Journal • Nov 15, 2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

Would you like to learn Mandarin through songs? If so, Sarah Chen is the singer to listen to. She sings standard Mandarin as if she were a broadcaster competing in a singing contest. As someone struggling with Chinese pronunciation, I wish I had discovered her music much earlier.

This is particularly notable because Chen grew up in Taiwan2. Her grandmother spoke Taiwanese, and her earliest songs were in Taiwanese. Although Mandarin is taught in schools, everyday speech often carries local accents. Southern Chinese dialects do not always distinguish certain sounds used in standard Mandarin, leading to common pronunciation errors such as confusing retroflex and alveolar fricatives (e.g., “sh” and “s”), front and back nasal finals (“in” and “ing”), and lateral and nasal initials (“l” and “n”).

Sarah Chen was exceptional among Taiwanese singers for her standard Mandarin diction. If you notice articulation differences between Chen and another singer performing the same song, you can bet that the other singer mispronounced the words. Even the linguistically talented Teresa Teng made occasional mistakes. When a live recording of Chen covering Teng’s song “My Native Land” (〈原乡人〉), performed in 1981, recently surfaced, I had to check the dictionary to verify that it was Chen, not Teng, who got every nuance of pronunciation right3.

The surprising thing about Chen’s diction in songs, however, is that she wasn’t always so flawless. Her childhood recordings show progressive refinement over several years. At age 12, when she released her first batch of Mandarin songs4, Chen sang in accented Mandarin, often failing to distinguish between retroflex and alveolar affricates. At age 15, when she recorded her first solo album, Love’s Sun, her diction had become clearer. By age 18, when she became a professional singer, her pronunciation was markedly more accurate, with only occasional slips (as in “chang” versus “cang” in “Night Jasmine”). By the time her career finally took off at age 21, Chen had become a singing dictionary.

The progression is striking both for the years it took and for the significant refinement that continued after age 15, when achieving native-like pronunciation generally becomes much less likely5. Yet Chen did not always sound like a broadcaster in conversation. Her diction was most precise in songs, while a slight southern accent remained audible in interviews.

Besides Mandarin, Sarah Chen sang in English, Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Japanese. Her major foreign-language work was in English; her four English albums accounted for about one-eighth of her album catalog6. For years, Chen’s English album “The Right to Sing” was her bestseller, outselling the more than 20 other albums she had released by the mid-1980s7.

Contributing to this success was Chen’s extraordinary command of English in her songs. Not only did she sound bold and confident, as the songs demanded, but she sang without a noticeable non-native accent.

But as with Mandarin, Chen wasn’t always so precise in her English singing. Her first English album, an amateurish production recorded with college classmates, was considerably weaker. Not only did she sound less confident, but she also made occasional pronunciation errors, most notably confusing “l” and “r,” as in “travel.” Chen was already 20 at the time.

Five years later, when she released her first professional-grade English album, Chen had become a commanding “East–West singer.”8,9 Contemporary reports offer no evidence that Chen had lived in an English-speaking environment. Her mother spoke Japanese rather than English. Her studies in the United States took place in the 1990s10, after her major English albums.

Intriguingly, Chen’s English in her final English song, recorded in 1995 after she had studied English in the U.S., was no better than in her earlier recordings. If anything, Chen sounded more “heavy-tongued” in that recording, possibly because it was an R&B song rather than the English pop she had sung earlier. Whatever she did to achieve such precise diction in the 1980s, it was unlikely to have been immersion abroad.

What could have contributed to Sarah Chen’s remarkable mastery of Mandarin and English diction after adolescence, when it is difficult to achieve accent-free pronunciation? Contemporary reports offer several clues, leading us to propose the Imitation Refinement Hypothesis, which attributes her mastery to three interrelated factors: a talent for vocal imitation, early training in singing, and extensive professional practice.

Before presenting this hypothesis, we should note that this account concerns Chen’s diction in singing only and does not necessarily extend to her command of spoken language. While singing and speaking share common components, their processing demands differ11. Songs are rehearsed and have fixed lyrics12, with speech sounds shaped by melody rather than the natural rhythm and tonal patterns of speech. Singing is therefore a more specialized task, potentially bypassing some of the computational demands of speech.

At the core of the Imitation Refinement Hypothesis is “imitation talent,” a term we use to describe two basic abilities necessary for accurately imitating sounds: auditory discrimination of subtle sound differences and the motor flexibility to reproduce them13. We propose that people differ in imitation talent14, and that its development is shaped by early training and extensive practice.

For example, a child who can hear subtle sound differences and imitate them accurately has an imitation talent. Early training in music, speech, dance, and related activities could help develop that talent, increasing the child’s sensitivity to subtle sound differences and improving the motor skills needed to reproduce them. Later, as the child becomes a singer or a broadcaster, extensive practice in producing precise sounds further refines those imitation skills, potentially allowing the singer to correct pronunciation imperfections well past the “critical period” of language acquisition. Figure 1 illustrates the Imitation Refinement Hypothesis.

