandarin as first language if their parents are not of the same area, for example my boss's mother is from Ningbo and her father from Guangxi, so they first taught her Mandarin (hence her good level in Mandarin).


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## fall_ark

I heard that recently all the "offical" textbooks for early education are in Madarin. Didn't bother to find out so I could be wrong....but that should be the case when it comes to middle school. It is said that in Tibet there is now no Tibetan in middle school textbooks.
I don't think most dialect users would have much difficulty in picking up Mandarin - after all there are usually many similarities.


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## LikeBarleyBending

In China, all students are learning Mandarin at school at their Chinese classes and when watching TV of course. However different people from different places speak different Mandarins--mixtures of Mandarin and their local dialects. So sometimes you might be able to tell where somebody comes from even when he is speaking "Mandarin". 

As far as I know, in some regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, things are different--students will learn their own languages (more than just dialects, totally different languages from Chinese) as well as Mandarin.


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## rivei

Hi everyone! 
I can say I am just growing up in the definitely "non Mandarin speaking regions of China", Guangzhou, where we speak Cantonese. Its pronunciation is totally different from Mandarin, though the letter system is mostly the same.
Outside school, local people hardly speak Mandarin except for some situation communicating with people from other parts of China. And Mandarin is begun in the first year of primery school in Chinese classes (语文课). We learn from basic spell (拼音) to speak a whole sentence. We have to remember every word's pronunciation in Mandarin, just like reciting English vocabulary.
Generally speaking, we are "forced" to speak Mandarin at school. But except for 语文 classes, other classes' teachers used to speak Cantonese so that students can understand easier.
As far as I know, most part of Guangdong province, where dialects are "too" different from Mandarin, students only "learn to speak" Mandarin at school but seldom use it at home or between friends.


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## kareno999

rivei said:


> As far as I know, most part of Guangdong province, where dialects are "too" different from Mandarin, students only "learn to speak" Mandarin at school but seldom use it at home or between friends.


 
And that's exactly why i find the putonghua spoken by you guys is very funny in most cases. No offense.


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## rainBELL

The kids will handle mandarin pretty well, as long as there is public education in that region. Actually, I think most of the dialects are being forgotten by teenagers nowadays.


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## notnotchris

Where I used to teach English in Kaiping, Guangdong province, people spoke Kaiping-hua outside of class (mutually unintelligible from Cantonese) and most classes were taught in Cantonese, which is kind of a lingua-franca for Guangdong Province (there are many dialects within the Cantonese language family). This was a private English school though, and I heard that Mandarin is used to teach in public schools. This trend is increasing, and in Shenzhen/Guangzhou, Mandarin is becoming almost as common as Cantonese due to immigration from other provinces.

One teacher at that school in Kaiping, who used to teach in public schools, taught her classes in Mandarin because she was used to teaching in Mandarin (that is the government mandate for teaching at public schools). However, many students complained and the old people had trouble following so she switched to Cantonese.

It seems to me that other dialects do not receive the special status that Cantonese has. Wu, the dialect of Shanghai, is a huge dialect with more speakers than Cantonese, but I did not see TVstations, a music industry or movies in that dialect. Perhaps it's the historical significance of Cantonese and its prevalence outside pre-1997 PRC (Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese) that gave it this special status which does not seem to be enjoyed by the other dialects (except Taiwanese perhaps).


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