Mandarin accented English

Mandarin - overview
Also called simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese In China, often referred to as "the northern dialects Mandarin is a group of related varieties or dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China Nearly a billion native speakers

Tone
Mandarin is a so-called tone language Generally there are four different tones A syllable using different tones have different meanings

Examples:
ma (level tone) = mother ma (rising tone) = hemp ma (falling-rising) = horse ma (falling) = to scold

Distinctive features
A syllable consists maximally of:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. an initial consonant a glide a vowel a final tone

Disappearance of final plosives and /-m/ Palatalization of velars and alveolar sibilants when they occur before palatal glides The presence of retroflex consonants Devoicing of plosives and sibilants (fricatives and affricates)

Vowels
Mandarin dialects have relatively few vowels. Depending on the analysis only 5 or 6 (the backed vowels // and // are sometimes not included, but the front // sometimes is) The pronunciation varies, depending on context The close (high) and fronted vowels are distinctive features

Consonants (1)
All but the velar nasal // occur in syllable onsets as initials, whereas only /n/, // and // occur as syllable codas In Mandarin, aspiration is distinctive, voicing is not While the unvoiced plosives /p,t,d/ have voiced counterparts in English /b,d,g/, they have aspirated counterparts in Mandarin

Consonants (2)
The retroflex / / is actually a voiced retroflex fricative, and it is therefore often categorized as both an approximant and a fricative. It occurs prominently in the so-called "rhotic coda", i.e the "final" of the syllable The alveolar, the palato-alveolar and the alveo-palatal consonants are in complementary distribution. Some linguists classify the palatals as allophones of the retroflex consonants None of the retroflex consonants occur in a high front environment

Distinct features of Mandarin accented English

Consonants:
Deletion of final plosives Deletion or alteration of dental fricatives (//,//) /h/ becomes a velar fricative /x/ /w/ becomes a labial fricative /v/ Devoicing of final obstruents

Vowels:
Vowel raising Vowel lowering

Other things:
Insertion of (extra) vowels in syllables

Speech examples
Female 31 Male 29

YouTube clip: Funny Mandarin Chinese Accent English Tutorial