Chinese subtitles...on Chinese TV?

I've been watching a bit of Chinese television lately to try to get better at my Chinese listening comprehension. I've been neglecting my language studies lately and I'm trying to do whatever I can to get some meaningful exposure to Chinese. It doesn't happen during the work day, because I'm speaking and hearing English the entire day. There's not much chance to practice when I go shopping or out to a restaurant, either. I can get by with the limited set of phrases I can speak and understand, but there's no real opportunities for the sustained speaking and listening I need in order to get more proficient.

Watching television gives me a little more of that. It's not perfect but it is useful. You can do worse than watching children's shows and news programs in a language you're trying to learn. It's a simple way to get some high-context exposure to the language and build a bit of cultural literacy as well.

All of these shows are subtitled in Chinese, which might seem strange at first. Why do you need to subtitle programs in a language that everyone in the country speaks?

What westerners think of as "Chinese" is actually several different dialects. You might be familiar with the what we call Mandarin (the Northern dialect, or the Beijing dialect) and Cantonese (Yue dialect). Mandarin is spoken by about 70% of Chinese people, and Cantonese by about 5% or so. Cantonese is the dialect of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macao.

These two dialects are mutually unintelligible. A Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker will not be able to speak with one another if they speak in their own dialects. Their pronunciation is just too different.

Cantonese and Mandarin are just two of the seven major dialects of Chinese, and there are numerous other regional dialects. I have a friend from Beijing whose Grandmother is from Sichuan. Grandmother speaks the Sichuan dialect almost exclusively, and my Beijing friend sometimes has trouble understanding her. "Speak standard, Grandma" she'll say, and Grandma will reply with "I am speaking standard!"

The Guiyang dialect pronounces two of the four tones in very similar ways, making it harder for the language learner to understand. I have to ask for clarification quite a few times. When I get more fluent, I may end up speaking the Northern Dialect with a Guiyang accent, which would probably amuse the Chinese people I speak with.

They all share a written language, and here's where the Chinese writing system has an advantage over the Roman alphabet. Chinese writing is not phonetic, it's ideographic. It doesn't matter how you pronounce the word because the concept is what's important.

The Cantonese and Mandarin speakers I mentioned earlier could communicate perfectly well in writing despite not being able to understand each other's spoken words.

This is why so much of Chinese television is subtitled: so everyone in the country can understand it no matter what dialect they speak. It's an elegant solution and I could write a whole other post on what a brilliant piece of language planning it is.

I suppose I'll have to do that now.