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400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin
dryriver writes with this excerpt from a thought-provoking report at the BBC: "China's Education Ministry says that about 400 million people — or 30% of the population — cannot speak the country's national language. Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. The admission from officials came as the government launched another push for linguistic unity in China. China is home to thousands of dialects and several minority languages. These include Cantonese and Hokkien, which enjoy strong regional support. Mandarin — formally called Putonghua in China, meaning 'common tongue' — is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world. The Education Ministry spokeswoman said the push would be focusing on the countryside and areas with ethnic minorities."
USA! USA! USA!
Many people in the US can't speak English, and an overwhelming majority of our youth can't seem to do it well at all.
You won't miss 400 million intractable rebels.
And they don't like hokkien because they don't like the hakka people in general.
Fuck them. It's like telling US southerners that they suck for speaking with an accent.
what % of the US does not speak english?
This is because "the country" is really an empire, not a country. Would you find it odd that people in places under the US's imperial control (either formally or informally) don't always speak English?
Maybe if the language wasn't so difficult it would see more widespread adoption. I honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization like pinyin, even if it does not have100% of what the Chinese characters provide. I understand the heritage and cultural proudness of having your own characters, but that way you still keep your language, and second you don't waste vauable time thhat can be used to learn something else. Chinese atm is like a legacy programming language with lots of ancient functions that can make the code messy. Learning the radicals, stroke sequences and others on top of all the tones is absurd to me.
But hey, if somebody can make a counterpoint I will be happy to debate.
I wonder how many "Americans" can only speak Spanish?
The government in Beijing has been trying to convert the Cantonese-speaking part of the country (which includes Hong Kong) to Mandarin since Mao's day, without much success. Due to development, internal migration, improved transportation and communications, and pressure from the central government, Mandarin is finally displacing Cantonese in some areas. Shenzhen, the high-tech region near Hong Kong, was mostly using Cantonese two decades ago, but is now mostly Mandarin.
I remember very recently there was a sort of "learn Chinese" fad going around...
It was usually some techie MBA type...
OH at the watercooler: "oh yeah, I'm learning Chinese...yeah for sure...it's all China man...it is the next superpower"
Or yuppie parents...
"yes we have jonny and suzy both in Mandarin classes twice a week..."
I taught English in Korea in 2002 (world cup woo hoo) and had several friends who did the same in China, Japan, and Thailand.
The idea that learning Chinese would ever be anyone's idea of a smart thing for business or education in the 21st Century **baffled** me when I first read it (probably a Friedman article)...
This kind of bears it out in numbers...
400 million **don't even speak it in their own country**
It's English...for better or worse international business and science is conducted in English.
Same was true when I studied at Telecom Bretagne in France in 2009...in the computer lab all the Moroccans, Russians, Germans, Itialians, Chinese, Japanese, and yes French students spoke English.
Chinese is fine. If you want a challenge go for it...but don't do it thinking it'll be a good business investment or learning tool for a child...if that's what you want you'll just end with torture ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
Some Chinese guys I did some work for said Cantonese is for business and Mandarin is for government. I was told just about all business is transacted in Cantonese.
Away from the cities?
In India, English has more or less usurped the position as national exchange language, a role that Hindi was supposed to fill.
Anyone who advocated a national language and tried to institute the teaching of the language would be called racist.
But, in China, it is considered a good thing to educate the population to speak the national language... I'm sure it is believed that the children who can speak the common language will probably be able to do better (financially / quality of life) if they can interact with the majority of the country....
This then would have the effect of raising the overall standard of living of the entire country...
How dare those Chinese do something so blatantly racist...
NOTE: this is not a joke... It is a sad truth in the US today!!!
But one of the things I stumbled upon trying to learn some asian languages is the logographic writing. Unlike our alphabet, where you can sound it out, in logographic systems you either know the 1 of many thousands of symbols or you don't. Which is why in Japanese writing, particularly geared for younger folk, the more advanced kanji (for that age group) usually has kana (a type of phonographic alphabet) over the Kanji, so they can sound out the words. Don't know how it works in Chinese.
