At the beginning of the awesome scene "The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei", the scene in which Beatrix Kiddo goes to the Sichuan province in China to study with a kung fu master, Dai Li yells, "Hey! They don't speak Guangdong hua in Sichuan!" She was right, Pai Mai wasn't speaking Mandarin, he was speaking Cantonese (called Guangdong hua in Mandarin), which also explains why I couldn't understand much of what was being said. In fact, the actor playing Pai Mai, Chia Hui Liu, is from Hong Kong where most people speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin. I assume that while Chia probably speaks a bit of Mandarin, Tarantino had him speak his native tongue so he wouldn't butcher the pronunciation. Still, the Chinese person I was watching the movie with didn't buy this, and neither do I.
Mandarin Speaking Skills: 1, Tarantino's Film Veracity: 0
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3 comments:
I figure out that you got some funny things in HUNAN, China. That's pretty good. I am a student studying in US and will go back to Changsha at 15th,MAY. If it possible I hope we can be friends.
MY E-MAIL:xiaoxiao_tanya@yahoo.com
Heh, that's pretty funny.
Mind if I ask, what do they call Mandarin, if they call Cantonese "Guangdong hua"?
Haha...that's a tough question you ask. Standard Mandarin is called Putonghua and supposedly originated in Beijing (If you ask me, I think Beijingers speak Chinese like pirates with mouths full of cashews). The interesting thing about China is that there are literally thousands of different and very dissimilar variations of Mandarin Chinese. In fact, every city, every town, and even some villages have their own dialect, their own unique "hua". There is Shanghaihua, Changshahua, and even small-shantytown-no-one has-ever-heard-of-hua.
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