Thank you for your feedback. I personally haven't been to Mainland China so I don't know that this is the practice. But judging from my relatives who congregate here in Thailand once in a while, they don't speak in dual/triple dialects to each other. They just settle on one dialect that all know. Yes, you are right, I grew up in a household where Cantonese was primarily spoken so I am more proficient in that than the limited vocabulary I have of Mandarin.
When my student's mother speaks Mandarin to me, I can only guess about 20-30% of the content she is trying to communicate to me, so I think it is not realistic to speak in dual dialects and expect the other person to comprehend one fully. In the case of watching a movie, when Mandarin is thrown into the Cantonese soundtrack, I have to divert my eyes to read the English subtitles to understand what is being said. Hence, my annoyance.
I take it that you can understand Mandarin and Cantonese. But for us overseas Chinese, it's rare.
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lartrak
15 years ago
I'm trying to learn Cantonese right now, and I'd like to learn Mandarin at some point. But I'm very much a novice. And yeah, I can see how that'd be annoying. Probably something like when I watched Undeclared War. It's a Hong Kong film, but probably 3/4ths of it is in English - quite good English actually. But I'm so used to reading subtitles mixed in with non-subtitles, and random english stuck in the middle of it all, it doesn't bother me anymore.
Anyway, here is the guy I was talking about. http://cantonese.hk/wp/?p=75
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