Originally Posted by
moondog
... er hua actually actually is proper and can sound pretty nice if subtle.
This is true. Admittedly, the few times when I heard beautifully-spoken, almost aristocratic-sounding Mandarin were all in Beijing. But in the same vein, the typical Beijinger usually overuse "er" to point of sounding like a broken record:
"Lao-pengyou'r, wo-men'er yiqi'r qu'r chi'r fan'er!' (老朋友，我們一起去吃飯！ "Let's go eat, old friend!"). Gawd!
