English Speakers speak Mandarin | Understand Different Mandarin Accents

English Speakers speak Mandarin | Understand different Mandarin Accents

In this video, I talk about some common pronunciation tendencies that native English speakers have when they speak Mandarin. If you’re a native English speaker, this video will help you understand the pronunciation differences between English and Mandarin.

🎥 Related videos:

Understand Different Mandarin Accents | Japanese Accent

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﹝Real-life Chinese﹞

Music 🎵
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🔆 PROMOS

[GraceMandarinChinese]

Are there any other accents you’d like me to analyze?
Leave a comment to let me know! 😉

Further information:

When learning unvoiced Mandarin consonants such as Mandarin “b”, “d”, “g”, they often sound voiced because adding a vowel to them helps make it easier to differentiate and imitate their sounds.
For instance:
“b p m f” would sound like “be pe me fe” or “po po mo fo”
“d t n l” would sound like “de te ne le”
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If you want to learn some daily words and phrases in Mandarin, you can check out my Instagram: Gracemandarin

[froobly]

What's really interesting is how you can tell John Cena actually speaks and thinks in Mandarin (even if imperfect), whereas Zuck seems like he's just reading sounds off a prompter. It's really impressive how fluid Cena's speaking is after just a few years.

[Li.Siyuan]

This is probably more useful than you can imagine...

[GregBackwards]

As an English teacher here, I've been noticing tendencies in native Mandarin speakers' accents when speaking English. A couple that stand out to me: the -le ending as in "people" or "example". Often times the '-le' ending comes out as a long 'o' sound. Long 'a' is troublesome as well. Often it comes out as short 'e'. "Airplane" becomes "airplen" and "rain" becomes "ren". I really liked this video, because I find these tendencies fascinating and very consistent across the majority of English learners, as I'm sure you notice the same across Mandarin learners.

[viomusardathefluffysealgas]

I want to say that the visual aid/drawings of the anatomical position of the interior of the mouth to know how to pronounce the phonetics is really great. It really helps a lot to see that visually so thank you for that💜
I have seen other language videos where they show the visual aid of the interior of the mouth and it is not the best for me to learn. But yours is really amazing it facilities the learning for me so thank you again💜

[kenneth-theenglish]

This hurt to watch...but I watched it to try to find my own flaws...thank you.

[javig]

This was so helpful!! I’m not a native english speaker, my first tongue actually is spanish, so I would love to see a video analyzing our accent! They may overlap a bit with the english accent though, as I notice some of these tendencies in myself 😅

[jwuluvsyou]

This was a cool video to watch! As an ABC I grew up speaking both Mandarin and English, but since I've spent the majority of my life in the US my accent isn't as good as when I was like 4 years old haha. I wonder if it'd be possible for you to do a video comparing an ABC accent? I think it's similar to this vid in the sense that we do often have tendencies from English in our accents but often it's not to this extent. Or maybe our sound pronunciation is kind of like this but our tones are more accurate since we grew up listening to it? Either way, looking forward to seeing more videos from this series!

[brilliantlightphoto]

I’ve been waiting for this video!! Thank you! And I can’t wait for the tones video.

[ines]

Hi Grace! This is a random comment but i just wanted to thank you for your hard work making videos about Chinese!
I'm currently in my first semester of majoring in chinese and we have to do a group assignment but none of my colleagues are helping, which means i have to do everything by myself. I will no tell the teacher because i don't wanna be a snitch :((
Your videos have been helping me a lot with this group assignment and i truly appreciate it! Please keep up with the work and stay healthy <3

[RogerCasella]

I'm learning Mandarin. One thing I realized from watching this video is that we should clear our minds and calm our thoughts in order to learn. What I mean by that is, culturally, we Americans tend to think more loudly, at least from what I notice. Vowels are after all much louder than consonants. And we think in our native language. So it gives us a loud voice in our heads. But we're so used to it that we don't notice. Not until we have a genuine desire to learn Chinese. 😌

[heterotardigrada]

I really appreciate how clear and well-researched all your videos are! (Thank you for including the IPA in some of your other videos as well.)
If we get another addition to this series, it would be interesting to have a video analyzing the korean accent.

[mrcet]

视频太好了！谢谢！

For me the most confusing thing about Mark Zuckerberg’s Mandarin is his weak or incorrect tones.

Many of the consonant differences you pointed out, between Mandarin and English, I perceive to be on the same order as differences in various English accents by countries or regions.

[elchinoguerrito]

Another incredible video! Never noticed these subtle differences, but now I will try to work on improving my pronunciation. 谢谢老师 (:

[isolei]

A nice video! When learning Mandarin, I think most people concentrate on the sounds that are unique to Chinese, and don't realize they over-pronounce supposedly easier consonants such as 'b' and 'd'. Certainly, it's an issue I still have to smooth out in my own speaking and videos. Thanks for bringing up this issue.

[Andrea-sgqp]

I've been studying 中文 for over a year and somehow had no idea that consonants were pronounced differently than in English, don't know how I missed that but now that I know it'll be very helpful. Also your explanation of pronouncing ü was extremely helpful, it's such a simple explanation but I've never seen it actually described. 非常 谢谢!

[Eimist]

Hi Grace! First of all let me say thank you for helping me realise some of these mistakes I was making! I'm definitely a better Chinese learner thanks to your videos and advice. That said, I hope you won't be offended if I try to give you some pronunciation advice too. While your English is definitely some of the best I've heard out of any Chinese person, you could sound a lot more native with one tiny improvement.
Your pronunciation of the "i" in the words "video" and "lips" is a little bit too long, something I've noticed in the English of a lot of Chinese speakers. So you can try to shorten it to be more like the i in words like hit and bit, so it doesn't sound like your saying veedio or leeps.
Keep up the great work! I'm genuinely jealous of your future Mandarin students since you're already such a good teacher!

[nubnooblet]

wow, it took me so long to even find a video of a person with an english accent speaking mandarin and this video also explains how to work on correcting the accent, and some of the causes of the accent! you definitely earned a sub!

[peters]

7:05 Now I'm just imagining going about my day with sound effects playing in the background. Open a door? Ding dong. Ope the fridge, but can't find the snack you want? Beeeep.

Also, Zuck's accent is going to give me nightmares tonight.

[Paixever]

謝謝! Can you also so for French native speakers? We tend to struggle a lot to get rid of our accent. 😆