MovieChat Forums > Seung sing (2006) Discussion > Kaneshiro Takeshis Cantonese

Kaneshiro Takeshis Cantonese


Hey!

I'm wondering, since Kaneshiro is of Taiwanese/Japanese decent he's supposedly a (Taiwanese) Mandarin native. What strikes me is that Kaneshiro's voice is on both the Mandarin dub and the original Canto track, though it sounds like he's dubbed in both tracks. So a question for the Canto-natives, how is his pronounciation? I imagine that he spoke Cantonese during production but his pronounciation was sorta bad and they dubbed it in again later.

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Both his and Hsu Chi's Cantonese were noticeably off in terms of tonality. Overall I could understand what they were saying, although I waaaas watching with subtitles.

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I know that Chinese is tonal, but is it really all THAT important to get it totally right? I always figured that if it was really THAT important, how could people understand the lyrics to songs?

I mean you can probably also understand a romanized and therefor toneless question like - "his cantonese sucks" chung man dim gong a? ;)

Anyway, thanks for sharing your perpective.

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I don't think getting the tone right is 100% important, but incorrect tone does make it harder to understand what someone is saying, since wrong tone = completely different word. Basically you would have to listen to the entire sentence, and then play it back in your mind and mentally edit the incorrect words to the words you think he probably meant, given the context.

So if I said, "Last night at dinner, I ate General Tso's chagrin, and it was mighty tasty!" you would obviously take it to mean "Chicken" instead of "chagrin".

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It definitely matters because something spoken in the wrong tone can mean something totally different.

I've never really noticed tones being super distorted in music although maybe that's because I know all my songs by heart anyway?

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Tonality can be quite important. I tried to say "i'm sitting on an aeroplane" and ended up saying, "I'm sitting on a fat chicken".

That, of course, was in Mandarin, but it's the same principal for Canto.

As another poster said, though, a lot depends on the context.

Waiting for my Mr Colin Firth Darcy

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