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My wife’s relatives are all over the map with the s/sh c/ch z/zh thing. And it’s not so simple that one person will always say s/c/z and others will say sh/ch/zh; it’s more that one person will randomly switch between the two sets, even in one sentence.
The problem seems to be that they’re not really sure when the tongue should be flat and when it should be curled. It used to drive me crazy when I first came here and would ask people “how do you say this character?” and they would tell me, and I would memorize it and use it all the time only to find out months later through coming across the character in a dictionary and finding that I learned it wrong. Now I never trust anyone with those 平舌/翘舌 (ping2she2/qiao4she2, flat tongue / curled tongue) characters.
Sometimes I’m at a loss at how people understand each other in China.
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