What? Taiwanese Mandarin is extremely standard and perfectly understandable for anyone who speaks putonghua. I can still tell if someone is Taiwanese but it is very close to Standard Mandarin compared to many regional accents in Mainland China.
Now, Hong Kong people trying to speak Mandarin, on the other hand, can be a complete mess and their accents hard to decipher.
Imagine if the OP sent their son to some other Chinese diaspora and comes back with fluent Wenzhounese and is completely unable to communicate with 99.95% of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers
since southerners including taiwanese don't distinguish s/sh, z/zh, c/ch, and in some cases r/l and f/h, it could be a bit difficult to listen and understand for beginners.
Beginners probably, but Taiwanese Mandarin is perfectly intelligible for the vast majority of Mainland China. Taiwanese dramas were extremely popular in the 90s and early 2000s, and Taiwanese pop music used to be everywhere in the 2000s. I grew up watching and listening to those shit lol.
Yes there are slight differences in pronunciation but I cannot imagine it being difficult for any native speaker. In fact, there are regional Mainland accents where I really have to pay a lot of attention to keep up with, and this is certainly not the case for Taiwanese Mandarin.
I was thinking about from a learner's perspective. and local people, especially middle age and older, don't talk like people on TV.
but yeah sichuanese or like hubeinese with their weird bendy tones and stuff is way more difficult for me as a non-native than southeastern mandarin, but i found most people in central/western china can code-switch to a kind of standard mandarin as well
What? Taiwanese Mandarin is extremely standard and perfectly understandable for anyone who speaks putonghua. I can still tell if someone is Taiwanese but it is very close to Standard Mandarin compared to many regional accents in Mainland China.
Now, Hong Kong people trying to speak Mandarin, on the other hand, can be a complete mess and their accents hard to decipher.
Imagine if the OP sent their son to some other Chinese diaspora and comes back with fluent Wenzhounese and is completely unable to communicate with 99.95% of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers
"So do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese?"
"Wenzhounese."
"When Joe needs you to do what?"
"No, I speak Wenzhounese. It's the most divergent form of Wu Chinese. 5 million native speakers. Spoken in Zhejiang province."
"...So do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese?"
since southerners including taiwanese don't distinguish s/sh, z/zh, c/ch, and in some cases r/l and f/h, it could be a bit difficult to listen and understand for beginners.
Beginners probably, but Taiwanese Mandarin is perfectly intelligible for the vast majority of Mainland China. Taiwanese dramas were extremely popular in the 90s and early 2000s, and Taiwanese pop music used to be everywhere in the 2000s. I grew up watching and listening to those shit lol.
Yes there are slight differences in pronunciation but I cannot imagine it being difficult for any native speaker. In fact, there are regional Mainland accents where I really have to pay a lot of attention to keep up with, and this is certainly not the case for Taiwanese Mandarin.
I was thinking about from a learner's perspective. and local people, especially middle age and older, don't talk like people on TV.
but yeah sichuanese or like hubeinese with their weird bendy tones and stuff is way more difficult for me as a non-native than southeastern mandarin, but i found most people in central/western china can code-switch to a kind of standard mandarin as well