There are two styles of Mandarin intonation:
1.the mainland way(especially northern), in which there are tons of neutral tones

2. the Taiwanese way , in which the neutral tone is rarely used, in comparison with mainland style Mandarin.

Here's a few examples:
1. 朋友， being 2nd and 3rd tone in Taiwan, but 2nd and neutral in mainland.
1. 認識/认识 is pronounced with two 4th tones in Taiwan, but with the second character being neutral in mainland.
1. 窗戶, being 1st and 4th in Taiwan, but 1st and neutral in mainland.

Now let it be clear that I'm NOT suggesting or requesting for a Taiwanese person to be heard for the audio! All I'm suggesting is for us to be able to choose which style intonation to learn.

In my opinion, Taiwanese intonation is actually the proper intonation, and the mainland way is based on Beijing locals who have lazy tongues and want to force everyone else in the country to speak in the same style as they do. That said, I still want to be exposed to both styles, Taiwanese and mainland.

Agreed. I think at the very least we should have the option to not play the audio. I would rather hear nothing than hear a word pronounced "incorrectly."

@pharchik, can't you just hit the small speaker to mute the audio?

Couple problems here:

- Classifying Mainland and Taiwanese intonations for every character would be a bear of a task, and there would still likely be some gray areas.

- Chinese has been developing over the course of thousands of years. There are thousands of dialects with different pronunciations, intonations, usages, etc. To say that one of those dialects is the "right way" (whether it's Putonghua or standard Taiwanese Mandarin) seems fairly presumptuous.

@ Thomas, I think what he meant was that he'd rather not hear the audio ONLY for the words that have different tones, such as the ones I typed out in the first comment of this thread. It would be a huge pain to turn off the audio everytime you come across one of those words and then turning the audio back on to continue over and over again.

@Fatdragon,
This thread isn't about dialects, it's only about Mandarin Chinese, which is the the official language used in mainland China and Taiwan. Putonghua and "Taiwanese Mandarin" are the same language, with the EXCEPTION of some minor differences such as accents, intonation　and word usage (公交車 instead of 公共汽車）. It's sort of like the little differences between American and British English.

Regarding what you said about it being a bear of a task to classify the differences in intonation between mainland and Taiwanese Mandarin, I have to respectfully disagree. There are online dictionaries such as Yahoo's dictionary (see below) that are based on the Taiwan style intonation. Link: http://tw.dictionary.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=%E6%9F%8F%E6%A8%B9

Plus, Skritter users like me, will help notify the Skritter team if there's a character that has two possible intonations.

"This thread isn't about dialects, it's only about Mandarin Chinese... It's sort of like the little differences between American and British English."

American and British English are two different English dialects, just like Putonghua and Taiwanese Mandarin are two different dialects of Mandarin.

Chinese people tend to refer to different Chinese languages like Mandarin and Cantonese as "dialects," but this is clearly incorrect usage by basic linguistic standards of what counts as languages and dialects.

@ahickey I disagree with you. I think that Americans and Brits speak the exact same language but with different pronunciation, intonation and word usage( "lift" instead of "elevator", or "flat" instead of "apartment").

A "dialect" of a language really means that there are considerable differences that often times means two people from different "dialect areas" have trouble communicating. A good example is Iranian Farsi and Tajikistan's Tajik language. A Chinese related example is Hakka dialect in relation to Cantonese. Another one is MinNan dialect in relation to Mandarin.

I know that everyone has their own opinions and beliefs about dialects/languages, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree

The Skritter guys do their best to accommodate Taiwanese tone changes. If you have a specific request, hit the feedback button and I'm sure they'll happily make another exception for you.

Unless you are volunteering to write the code and input the data...

@Thomas, cool thanks for the input

@Thomas: I requested using feedback that the ji in 成績 also accept 1st tone (as used in Taiwan). On Skritter it does not accept 1st tone, it only accepts 4th tone.