Anyway, a long while back I was watching what I thought was a Jackie Chan movie as touted by Redbox "Looking for Jackie" which was really just a few minutes of him and a story of a 15y/o circa 10th grader idolizing him and trying to find him. The kid had "bad" grades, particularly in Chinese, bad here being Cs. It was essentially an afterschool special for kids. Anyway, one scene in the movie was that he was in a city and some tourist asked him to read a name off a map and he couldn't do it or any of the names in fact.
Idk how realistic that is, but it made me question the writing systems of the country that a 10th grader with "bad" grades had problems I think no 5th grader with normal grades would have. Growing up, my reading reinforced my writing and my speaking. I'm sure without it, I would be relegated to speak as badly as some of the people around me, which in a big country, especially in rural area, probably would decline quickly to some backwood dialect.
In fact, I think the communists in the 1960-1970s toyed with the idea of dropping the traditionally written language in favor of romanization as an official reform but it never quite got the push it needed.
If 400 million Chinese citizens of the People's Republic of China (Zhnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó) cannot speak Mandrin flulently, do they speak another language to communicate? Cantonese, Hokkien, Uyghur, Mongolian, Tibetan, Zhuang? Just wondering.
I learned some Chinese in high school and even won an inter-school award for "excellence", but I could not even hold a conversation. This makes me feel a lot better about my lack of Chinese speaking skills after devoting some years to it.
What in the hell does this have to do with the article? This has to do with a Chinese dialect, not race. It's kinda hard to even relate the article vs what you're saying because they're not even dealing with a major race issue over there.
From the fine article:
"In 2010, there were protests in Tibet about the use of Mandarin in schools. At the time, protesters said it was eroding their culture and language."
Am I the only one that remembers the four "surfaces" from the "culture polyhedron" from Anthropology 101?
- Language - Behavior - History - Religion
It's the same idea as the "fire polyhedron": - Heat - Fuel - Oxidizer - Ignition Source.
Remove one, and the whole thing collapses.
And China is not the only nation using 1984 as a users manual.
A decade ago I visited my adult cousines in Guang Dong province and they barely spoke any mandarin. There was no need to. Local TV/radio was readily in Cantonese and they could read all national documents written in Chinese.
Situations have changed since there's more business dealings with those outside their province so they have since learned to speak mandarin fluently.
I imagine they treat the need to learn Mandarin in the same way Quebecois have to learn English.
What in the hell does this have to do with the article? This has to do with a Chinese dialect, not race. It's kinda hard to even relate the article vs what you're saying because they're not even dealing with a major race issue over there.
They probably meant to post in the "Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'?" article, which demonstrates that racists aren't too bright.
Only such a dictatorship/imperialist can think of imposing a "national language" to territories that have spoken another language for centuries or millennia.
In some bits they speak Korean, in others Tibetan and places like the Gobi desert are a very long way from Beijing.
So I'll imagine Nelson saying, "You can't speak Mandrin, Ha Ha!", and rest assured the future of America is safe from the yellow horde!
Managed to get English spoken pretty much throughout the country. You can thank the British for that - because India is also a polyglot nation depending upon things like region, etc.
But the Chinese, insistent upon Mandarin yet a good chunk of their population cannot speak it. That's bizarre but then the Chinese didn't have the benefit of British rule I suppose.
..My Lawn!
(This post's A.C. Captcha = tolerant !?!)
Big fucking deal, neither can I.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
IQ test are biased. They've changed IQ tests to fix the bias that is against blacks and it turned out that whites scored lower then. What is an IQ test supposed to measure anyway? It's like a 1 dimensional measurement of a many dimensional object.
