A little tidbit on the Sichuan dialect
I learned that the dialect spoken in Sichuan is a member of the northern
guanhua dialect family, which is to say that it’s relatively close to Mandarin.
As I lay on the hard-sleeper bunk on the train to Sichuan, straining to
follow the conversations of the Sichuanese around me from the one word out
of every three that I could catch, I began to suspect that on this point…