How Yuja as a child viewed piano playing, her looking back on her life as a student, aspects of her personality, her reaction to media comparing her to Lang Lang, and lots more ...

The video shows that by 2012 Yuja probably already enjoyed a vocabulary larger in English than in her mother tongue, as there are occasions during the interview when she struggles to find a suitable Chinese word, and often just uses an English equivalent to save time. This is not surprising given that she left China at the age of 14 (2001), and has lived in North America ever since. Nonetheless, Yuja's native Beijing accent - the phonetic basis of standard spoken Mandarin (putonghua) - has not changed an iota.

While the interview is conducted in Mandarin, Chinese subtitles visible in white have been added to the original footage. This obvious redundancy actually has been a practice for many years in China for all TV programs (news and live broadcasts excepted), which is probably a deliberate effort to assist non-native speakers, school children, etc. in learning the difficult written form of this language.

свернуть