No, really.. why do we care that they speak some hybrid language 1/2 way around the world? This knowledge has what value ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The People's Republic of China has used Pinyin romanization for ages. There is another, arguably better, system called Zhuyin, that is less confusing because the phonetic symbols come from actual Chinese words that are written with only a few strokes. It is less confusing for kids who already know a romanized language and is standard in Taiwan. Look for little kids books in Chinese in a second hand store and you will see how the text is annotated in Pinyin or Zhuyin for young learners.
And spoken Mandarin Chinese is not that hard to learn. The grammar is very similar to English except where it is simpler such as verbs. And the multisyllable words are almost always composed of monosyllable words that have a poetic connection in meaning to the longer words. Makes it easier to remember.
For the U.S. 9% of people aren't proficient in English. About 30% of households speak a language other than English at home, but as you can tell from the statistics this represents a large bilingual population in the US.
And speak some of the natives about the Welsh Not and La Vaches. It worked, and the only thing standing in the way of fluency in the official dialect is bitter resentment.
Some recently arrived Latinos from Central America have problems with ESL because they can't even READ THEIR OWN LANGUAGE. They can speak a dialect of Spanish, but never learned to read. There are no schools for the poor in most of those Nations. Sucks.
How would that apply to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. generations of Asians?
I'm baffled to read comments from those who don't know Chinese, or don't even bother to learn Chinese. The mandarin, is just another dialect in China, which happens to be promoted by the emperor/government as the one unified tongue so as to facilitate communication. Even with tens of different regional dialects, they are all based on the same character set. People had been able to communicate with each other for thousands of years.
The worst thing is to see people suggest that the Chinese should "latinize" their language. Please, do not make stupid suggestions like on subject you have no idea.
And for people who said that Chinese is difficult, that's because you haven't really put efforts into it. Look, how many hours have you put into learning Chinese on a daily basis, as compared to the hours that Chinese people (and other people all over the world) had put into learning English? And you even complain that these folks can't speak English correctly, whereas the Chinese people would have congratulated you even all you can say is "nihao" and "xiexie". For non-English-speaking people, English is really a bastard language. Why is "shit" not "sheet" or "shait"? Words such as "anticonstitutionally", where am I supposed to put the tone on? And the grammatical rules and exceptions. And shit like that.
And the French language. Try to learn just the conjugation of the verbs. Try to master the grammar. And how do I figure out the gender of a noun? Is there a rule for that? I spent years learning French, I know it pretty well, but I can't even say I really master the grammar. And before we went on a trip to Italy, everyone said Italian is really easy. Even with my French background, I still struggled quite a bit to learn that other latin-based language.
And before going to Germany, I also tried to learn German. Oh, ouch, err... learning German is like being a masochist.
How about if people in other parts of the world tell the Amerians/Brits to "simplify" English, or tell the French to simplify French, or tell the Germans to simplify German? Or to simplify your _insert_your_favorite_mother_tongue_here_ ? You know what, it's been a struggling experience for them too.
I master quite well Chinese (Mandarin plus other 3 dialects)/English/French, know a bit of Italian and Spanish, Khmer and Vietnamese, but still struggle a lot whenever I try to learn a new language. Languages evolve over hundreds/thousands of years, it's hard to learn, even harder to master. You need to really put effort into it. Besides, learning a new language or get to know a new culture, is supposed to be an intellectual endeavor of your own journey. People don't give a shit about what you think of their language or culture. You are supposed to approach them. They have no duty to "make it easy" (whatever that means) for you.
Way to show your ignorance dude. Chinese Characters are agnostic of pronunciation, hence they ALLOW a Mandarin, Wu, Minan, Guangdonghua, etc. speaker to communicate with each other in the first place! There is a reason why Chinese television programs are always subtitled in Chinese!
Since China's modernization process set in later, was longer and tougher than those in most European Nations (but see India, any African Nation, etc. as a counter point) it is pretty normal that not everybody speaks what was proclaimed by fiat to be "Chinese". However, these people are almost always poor peasants living in remote places, Mandarin is the language of the country and you will be able to communicate and interactive with people in all of China if you speak it.
