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."

Comments

Re:Why don't they just learn Ebonics?

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Big surprise. American blacks on average are poorer than American whites. Meaning, live in worse neighbourhoods ,visit worse schools and therefore have a worse education than whites. Africans, even more so.

Asians use heavily abstracted, symbolic writing in contrast to European, phonetically oriented writing. If you have ever performed one of those IQ tests you will notice they have a bias towards detecting logical progressions in abstract, visual symbols. Asians will naturally have a keener eye, better memory and generally feel more at ease with the visual symbols in IQ tests, as it has familiarity to their writing.

There may be some merit to IQ tests, but their scope is limited and they do not measure the "raw intelligence potential" of a person. Only how good they are at solving IQ tests...