I've just found out the Chinese name for Zhang Jingchu's character Pin Yu is "Appreciate/ Appraise Jade"-- what I want to know now is how she ends up in Finland in present time and how well she managed her Finnish dialogue. And does she get much screen time-- it sounds like she only appears halfway through the movie...
Can anyone help?
Hey, saw the film today... she doesn't speak Finnish more than a few lines (and quite understandably), the film is almost like 50% Chinese and 50% Finnish... The Finnish actors speak Chinese quite a bit, but I don't know how well - sounded right, though...
She also doesn't come to present time Finland, but 2000 years BC... She's the third most important character in the film so she has enough screen time...
So her Finnish is not too good huh? But if she never comes to present-day Finland, how come she speaks Finnish at all? N'er mind, I think I'm sufficiently interested to go find out for myself... :)
shareShe delivers the most incomprehensible lines in the entire movie, but she also happens to be the only thing good around during one of the most dull 100 minutes I've had to endure for a long time. And there was never even any reason to let her speak finnish...
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Zhang Jingchu commented on her blog that she didn't have a hard time with the Finnish lines-- so I'm not sure what the director was doing.... I mean, if the lines were unimportant, they should have been scrapped; if they were important, then Zhang Jingchu should have been coached much harder.
As for the Mandarin dialogue of the Finns-- well, if the Chinese laughed at Chow Yun-Fatt and Michelle Yeoh in CTHD, you don't have to guess what the Chinese reaction will be... Mandarin is the common tongue/ official speech and speaking it with very strong accents would indicate that you are "rustic" (Chow Yun-Fatt) or "foreign" (Michelle Yeoh).
But I'm just wondering what "bad" means in the context of this film? Must be a big shock to the Finns to hear someone "mess up" their language in the movies(for the first time?) Since Finnish (unlike say, English) is not widely spoken in different parts of the world, I would imagine that "strangely-spoken" Finnish would REALLY make the Finns uncomfortable.
At least as far as Mandarin is concerned, the non-speakers (like Chow and Yeoh) are NOT portraying characters from modern/northern China as far-- they would only sound "funny" the way say, Asian-accented English sounds "funny", but no one can really complain that the accents are erm, "wrong".
Anyway, I'm inclined to believe that the Finnish director, for budget or whatever reasons, just decided to "let things go".... I mean, he could have gotten the garbled lines dubbed over professionally. Like in Hero, where the HK actors didn't realize they were dubbed over because the dubbing artistes mimicked their voices so well (complete with HK accents).
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To continue the comparison with CTHD, the accents are the last thing the film should worry about. The real barrier the film faces in China comes from being a Chinese (language) film produced mainly for a "foreign" audience-- i.e. it may not "say" anything to the Chinese.
So there's definitely going to be a divide between those who appreciate what the film is trying to do and those who don't-- Zhang Jingchu herself considered Jadesoturi to be a "Finnish" film with "Chinese" elements. And if the Finns themselves don't "get it", then you can't blame the Chinese...
Jadesoturi's chief draw in China now is the "Jade" herself-- Zhang Jingchu's "Pin Yu". But from the reviews on this board, that also seems to be the case outside China... ;)
Well, there's first time for everything-- whoever said "genre-bending/ blending" was easy (compare Ang Lee's CTHD with his "Hulk")
I remember two times, when I've heard finnish to be spoken in an american film: first Charlies Angels movie, when the angels use their "secreat language" that actually is finnish and in a very old sci-fi film from the early 60's or late 50's 'This Island Earth', in which someone utters out a phrase "Mozart on oikein kaunista (Mozart is very nice)" in a dinner table conversation.
Personally I found that amusing, as finnish isn't very well known language, so the decision to use it at least some what original.
But I'm just wondering what "bad" means in the context of this film? Must be a big shock to the Finns to hear someone "mess up" their language in the movies(for the first time?) Since Finnish (unlike say, English) is not widely spoken in different parts of the world, I would imagine that "strangely-spoken" Finnish would REALLY make the Finns uncomfortable.
I watched the movie two days ago with a bunch of people... 2 of those people are actually studying chinese and they were very postively suprised how well the finns spoke mandarin - so my guess is that the chinese audience will be positively suprised. :)
To my self-trained ears, he sounded quite slow; the pronunciation sounded allright, but the tempo was off.
It's a pity that they didn't include a reason for the medley of languages. Well, they did, but I didn't really buy it.
I've submitted 2 items for the trivia section of Jadesoturi in IMDB regarding the "meanings" of Pin Yu's Chinese name. In case the items don't appear, here they are:
1) The name of Zhang Jingchu's film character, Pin Yu, literally means "to appreciate or recognize the value of jade"-- "Pin" means "to appreciate/ recognize the value of" and "Yu" means "Jade". So Pin Yu is possibly the Jade Warrior referred to the title of the film.
2) SPOILERS
The name of Zhang Jingchu's film character, Pin Yu, literally means "to appreciate or recognize the value of jade"-- and is possibly a reference to Kai/ Sintai's final realization or recognition of Pin Yu's reincarnation.
I watched the movie days ago. My mother language is mandarin, and i'm acutally studying finnish at school and estonian with my friends.
that day i was discussing about Tommi's mandarin with my estonian friends. well i have to say that his mandarin sounds very fake. I don't think he could understand what he says. He has strong and typical finnish accent at some points.
my estonian friends are studying mandarin with me, we found that estonian pronunciation is much more approched to mandarin than finnish to mandarin, e.g. palatalisations and the voiceless b d g etc.
so we wondered if Elle Kull could speak some mandarin...that would sound better than Tommi
Maybe in that case they should have hired a karelian to speak mandarin, dialect-wise :)
I think it's always difficult to learn languages from a different language group, especially something with has as much to do with intonation and detail as mandarin. I can believe that learning finnish must be a pain in the butt, because it's regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn. I didn't feel disturbed by Jingchu Zhang's finnish because that I didn't expect it to be perfect.
tommi eronen's mandarin was almost perfect some of the time especially when there were only a couple of words in a sentence, but when his script gets lengthy, it's almost completely unintelligible... It sounded like he mastered all the difficult phonetics of mandarin, the rest are shared phonetics with finnish anyways, but he's had several different pronunciations for the same words during the course of the film: words that he managed to pronounce ok initially he screws up later...for example, the word for MOTHER in chinese is "MUCHIN" (pronounced moo-CHEEN). Well, he said moo-CHEEN at one point and then says something like moo-SEEN elsewhere. It's gotta be the language coach's fault. Peltola's mandarin was the best...but then he's got so little of it to tell.
shareAcutally, I would say that Tommi and Markku manages Mandarin phonetics quite well-- but delivering dialogue not simply "putting syllables together". That's why computer-generated voices sound so... mechanical.
shareI remember that Zhang Jingchu's character only spoke finnish in one scene. After the little 'fisticuffs' with Tommi. She only said I LOVE YOU TOO or something like that. And I could easily understand that...
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