China Travel Advice

Q: I live in Korea and will be travelling to China for 5 weeks during my winter vacation. I want to practice/learn Mandarin/putonghua while I am there. I still have a low conversational level in Chinese, but I haven't studied it for 5 or 6 years and I'm forgetting a lot. My main idea is to force myself to use it by travelling in China, but though I'd like to travel around, I know some places they will speak in a dialect far enough from putonghua that I might have trouble understanding when they speak (I'm not just talking about Cantonese, but even different accents distinct enough that it would make understanding hard). Where would I have trouble understanding Chinese if I know only putonghua/mandarin?

Unless you travel to remote parts of China or talk to the elderly people, you should be all right insofar as putonghua or dialects is concerned. Due to the expansion of mass media in recent decades, especially in terms of television, few Chinese, if they have education, do not have any putonghua/mandarin ability nowadays. In the parts of China where people normally speak their dialects, many residents understand and speak mandarin pretty well, especially the young. If they talk to you in dialects, you can just tell them that you understand mandarin only. This is no big deal, as you apparently know, many Chinese themselves do not understand dialects such as Cantonese.

As for accents, that cannot be helped, but it's nothing that cannot be overcome as people know that they have to speak clearly if they want to have their foreign friends understand them. Also, there are certain patterns in the ways dialect-speakers talk in mandarin/putonghua. For example, some southerners cannot make the "N" sound; to them, "N" and "L" are both "L". In that case, they'd pronounce "Nankai Unversity" as "Lankai University." They may also have difficulties with a nasal sound such as in "ing" - with them, "Beijing" is "Beijin."

But all these are just details and should not be big problems to you if you do have some mandarin Chinese in you. Not understanding fully is of course part of learning a language. In cases of ambiguities that must be cleared, you can try write out, on paper or on an electronic device - the characters, which, of course, are all the same across mainland China.