Finally, China, HK, Taiwan, etc. have extremely high literacy rates, small children seem to be as apt at picking up Chinese Characters as they are at reading Roman Characters here.
The only somewhat valid point would be that learning Chinese Characters for foreigners is "too hard", but then, most things are hard if you do them well...
See, I think you missed my point from my post above...when I talked about my scientific work in France in 2009, when I said this:
Moroccans converse with Russians and Chinese in group work in English.
English is the language of last resort...the *common* language of the world for business and science.
I took French lessons while I was over there at the university. Lessons were mandatory until you were conversational precisely *because* they hated the fact that all the international students conversed in English.
The point of the program was to do HCI research and study France's business and tech culture. I can understand why they wanted us to speak French and I was happy to learn.
In my French class a Libyan, Japanese, Camaroonean, Mexican, Brazilian, Pakistani and yours truly *all would converse in English* to help each other with answers.
The French teacher (who herself had taught in China for years) banned all English from the classroom **because it was too much of a crutch for us all**
So...the Mexican and I would still help each other in Spanish! Ha!
So you're just way, way, way off...
Why is this hard to accept as fact when it so obvious? Acknoledging the truth doesn't mean you approve of it or even like English.
Thank you Dave Raggett
No doubt many of the 400 million are from impoverished rural areas with regional/ethnic dialects, but I wonder how many of the 400 million are just from older generations. China made Mandarin mandatory in schools decades ago, so overall Mandarin literacy is increasing with each generation.
I've lived in China for 5 years and all of the young (= 40yo) people I've met speak Mandarin quite well, whereas even here in Shanghai locals in their 50-60s speak Mandarin clunkily and many Shanghainese above 60 don't speak Mandarin at all.
I am totally overwhelmed by the amazing comments from all the resident "Mandarin experts" in Slashdot !
Their prose and analysis and their teardown of the Mandarin language is nothing short of a fucking miracle !
Take for instance, in this comment
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4181399&cid=44786643
Mandarin vs. Cantonese is completely different, as they're not mutually intelligible
There are more similarities shared by the Cantonese dialect and the Mandarin language than the Spanish language and the Portuguese language !
The two even share at least 99% of everyday idioms.
As an American whose first language is not English I always try my best to not comment on others' use of the Queen's Language, as I know there are millions of others who are much more qualified than me in the task.
I can't help but wonder what the fuck happened to the IQ level of Slashdot visitors.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I speak Cantonese. I speak Mandarin too. And I do know several other Chinese dialects.
Yes, I was from China.
Your assertion :
Cantonese speakers would end up having to mentally rearrange what they're looking at for it make sense
Those who have true understanding of both the Mandarin language and the Cantonese dialect would see through your bullshit.
Unfortunately, many here don't know either.
The only time a Chinese speaker (no matter which Chinese dialect/language) needs to do "mental rearrangement" when dealing with another language is when they encounter the Japanese language, as most of the Japanese Kanji characters were derived from the Chinese Han (Mandarin) language. The way the Japanese arrange their Kanji characters is a bit different from the way the Chinese use them.
And btw, other than the Chinese language I can speak and write Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic.
I am not saying this to make myself any more superior to others here. I am saying this to make a point - that if you want to comment on something, PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE PARTICULAR SUBJECT FIRST.
The IQ test is supposed to be a composite metric of many different forms of intelligence, just to provide a single convenient number for use in comparisons. It's a statistical tool.
If you feel the need to post paragraph after paragraph about black people being worse than white people in the comments section of an article about Chinese people speaking Mandarin, you may have a problem
...the majority of the spoken portion of canto and mandarin are different. Some words sound similar, but for the most party, they're completely different
What just type of bullshit you want to spread in Slashdot ??
There are many types of different Cantonese dialects being spoken in Guandong, but all of them are pretty much based on the Chinese language system.
