Shanghai 1

Listen to Shanghai 1, a 27-year-old woman from Shanghai, China. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 27

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1972

PLACE OF BIRTH: Shanghai Municipality

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Chinese (exact ethnicity unknown)

OCCUPATION: graduate student

EDUCATION: At the time of the recording, the subject was an accounting student.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject came to live in the United States at an unspecified time before the recording,  apparently to take up her graduate studies.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Cynthia Blaise and Shawn Muller

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 24/08/1999

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

When, OK, before I came here I had a lot of dreams. They told me … my friend told me, “You can’t imagine how beautiful U.S. (United States) is.” Then when … when I came here, I realize what they said was not right. It is not as beautiful as what I thought from the picture. I re … I noticed there’s many poor people and then what I concentrate on is, I want to learn in the …understand and … um, I want to learn the Western culture. So, um, I will … I go to school, make the friend, then I just try to see what’s the difference of them with me. I noticed, the people, they’re all the same, whatever, where they’re living. They are working for money. They have their own problem, maybe just different kind of problem. For example, in my country my friend, they have no drug problem, but maybe here they have drug, alcohol problem. But in my country, there are few of them have that kind of problem. But the people, their thoughts … the way they’re thinking … a lot of their … there’s a lot of in common.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Mitchell Kelly

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/01/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.
• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.