Native Chinese rating xiaomanyc‘s Mandarin. Is it really flawless?

You're right, it is extremely difficult for foreigners to get to 'flawless' Chinese pronunciation.

Awesome insightful video! definitely subscribing

the comment on english being throat pronounce confused me a little because it made me think of front/back pronounce. i think a better way to describe it is in english you pronounce lower in the throat and in mandarin you pronounce higher one weird way i figured this out is saying 俄罗斯 and then russia over and over 😂 you can definitely hear the difference

Wow this is a great breakdown. I know nothing about the Chinese language outside of XiaomaNYC videos. What an amazing language.

Fantastic video thankyou

This guy has extreme and obvious american accent

It's really cool to see the tattoo artist instantly light up when he realized xiaoma speak Mandarin, let alone Fujian dialect, which makes him like a brother and feel more familiar. I grew up in Hong Kong and only spoke standard Cantonese (based on Guangzhou). My grandparents on my father's side were originally from Guangdong (廣東台山and 恩平) then moved to guangzhou , Hk, and US, could speak the dialects from their own counties and also Cantonese with a provincial accent. I probably understood my grandparents around 70 to 80%. Imagine if grandparents or parents can't talk to their kids. So both putonghua/guoyu and preserving one's family dialect is important for communication. So he has a Chinese wife, that explains it. No better language teacher than a spouse. I was not good at mandarin when I was young, but have improved a lot over the years practicing with friends and coworkers from China and Taiwan. Dating women from China was a great motivator lol. Now I'm still learning Cantonese, mandarin, Japanese, and English everyday, it's a non stop process. I'm lazy with my zh ch sh so I sound more like a Taiwanese, and I probably still mess up the 1st and 4th tone lol So basically xiaoma's pronunciation is slightly off since he's too focused on pinyin like the eng letters like most ABCs, which might be preventable if studying mandarin in zhuyin used by Taiwan

keep posting, great content. And your English is great despite my native languages are russian and ukrainian

Xiaoma speaks very good Chinese don’t get me wrong but it’s always jarring when Chinese people go 你中文很標準 or 聽不出來你是美國人 like he clearly has the american accent Good but FAR from flawless or perfect he even stated it himself

Don't (pinyin)zh, ch, sh, and r all have retroflex pronunciation? It's nearly impossible to make these sounds without moving your tongue backwards as you say them.

great tip about using the front of the mouth for Chinese pronunciation. thanks

Well made video from a production standpoint and I enjoy the way you present information. Also this is a good topic, because it can be hard to tell if, "foreigner impresses locals," language videos are staged or not.

Broh, he has a very strong American accent in Chinese, why is everyone pretendings he hasn't?

it is like in Ukraine before Russia invasion, - many spoke Russian without any issues. I would say more than 50% probably. Despite one country one language, - people still want to speak the way whey want and nobody gonna stop them.

The speaker in the movie clip around 3:30 is speaking English in a Singaporean/Malay accent, not a Fujian accent. Of course, there are many Fujianese people in Singapore (Hokkien), but that English accent is more influenced by Malay intonation.

I try to imitate how people pronounce, so I can sound clearer. But sometimes they mix the sounds, like the name Zhang, sometimes they speak Chang. By the way, I have watched your old videos, gosh you look like another person? That old you needed a buff and more confidence. And you got it this year. Now I wish the same happen to me. 🤣

英文母語者無論講什麼外語都有很重的口音 😅 不過小馬的中文真的很不錯了，只是一聽就知道是美國人哈哈 (我來自波蘭)

Tough language to learn, German and Russian are way easier.

My mom said his mandarin was terrible

7:02 If we analyze xiaoma's pronunciation of shang, we see he used [a], whereas a Mandarin speaker would use [ɑ]. His pronunciation of jing is also apparent of a foreign accent [ʧʷɪŋ], with his apparent rounding of lips. Mandarin uses [tɕiŋ] instead, the vowel is closer, never rounded, and the consonant is a palatal sound. I disagree with your analysis of "Chinese is pronounced more in the front not in the throat" statement. This is not what phonetics tell us. You are likely talking about voiced/unvoiced consonants. e.g. Mandarin b/d/g/j/zh/z are all unvoiced, meaning the vocal folds don't vibrate when producing the consonant sounds. But there are still voiced consonants, like n/r. "Vowel/consonant fronting" is a phonetic term describing sounds migrating to the front of the mouth, but this is not what's happening in Chinese compared to English, as evident as the shang example, English prefers "fronting" the a [a], whereas Mandarin pronounces the sound with the tongue at the back [ɑ]. Mandarin uses retroflex for zh/ch/sh/r. This is recognized by linguists. When comparing sh in Mandarin vs in English, English puts the tip of the tongue further to the front. Comparing 書 shu and the English shoe, besides English commonly fronts the /u/, the placement of the tongue for the consonant should also be different.