On the other hand, the so-called "zhong man" as spoken by the Hongkies in Hong Kong, has become bastardized due to the influence of their "British Masters" during their 99 year rule over Hong Kong - and in large part, most Hongkies still worship their white-skin masters.
The Hongkies have mixed up a lot of English nouns in their everyday utterance.
For instance - in Hong Kong, "Spare Key" has morphed into "see-pair see", and "off" (as I'm off work tomorrow) in Hongkong, it is pronounced very similar to "awful".
Thus, it is not uncommon for the Hongkies to feel alienated when they try to use the Pu Tong Hua, because the bastardized version of the Hong Kong "zhong man"is, technically speaking, no longer a branch of the Chinese language system.
The official language of China is Standard Chinese aka Mandarin. The official language of the United States is... oh wait, there isn't one.
Back in 1790s there was a crucial vote in Pennsylvania.
Had the German won that vote, the school kids in the United States of America would have been taught German, instead of the Queen's language.
http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa010820b.htm
As much as I like wubi input method and actually use it to type Chinese, it is hardly used among most of the natives. For anyone who actually knows Chinese, wubi today is real PITA compared to modern pinyin methods like offered by Soguo or Google.
These days, wubi no longer offers dramatic speed advantages like it was in the old days, where pinyin was very simple and dumb (one of the earlier pinyin "smart" input programs was http://www.unispim.com/, afaik). Today, most pinyin input programs usually employ sophisticated heuristics which supports shortcuts for many common words and phrases (e.g. you don't have to type "woxiangyao", just "wxy" is enough), they are auto-learning, they accumulate people's character usage statistics in a cloud, etc.
Even those folks who normally use wubi often use it in combination with pinyin, 'cause they often forget the code for some rarely used or complicated character. Praised fast typing rate of wubi is dramatically crippled once you stop and had to type a character by trial-and-error. It rarely happens with pinyin.
Wubi is still good for people who do not know many Chinese characters (how they're pronounced), e.g. for learners. For native Chinese, wubi offers little to none advantages over pinyin these days.
What kind of tosh is this? No wonder the HK doesn't want to further integration with China, if it means they have to put up with people like you.
Have you never heard of "Loan Words"?
Much of Japanese and Korean is made of Chinese loan words. They are proud of their languague, why does it make Hong Kongers with their loan wards into Cantonese any different (considering that Cantonese has borrowed very little compared to the Korean and Japanese languages)?
In fact Mandarin has a number of loan words itself borrowed from English -
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/englishloan.php
Note that 2/3rd of the list are Mandarin loan words.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
If so many speak the language of the FSM, O may His Noodly Appendages marinade in tomato sauce for eternity, maybe China isn't so bad after all?
Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually intelligible for most part in the written form, but for spoken varieties it is a challenge.
The pronunciation has diverged too much (from their respective dialects in Middle Chinese) to be considered mutually intelligible. I'm putting my neck out here, but the difference between spoken Cantonese and Mandarin is similar to the difference between spoken Portuguese and Spanish.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
The Southern part of China (guandong, fujian) are populated by Chinese who still use the Tang form of Chinese Language.
In other words, the way the spoken dialect of the Southern China is being used can be traced back to the way the Chinese language was used in the Tang Dynasty.
In fact, Southern Chinese still refer to themselves as "People of Tang", as "tong yang" (for Cantonese speaking folks) and "deng lang" (for Hokkien speaking folks).
And they are not the only one using the Tang form of the Chinese language.
In the Japanese and the Korean language, and also in the Vietnamese language (mainly spoken form) there are still many traces of Tang Chinese mixed in.
For example, chopsticks.
In modern Mandarin, chopsticks are known as "kuai zi", but in Japanese as well as in Hokkien, chopsticks is written (sorry, Slashdot can't display the word here) in a character with the pronunciation as "zhu".
