benlehman

Yeah, pretty much.

(warning: Long, meandering babble about Standard Mandarin follows.)

Whilst everone *outside of Beijing* says that standard Mandarin is a Beijing accent, people who live inside the city know tht the Beijing accent has nothing to do with standarad Mandarin, and that the Beijing accent is, in fact, almost totally incomprehensible to a standard Mandarin speaker. Although it does sound rather jaunty and piratical (you commonly replace any end consonants with a rolling "r.")

The only people who speak standard Mandarin as an actual local dialect are Manchurians and (correct me if I'm wrong on this, Eileen), parts of Taiwan.

It makes good sense to teach standard Mandarin for a couple of reasons -- first, it is the formal language but, perhaps more importantly, most other dialects are defined by dropping or transforming standard Mandarin sounds. For instance, a convincing southern accent can be made by turning r->y, sh->s, ch->c, zh->z. It is really easy to make this transition one way (in fact, I started speaking in a southern accent when I was visiting the south), but not the other way (which requires you to make new sounds.)

In any event, I'm just happy that I have an accent that isn't "dumb American."

yrs--
--Ben