That is incorrect. Taiwanese has no equivalent of the third tone in Mandarin. The Mandarin spoken in Taiwan has been influenced by Taiwanese, and people don’t inflect the third tone the same way as standard Mandarin speakers do. You are correct that the speech in the recording is standard. However, the majority of Taiwanese people don’t speak like that, and Mark’s story about a tutor who couldn’t identify the tones is very, very easy for me to believe.

eng -> en
ing -> in

I doubt those texts book CDs use any Beijinghua, since they’re made in Taiwan. Why do you figure so many Taiwanese people have troubles with the third tones? The reason I asked about southerners is that while many languages are spoken in the south, many southerners tend to exhibit the same pronunciation traits you listed above.

There is no tone in Mandarin that is not in Taiwanese, but the reverse is not true.

Are you sure about that? According to several sources I’ve seen, these are the seven Taiwanese tones:

1. a; high level
2. á; falling
3. à; low level
4. ah; low stopped
5. â; rising
6. the same as #2
7. ā; middle level
8. a̍h; high stopped

Here are the pitch contours and the correlated Middle Chinese tones:

1. 44 (陰平)
2. 51 (上聲)
3. 31 (陰去)
4. 3 (陰入)
5. 24 (陽平)
6. same as #2
7. 33 (陽去)
8. 5 (陽入)

I don’t the think third tone of standard Mandarin is represented by any of these tones. Which one do you say it is?

My take is there’s national Mandarin in China, there’s Beijing Mandarin, and in Taiwan there’s Taiwan Mandarin, and then there’s Taiwan Mandarin that’s really something like Taiwanese Mandarin with sound shifts I’ve read about and I’ve reproduced below. Beijing Mandarin does a lot of weird shit that I think is understandable in China, but not done by people outside of the northeast. It diverges from dictionary pronounciations (watch Chinese political figures give speaks and listen to their tones carefully). This is not an issue of Taiwan versus China but Beijing diverging from China Chinese. You can try to learn the Beijing version if you want, but it’s not necessary for being understood and in actuality it’s not “standard” even though everyone talks about it as if it is.

Taiwan Mandarin shifts:
The sounds that get mixed up a lot are the h and the r.

z vs zh
c vs ch
s vs sh

r goes to l a lot.
if it’s a uo cluster it often shifts to o.

The exercise was about listening to the words and writing the tone marks. I did every single one correctly. My tutor marked several of them wrong, but I didn’t believe her. So, I bought the instructor’s book for her and found that it was actually she who was wrong in each of those cases.

I’ve long since lost contact with that tutor, but since seeing your previous comments on this thread, I’ve had several other Taiwanese people listen to the CD, and only about 1/3 can correctly identify the 3rd tones. After being told they’re getting them wrong, some of them start incorrectly guessing that 2nd tones are 3rd tones. Every last one has blamed it on the “mainlander” pronunciation. If you have any mainland friends from the south, I’d love to know if it’s hard for them, too, or not.

Interestingly, many are also unable to distinguish “en” and “eng” sounds, but that’s the topic of a different post.

Sorry for taking awhile to get back. I don’t know why your tutor had problems identifying the tone. The pronounciations of second and third tone are very, very different in this exercise. Did your tutor actually pronounce it incorrectly though? I’m guessing you weren’t able to tell at the time, but I think that would be a different kind of problem.

The prounciation on the tape is also in the way I described, third tone not going up.

BTW, the textbook&CD are published in Taiwan.

I don’t have the book :-). I meant if you had a sample you wanted to type out or a clip from the CD (I thought you meant your tutor listened off of something and couldn’t tell).

My tutor had problems with every tone exercise in the book that I showed her, including the one in part A of lesson one in the workbook. It’s on page 1. The drill was to listen to the CD and write tone marks above 20 words. The reason she was confused is because she always shortens her 3rd tones into low-falling tones. As a result, when she heard the (1-4) part of a (2-1-4) pitch contour, it sounded a lot like (3-5) to her. That’s what happened, and I’m sorry if you don’t feel it matches up.