Those who argue that the Cantonese dialect is incompatible with the Mandarin language are either ignorant of the subject matter, or, they have some hidden political agenda.
As for me, I am an American, but I was from China.
And yes, I do speak and write Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean too.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Citation because you sound full of shit.
Though spoken Chinese dialects are not mutually intelligible, their scripts are, so written Chinese is common to China.
Most Americans don't speak or write English very well. The difference with the Chinese is, that they don't master any other language at all, while the Chinese often speak at least on other language fluently.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Are you saying that people should be able to speak French (New Orleans area) and Spanish (most of Florida and south California) without problems? As far as I'm aware, the Government exclusively communicates in English and Spanish translations are offered merely as a courtesy. The only moment you will get "official" support for non English languages is in court, where you can have a translator translate the English that is spoken in court from and to your native language.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The chinese language should be abandoned entirely, sealed deep in museum and only mentioned in history classes. We should all adopt English the international language.
I'm a chinese speaker in Taiwan and I can tell you that the garbage left from our ancestors do us nothing good at all. It's a huge waste of time to learn and as a result many people except top-grade or specialized graduates cannot even read English, severely harming our economic/business competitivity and good for nothing.
In modern Mandarin, chopsticks are known as "kuai zi", but in Japanese as well as in Hokkien, chopsticks is written (sorry, Slashdot can't display the word here) in a character with the pronunciation as "zhu".
And in Korean, "chokkara".
A quarter of Americans can't speak English.
Well I'm on a project with a very large Chinese network supplier. Their team with Cantonese and Mandarin use English to communicate. It's only via English they can communicate. So they tell me.
Interestingly, in Japan, where local Japanese dialects are spoken with pride, if you can speak/write fluently the what's known as "hyoujungo" or "standard language" Japanese (the Japanese language taught by schools in Japan from kindergarten on and the reference Japanese dialect used in newspapers/periodicals and TV broadcasts), you can usually converse with most people in Japan in general. Sure, the people of Osaka, Okayama, Fukuoka, etc. speak their own dialects, but most people living there also understand "hyoujungo."
In short, what the Chinese government needs to do is start teaching the Mandarin dialect at ALL schools starting from kindergarten on and require that to graduate high school you have to be fluent in speaking and writing/reading the dialect.
There are more similarities shared by the Cantonese dialect and the Mandarin language than the Spanish language and the Portuguese language ! ...
Sorry, that is nonsense.
Cantonese and Mandarin are as different as Spanish and Russian
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wouldn't go that far. Maybe Italian and French, or Italian and Roumanian. For instance, German and Italian have too many root words that are different --- bigger difference than the root words in Mandarin and Cantonese. For sure, the regional dialects in China are unified by the written language. People in Beijing know the word zhu for chopsticks, because it is a synonym in the written language. They just pronounce the written word differently.
What are linguists doing out there? The modern English language is in a pretty dire state to say the least. What a disgrace to add twerking and derp as official words. How did we become so single minded and obnoxiously rigid? It's ludicrous to think that a single language handles every piece of communication needed. It's clear that professions, hobbyists, and other groups are developing their own individual languages. If people really wanted a universally accessible language, linguists would be working hard to bring that forward. Unfortunately that's a hard task and people these days don't appreciate or have the diligence for long term projects.
I think it would be better if you focused on the speakers in Guang Zhou City, the capital of Guang Dong Province, rather on the speakers in the former English colony.
I think if they used an alphabet they would truly rule the world.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
30% doesn't speak Mandarin, Taiwan had the same problem within the older generation. I bet it's the same in China. China was fucked up by Western and Japanese nations until the 1950s. The actual rebuilding didn't occur until recently, you can't expect them to have a perfect system in such a short period of time. US had over 200 years to perfect their Democracy, and we can all agree it is no where near perfect yet. We all need time to grow up and mature.
If you don't speak even a little bit of your business partners language, you'll miss out on a lot. Missed opportunities, missed common ground and, yes, missed respect.
