Accents while speaking Chinese...

Yet another set of red herring issues that drove me crazy. There were a few Chinese American mommies in our first MI program who would go on and on and on about accents. These parents had some Taiwanese background in them. But I suspect their actual skills in Mandarin were poor. Poor enough to produce a kind of prejudice that was just plain stupid.

They would judge teachers by their accent. Yup. You heard me. They judged teachers positively or negatively based on the accent with which the teachers spoke Mandarin. If it was what they termed a "Taiwanese" accent, then the teacher was deemed to be "good." On the other hand, if a Cantonese accent was discerned, then the teacher was judged negatively.

They spread their prejudice throughout the English-Only parent community. It was so stupid that I didn't even know how to address it at times. Why bother? What incredible idiocy.

I've also heard Cantonese parents speak to this, in their desperation to "get Mandarin" for their kids. There is some kind of weird and desperate longing for "pure Mandarin" that baffles me. Unless you come from a family of linguists or bigots, then it's not a feature of functional proficiency.

My parents spoke English with an accent for their entire lives. That didn't stop them from achieving being comprehensible at a high level and therefore leading rich and productive lives while operating in this "foreign" language. But that is the difference and distance of going from a native Chinese speaker to being proficient in the English language.

Now, what we are talking about with Chinese teachers is the difference between one dialect and another. But all these dialects - and especially true for the main dialects - they are all part of the Chinese language. Thought and expression are generally constructed on a similar basis, so the distance between Cantonese and Mandarin, for example, is nowhere near the distance between Cantonese and English.

An accent? About as significant as someone speaking with a British accent v. an American one. Most people who are native English speakers don't negatively judge intelligence and competence based on this difference in accent. We have friends who are French, Italian, Argentine... their accents while speaking English do not seem to leave them open for automatic negative judgment around their competence. Just their own behavior or the quality of the ideas reflected by the actual words that come out of their mouths.

For those who are perpetuating this issue for Chinese people, just know that it is a reflection of their own ignorance. It is not a real or material difference.

Does it influence what people think about each other and whether or not they want to do business or have a social relationship? Sure. Just like Southern Americans relate to each other because of their accents and their food cultures, or that surfer culture from SoCal to Hawaii might feel there is a connection, or that people who like to watch soccer might like hanging out together, then sure, when people identify things like being from Taiwan v. Mainland, or Shandong v. GuanXi or Suzhou v. Hubei, whatever. The extent to which this matters for doing business is also up to the other various resources of the people in play.

But for education happening at such a basic level? And we are still talking about elementary school, here... Wow. Get a grip. You've got a long, long way to go just to end up educated, let alone proficient in a "foreign" language, let alone speaking accent-free. You might want to focus more attention on accumulating things like vocabulary and knowledge... or critical thinking skills... just to name a few.