In speaking class (口语课) today, we were going over the pronunciation of the ang and ong sound. This stemmed from difficulty pronouncing rong and rang correctly. Since I still have traces of a Cantonese accent when I speak Mandarin, this pronunciation exercise was very hard for me. The “r” and the “ng” sound in Mandarin are ones I can never get quite right, as they don’t exactly exist in Cantonese!
My classmate had a hell of a time laughing at me as I tried to get these various sounds right, let me tell you. And halfway through my attempts at pronouncing them, my teacher started laughing at me, too. She told me that I was saying “rong” like a Cantonese speaker, but the accent I was putting on it was most definitely Mandarin. It’s like when I was in Guangzhou last December and all my questions were answered in Mandarin despite using Cantonese – turns out I don’t have an authentic, native accent for either language!