Then again, you sound like an MBA type, so this concept flies straight over your head.
I've tried to learn Mandarin for a few years. The characters were not the main problem. Yes, it is a lot of work to learn them and to become fluent takes years if it can be done at all. But the tones are a deal-breaker. I really can't do it. I understand the concept but as my own language uses intonation as a clue of emphasis and/or questions, I can't repurpose it for discerning meaning in words that are otherwise identical. I can't. Impossible. And you best believe I tried and tried.
Perhaps I'm too old to learn such a radical (haha) new language, but I refuse to think it is "low difficulty" for anybody.
So my wife (Mandarin speaking, born and raised in Shanghai) was just pulling my leg all the times we went to Hong Kong and Shenzhen and she couldn't understand Cantonese... Good to know!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
1/3 of the people living in Estonia do not speak fluent estonian (or do not speak the language at all).
Those are the descendants of the former occupation forces, Russians who are encouraged by their nations leaders to stay on the formerly occupied territories and to resist integration.
Strangely enough the EU and the world community fail to approve of Estonia-s attempt to assimilate the next generation by making estonian the mandatory teaching language at schools, i.e. to acquire adequate skills inte local tongue. (For clarity I must add that Estonia in no way tries to prevent studying or using russian; the objective is to make the russian descendants adopt estonian in addition to their own language.)
"Biased". A universal test that whites and Asians score the highest on. Riiiight....
Mandarin is Chinese mangled by for foreign rulers like the Mongols.
They might be refering to those whom we call Tibetans or Hong Kongers, or Taiwanese.
China is home to thousands of LANGUAGES and several minority languages.
FTFY
If two ways of speaking are not mutually intelligible, call them "languages", not "dialects". China likes to call them "dialects" to hide the fact that China is an empire, not a nation-state. The western view of China as a nation-state is somewhat racist and ethno-centric as it reflects the "they all look alike" syndrome. In fact Chinese are not all like - their cultures and languages are as varied as those off Europeans. The eastern view of China as a nation-state exists because it is politically convenient.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
The linguist Qian Xuantong proposed the substitution of Chinese with Esperanto.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Many of those languages are mutually intelligible if they are written down.
China has long had a history of a dialect problem -- with the pronunciation of the national language being different from town to town.
They don't call it a different language, because it is the same alphabet...they just can't understand the various non-standard pronunciations used for the same kanji.
>>I can't help but wonder what the fuck happened to the IQ level of Slashdot visitors.
It collapsed once the socialists arrived.
The number of Chinese who speak/write English is rapidly growing. They will use English where it is easier. Over time, a form of Gresham's law will apply: "Facile languages drive out difficult languages.", English will eventually supplant the native Chinese languages, which will be tossed into the dustbin of history.
I'm reading through responses to my post and it seems many commenters have an emotional attachment to the 'Chinese' language (actually there are hundreds of variations)...
You're missing the point I think...
In France, the Indian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Australian, Argentinian, and Japanese students have *ONE* common language:
english
practicallly impossible...are all those Indians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Australians, Argentinians, and Japanese (and Chinese) are going to all learn *one* version of Chinese
it absolutely will not happen on any timescale under 10^3 years
English took the efforts of *two* colonial countries over 400 years to become the world's language...
You're biased man...it just won't happen
Thank you Dave Raggett
yeah for sure...Chinese might be a great language to use to push yourself b/c it is so idiomatic
I'd even go as far to say that learning an idiomatic language or sign language might be very good sort of 'cross training' for a techie, especially coders
for me, writing code is like the exact opposite of learning an idiomatic language...
I have tried to pick up on how Arabic and Thai work in written form lately, and I learned Korean (which is the worlds most modern and easiest to learn language) and I feel it has improved my reading speed and visual dexterity greatly...