Apparantly neutral tone can be added as an optional extra acceptable tone in certain cases, but other tones cannot. At least that is how I remember it.

I of course do not know how much extra coding it would actually take to allow for these exceptions, but I would definitely welcome being able to type 1st tone for 績 in 成績.

It sounds like a lot of hard and tedious work.

@icecream You're right. It is tedious. But learning Chinese is altogether extremely tedious.

People who study Chinese are going to have to accept, sooner or later, that there is no "one standard Mandarin", there is no "one standard accent/pronunciation", because Chinese people are always going to continue speaking the way they learned to speak when they grew up, and Chinese people are headstrong so they'll never make any adjustments to their speech.

Taiwan only appears small on a map. There are probably a lot more Taiwanese who go abroad to live/work then mainland Chinese.

(by the way, when I said "Chinese ppl are headstrong" , I meant all Chinese speakers)

@Bohan "dialect" is a political term, really. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

When you refer to "minor differences such as accents, intonation　and word usage (公交車 instead of 公共汽車）. It's sort of like the little differences between American and British English" I wonder what about that description looks "minor" to you. ;)

As for your original suggestion, I thought the Skritter guys had already covered those points in this thread: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=49009040

You can also ignore Skritter's reading and force it to mark your reading as correct or incorrect by using the grading buttons.

James

@James

Well to me, 公交車and 公共汽車 both have "公車" in the word, so I consider the differences in word usage to be minor.
In British English, when people say "torch" instead of "flashlight" , I also consider that to be a minor substitution between two things that have the same function , and two words that are used in both American and British English.

Regarding what you said about languages and armies, I have to respectfully disagree. Let me give you an example that contradicts that whole idea: Tajikistan is an independent country with it's own military, buth the Tajik language is a Persian dialect (an Iranian dialect). Not only do books and encyclopedias such as Wikipedia say that Tajik is a Persian dialect, but so do the Tajik people (I have studied abroad there and talked to people about this)

Bohan: That may be, but that still doesn't give a better definition of what the difference is between a "dialect" and a "language".

By the way, we Americans don't generally say that we speak a different dialect than the English. Scottish (not Scottish Gaelic) is often referred to as a dialect and it is indeed quite difficult for me to understand, particularly when the Scots are drunk.

James

@James oh yeah! Scottish is super tough to understand.

And I can easily be wrong about everything I've written above. I'm an amatuer learner at best :)

I care more about how the characters can complement and combine into increasingly complex creations.

Sound changes are more rapid than written ones.

Maybe if everyone recommends Skritter to all their friends they will be able to hire another person to do all this tedious data input.

^^ Ditto ^^

Technically adept people aren't cheap. I think they mentioned that they tried to hire a few programmers to create an iPhone app but it never panned out. I can only imagine how much time it would take to implement some of the suggestions mentioned.

Ideas are worthless unless they are executable.

Very interesting debate. My first semester learning Chinese was taught by a Taiwanese teacher, then I switched universities and there they taught mainland chinese. It was tricky to not only switch to simplified (unfortunately, I did not know skritter early enough...) and also change my pronunciation changed over time. I also used to say peng2 you3 etc...

Many times my Taiwanese friends disagree that they speak the same language/dialect as mainland: they like to refer to Taiwan mandarin as 国语 and mainland 普通话.

My Taiwanese friends turn everything into politics. They don't like simplified characters, they don't like to call the language　普通话，you can't even say they're Chinese.

Maybe in 200 years the Chinese spoken in Taiwan will be a different language. Something similar is happening in India and Pakistan with Hindi and Urdu; what is currently one (highly diverse) language is slowly dividing in two. English will probably spawn a new language sooner; I already can't understand Jamaican English and it will probably declare formal independence before too long.

James

Except China won't let Taiwan declare independence, ever, I think...
But same here, it is nearly offending to call them Taiwanese. Although I have a few friends who like to say there are Chinese.