The earliest report noting Sarah Chen’s talent for imitation appeared in 1973, when the 15-year-old Chen expressed her wish to study dance at Chinese Culture College15. The report noted that Chen had been exceptionally good at imitation since childhood. She began singing for films behind the scenes at the age of six.

In interviews after winning the Golden Bell Award for Best Female Singer in 1985, Chen recalled imitating Western singers early in her career. She eventually lost interest in imitating them but continued to listen widely to other singers16. Her imitation was not limited to Western singers. Fans of Teresa Teng would instantly recognize the resemblance in Chen’s early album “Quietly Saying Good-Bye,” where Chen sounded a lot like Teng. Contemporary reports also described Chen’s habit of attending other singers’ concerts17. Imitation and the absorption of other singers’ techniques were therefore both a talent and a deliberate practice.

Chen’s ability to imitate other singers extended to male vocalists. In a 1995 television interview on "Rose’s Night," while recounting her experience recording “Red Dust” with Lo Ta-yu, Chen spontaneously imitated Lo’s singing, giving a hilariously accurate impression of his gestures and vocal style18.

Most reports date Sarah Chen’s musical debut to age nine, when she released her first single, “Water Wagon Girl.”19 But Chen had started singing and training long before that. Chen’s mother loved singing and, as a fluent speaker of Japanese, taught her Japanese songs when she was young20. Chen’s older sister, Su-Yu, was also reportedly a singer before she married15.

Chen recalled that she had loved singing for as long as she could remember, singing and dancing along to music21. At seven, she tried to join the Muxing Children’s Choir (牧星合唱团) but was rejected. The judges praised her pitch accuracy but didn't like her vocal quality. With her mother’s encouragement, she trained for a year and succeeded the following year22.

When Chen won a national singing contest at age eight, she was no ordinary eight-year-old23. She already had several years of experience singing in a semi-professional setting. Chen continued taking formal lessons in singing, dance, and piano15. At eleven, she was credited as a singer in the film The Rice Dumpling Vendor,24 and at twelve, her recordings were being sold commercially4.

Sarah Chen wasn’t just a child singer. She had unusually early and extensive musical training, which may have facilitated the development of her already notable imitation talent. The fourteen-year-old girl who sang impromptu on national television25 wasn’t just a teenager with a passion for singing. She was practically a veteran.

Compared with other Taiwanese singers, Sarah Chen’s most unusual professional experiences were singing in English and hosting television shows.

Before establishing her adult singing career, Chen once accompanied her father, an interior designer, on a renovation project at an American-owned hotel in Taiwan. A guitar caught her eye, and she started playing and singing. The owner offered her a job singing at night, which she held for two years26. Because the hotel catered to foreigners, Chen sang English songs, expanding her repertoire from a handful to hundreds.

She soon became known for singing English songs on television, a skill that helped her secure hosting jobs on programs such as Starry Grassland (《星星草原》) and Thousand-Mile Ride (《千里单骑》)27,28. On these shows, she sang English and Mandarin songs and introduced audiences to Taiwan’s scenery and cultural diversity. She also signed as a “basic singer” with Chinese Television System (CTS), taking on singing, hosting, and reporting duties29.

These experiences broadened her professional role from singer to broadcaster, placing high demands on her Mandarin and English pronunciation. By 1983, when she signed with EMI Singapore to pursue a more focused singing career, Chen had already perfected her singing, after releasing 15 albums and spending nearly two decades immersed in music.

The Imitation Refinement Hypothesis provides a tantalizing explanation for Sarah Chen’s extraordinary mastery of Mandarin and English diction in songs, despite growing up in Taiwan without early English-language immersion (Figure 4). By identifying three key contributors – imitation talent, early training, and extensive professional practice – the hypothesis both explains and highlights Chen’s remarkable achievement. In Chen's case, all three factors were unusually strong, and their combination may be difficult to replicate.

Could the same hypothesis explain the achievements of other multilingual singers, such as Chen’s peers Teresa Teng, Chyi Yu, and Julie Sue, all of whom sang in Mandarin, English, and Taiwanese, and, in Teng’s case, Japanese, Cantonese, Indonesian, and even Italian? We think it does, to varying degrees. But each singer had distinct circumstances, resulting in different levels of proficiency and different contributions from the three factors.

Teng’s Cantonese singing, for example, was likely facilitated by living in Hong Kong30, which gave her conversational fluency that Chen did not possess, even though both sang in Cantonese. Chyi Yu earned her master’s degree at UCLA, obtaining an immersive experience that Chen lacked31. Chen’s ability to compensate for limited immersion is particularly striking.

In a TV retrospective on Taiwan’s pop singers years after Chen’s retirement, a colleague observed that singers of that era were self-made, and their foreign-language work relied largely on self-directed learning, as opportunities for training and immersion were rare (see also32). Against all odds, Sarah Chen did it, giving her music a uniquely multicultural and multilingual dimension while revealing the marvels of human capacity.

“Determination prevails over fate” (人定胜天) was once Sarah Chen’s motto. At least in mastering pronunciation, she seems to have done just that.