Learning weird languages teaches you to scan a document quickly in new ways...very good for coding I think!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Some of the dialects or languages of Chinese are not mutually intelligible, although many do have similar grammar and syntax. It doesn't apply in all cases though. And it's not just mere differences in "pronunciation," which would be an accent. Many should probably be classified as different languages due to how different they are from one another. The reason the written language is the same is that they were spoken dialects/languages, not written ones, so they were written using the written Chinese system.
And I assume you mean "Chinese characters" instead of "kanji." Kanji refers to the Chinese characters that were adopted by the Japanese.
The Wikipedia article takes a neutral approach and calls them "varieties of Chinese."
Well, we've drifted a bit off-topic here and I can see that you basically want to vent... so...
I'm sorry to hear that you feel discriminated against. However, as the mainland has much more political and economic power over HK than vice versa, I don't think this is any sort of real racial discrimination on the part of HKers. It's more to do with the difference in culture and also that people coming from the mainland not behaving well when travelling and living in HK. All I can say is that respect is earned, and not taken for granted.
Why don't you channel your passion positively and influence the way mainlanders behave (especially when travelling in Hong Kong) so that they don't feel that mainlanders are rude and embarrassing to be around. Stuff like not pushing people around on the street, not shouting all the time and to queue up orderly.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
what the fsk are you talking about?
what? i never advocated being monolinguistic...I used to teach Korean to Americans in Korea just for this purpose...you're way off
**my point** was that in a research lab of Moroccans, Aussies, French, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Argentinian researchers the common language is **English** and will be for at least the next 100 years
I speak Spanish and Korean, woop de damn doo! It doesn't mean shit when I'm in a work group with a Japanese, Tunisian, and French person.
**They all speak English.**
When those nationalities working in a lab all by default speak Chinese, then maybe you'll have some sort of point to make...but don't hold your breath this century
Thank you Dave Raggett
Saying they are the same language due to the writing system is a bit strange if you ask the question, were they the same language before the writing system was grafted onto them?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
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So... once they catered to blacks, blacks scored higher? You don't say?
So where's the link?
Gosh, your country sure got unlucky when kidnapping a few foreign nations to provide slaves. It's a wonder the early Americans ever got enough work out of them to create the wealth the US enjoys today. They must have beaten the tar out of them to get that kind of return on investment, LOL! Well, better luck next time when enslaving a bunch of lesser races. May i suggest Nordic types, Swedes,Norwegians, etc? Diligent workers, yet able to withstand all sorts of harsh treatment without death or crippling.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
A more accurate headline would be '99% of \westerners do not know shit about the world's most populous nation,'
Which is not all that much more than they know about themselves.......
I can't speak Mandarin either and i'm pretty smart.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Mandarin is an 'encoded' language
Casteism
@readin: I see your point, ... it would be like calling Chinese, Japanese and Korean the same because they shared the same Chinese symbols. Er -- strike that original statement...my bad. ;-)
Anon wrote: "And I assume you mean "Chinese characters" instead of "kanji." Kanji refers to the Chinese characters that were adopted by the Japanese."
I look too much at Japanese. I thought Kanji mean Chinese character/word? But that's looking at it from a Japanese viewpoint, I supposed. It was your calling that to my attention that started me thinking how language, especially in this case, existed before the importing of the writing system and how Imperialistic the previous way I had learned it could possible sound.
Reprogramming the biased way you were taught knowledge as a child is so interesting as it uncovers biases in what or how you were taught. Not that either might not be true from a particular point of view, thought I see CJK more as separate, and that makes it easier how the earlier invention of a writing system that can be adapted to local needs can be a tool for both unification and Colonialism.
I still find the difference between syllabic-and-conceptual languages from the alphabetic languages to be fascinating. It's hard to imagine one's brain working in a different system and how that would introduce it's own biases on a more primary level than the information we were taught.
Anon quoted: "The Wikipedia article takes a neutral approach and calls them "varieties of Chinese [wikipedia.org].
Probably the safest approach.