@helixness - I stayed out of this topic as a whole, but I really wonder if your friend is right. We might should start referring to Mandarin as a school of languages as opposed to a language. You have 国语 and 普通话. This is why, when a foreigner asks me some question about Chinese, I always start it with, "I don't know about Taiwan, but in Mainland China..."

If I am really pressed I say I speak standardized mainland Mandarin with a slight northern twist. Isn't that a mouthful? I always hate it when people equate 国语 and 普通话 to American and British English. The differences are much more severe than that. I prefer the analogy of Spanish and Italian. Yes, they understand each other, but there are a ton of headaches involved.

According to this article http://itpth.foruto.com/cgi-bin/mknow.cgi?action=Read&TID=45 (the last but one paragraph), for the 3500 most commonly used characters, the readings between 普通话 and 国语 have approximately 13% differences.

@pts
I bet the researchers in that study consider differences in intonation as differences in character reading.

@ Bohan
The article actually cited the character 糙 as an example: “《新華字典》注cāo ，《國語辭典》保留了 cào 音”. So tones are under consideration.
But, it seems that the article considered the characters only but not words. So if the neutral tones in words are included, the differences must be much larger.

I think everyone is missing the point. There are lots of places in China where people don't speak 普通话 like they do in Beijing.

I have lots of friends and professors from XinJiang and Inner Mongolia. They speak mandarin like a foreigner, often using different tones than in the dictionary, dropping the intonation at the end of a sentence, and adding in lots of English curse words. How can everyone ignore the varieties going around the borders of China? It's a big country, and we should include all of it when we talk about possible divisions of the Chinese language.
That's my opinion.

FYI to the people who have brought up 國語 and 普通話 ：

Chinese people in mainland China originally used the word "國語” to refer to Hanyu/Mandarin Chinese. Later on, during the Mao era, the term 普通話 was coined because at that time there were lots of people in big cities and far flung small cities alike who couldn't speak Hanyu, and Chinese people thus didn't have a common language. The newly established Chinese government made a campaign to make Mandarin Chinese (Hanyu) the "common language" for all of Chinese people, so they started calling 國語 普通話 because they thought that was more fitting.

Bohan, I agree, except that today it seems 囯語 and 普通話 have turned into totally different languages to some. I guess we'll have to see what Taiwan and Mainland will be like in 50 years...

@helixness , I'm really interested in knowing what makes you think that. What is it that makes you/others think that "囯語 and 普通話 have turned into totally different languages to some" ?

@West316, were you serious when you wrote "I always hate it when people equate 国语 and 普通话 to American and British English. The differences are much more severe than that. I prefer the analogy of Spanish and Italian. Yes, they understand each other, but there are a ton of headaches involved." ?

You really think that Taiwanese ppl and mainland ppl from Shanghai/Nanjing/Qingdao( non-ethnic minority regions) speak a different language ?!

p.s. hopefully I didn't come off as rude in my last comment. If I did, I apologize. I'm just really interested in hearing the opinions/thoughts of helixness and west316

Chinese experts: are there any major differences not covered by these lists?

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/mandarin-differences.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin

James

I've never been to Taiwan, and I haven't even seen my Taiwanese uncle since I had more than a word or two of Chinese to rub together, but I have a bunch of Taiwanese co-workers, and while 台湾话 is certainly different from 普通话, when they speak Mandarin it's perfectly intelligible - they have zero problems communicating with people in Wuhan. Yes, there are small differences, primarily with tones, but the tone differences are relatively negligible in context - neither 他是我的好peng2you or 他是我的好peng2you3 is going to be misunderstood on either side of the Strait.

Really, I would say that the differences between 国语 and 普通话, at least as I know know them, are even less significant than the differences between British and American English. However, like James said, those on the southeast side of the Strait like to politicize stuff like this - they'll do everything they can to separate themselves from the mainland - BoPoMoFo, 国语, 繁体字, etc. They seem like silly things to argue about, but in the context of the larger issue, I suppose you can't blame them...