As you may have noticed in our latest lesson, I will be switching to some new native Chinese speakers from hereon – Bing and Jen. They are a couple in their fifties from central China so I thought it would be interesting to hear a different kind of accent. I like the contrast with the “younger” voice of Kirin.
I remember while teaching English in Taiwan how I thought I was doing a good job till a new teacher came along from England. The students had trouble understanding what he was saying because they weren’t familiar with his accent. It’s for this reason that I’m trying to change up the voices every now and then so you don’t fall into the same trap of only understanding one type of Chinese and being “lost” in the real world.
The other issue I’ve come across is that all the dialogues so far have been prepared with Kirin’s help which means they have a Taiwanese style to them. This means that certain words and phrases may be used differently in mainland China. This isn’t a big problem in my opinion since there is still no problem being understood. However, in order to change things up a little I’m going to switch to a mainland China approach as we progress just to provide a different contrast to the program. This also means (unfortunately) that I will ease out of using Kirin’s voice in the next ten lessons or so.
Don’t worry though, she’ll be back in the future, for future levels of the course.
