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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."
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.
what % of the US does not 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.
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.
Spoken like someone who has not realized that this is pretty common in the USA. Often a person will not be hired for a job that involves lots of client facing interaction if his accent is too bad. A rather famous tv personality Alton Brown had to learn to speak without an accent to be able to do his geek cooking show.
Yes, I would. American Samoa uses English as does Hawaii and most of the other locations we took over via imperialist type stuff. The only one I can think of that does not would be Puerto Rico. All major countries could be considered empires.
Also, I don't imagine all of the former Soviet Union spoke Russian, or did they?
Funny how people who are bigoted against Chinese always project their biggotry.
Hokkien is not Mandarin with an accent, it's more comarable with Pennsylvania Dutch. A native English speaker can understand a strong Southern accent with effort. Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien (and Taiwanese and Shanghaiese for that matter) are not mutually intelligible at all. I would suggest you work on improving your tiny knowledge of China if you are going to speak on this issue, and examine your own prejudices rather than accuse other people.
Why would you use quotes for that?
Do you not consider non-English speakers to be American? I do not believe citizenship requires it. Immigrants must pass a test that I bet you would not.
There are some southern accents with no amount of effort can I understand. Deep Georgia is one. They say specific as pacific, well becomes whale and on and on it goes. It would take as long as learning a new language for me to learn that.
To the rest of you comment, I have no idea. I don't how to say much of anything in any Chinese language.
Because even God does not trust those bastards in the dark.
In India, English has more or less usurped the position as national exchange language, a role that Hindi was supposed to fill.
And yet somehow people manage to have perfectly normal conversations in it. If you're going to argue that a language isn't "useful" then your dealing with pretty insurmountable evidence to the contrary when, you know, people use it.
Plus, the reason that Chinese local languages haven't developed is because they're being actively suppressed by the central government in Beijing. It's not a damned coincidence.
It is not a sad truth and not all of China wants to convert to one language or this article would not exist.
The USA is great because it is a melting pot, not because we are uniform and unbending.
The sun never sets on the British Empire, but it's mostly cloudy with light showers ; ).
I think many countries have roughly the same percentage of people that don't speak "The Queen's English" or whatever the local equivalent of that may be, or are even unintelligible upon arrival in the capitol so to say.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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.
Also, I don't imagine all of the former Soviet Union spoke Russian, or did they?
No. It was more common, and taught in schools, but not universally known.
If you travel round Eastern Europe you will find old people often know German or Russian, younger people learn English.
While there might be cases where the accent can't be understood, this is fairly rare. And I think you would learn to understand the accent a lot faster than you imagine. China on the other hand has five main groups of dialects (and this isn't counting "ethnic minorities") none of which are mutually intelligible at all.
But even the thickest of southern accents are still English, with pretty the same grammar and vocabulary, and even a lot of pronunciation in common ("well" and "whale" are close, but not the same, however, "well" and "wohl" [the German equivalent] are quite differently pronounced and also have somewhat divergent meanings). What people often fail to understand about Chinese dialects is that they are actually separate languages, and usually only called dialects because of the apparent cultural and political unity of China. As the saying goes: "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
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.
It doesn't even have a written language. It doesn't have words for many modern concepts. It can't distinguish between "mirror" and "light" for example.
Cantonese uses the same orthography as Mandarin excepting it has some variants of characters. The rest of this stuff is just plain wrong.
No, they make do with hand signals. What do you think?
Pacific and Specific do not even start with the same letters. Well and whale is easy compared to some changes.
I understand that fine, German my first language is like that. I cannot understand some old northerners.
Bavarian German has whole other words, as another example.
In English the word american means someone from the USA. What language are we conversing in?
If we were speaking in Portuguese you might have a point.
Anyone who advocated a national language and tried to institute the teaching of the language would be called racist.
That's hilarious because a non-racist would assume that all races are equally able to learn, read, and speak a national language. The person claiming a national language is "racist" is implying that some races are less able than others to cope with such a change, which is itself a racist belief. It is amazing to me the way this is so often glossed over and not pointed out.
This then would have the effect of raising the overall standard of living of the entire country...
I don't know about all of that, but being able to understand one another because there is a standard is how you maintain a nation long-term, without having it spilt into factions of people who see each other as different from the rest, only to become Balkanized over time.
NOTE: this is not a joke... It is a sad truth in the US today!!!
Another sad truth: political power is gained and expanded by dividing people, not by uniting them. The extreme hypersensitivity encouraged by identity politics and the obsession with group identity has two major effects. One, it encourages emotional, irrational thinking which helps prevent the sort of attention and scrutiny those in power don't want. Two, it produces division and squabbling over matters that by design cannot be resolved, creating much distraction, wasting much energy, and most of all allowing politicians to keep (and expand) power by promising to protect each group from all of the others. It's classic divide-and-conquer.
Inventing "racists" where they do not actually exist is never going to lead to the sort of color-blind society that judges people by the content of their character. "I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law", Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I lived there for 4 years in my youth, this was after living for 4 years in Alabama. Even then I regularly ran across people who I simply could not understand.
Last year I was speaking to dell tech support about a server that needed some parts and as I could not understand the CSR I asked for a native english speaker. He then slightly more clearly yelled something about Georgia, I am assuming he was in that state. He did eventually transfer me to someone I could understand.
I lived there 4 years and during that time learned some small amount of it. I can understand some of it, like those translations I listed. Knowing 50% of the words in a sentence does not always mean you can understand a sentence.
I speak more than one language, and am aware of what you mean. Switching between them takes work. No amount of work so far has let me understand some southern accents.
Get a Japanese toilet. Luxury models are almost self-aware at this point.
Dropping the "s" off "specific" does not mean the accent is an entirely different language. Do the people in Germany who say "is'" instead of "ist" speak a different language just because of that? No.
It's true that there are many vowel changes, but it's not usually more different than, say, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift), but I'd imagine you're more likely to have heard people speak with that accent than with the backwoods southern one, due to greater media presence of speakers of the former.
Regarding old northerners in Germany, they *do* truly speak a different language: low German, which is more closely related to English and Dutch than standard High German. The big difference between low and high German dialects is the presence or lack of the second High German consonant shift. Low German dialects (using Dutch as an example) will have "ik", "maken", "appel", "hopen", "tidj", etc., while High German has "ich", "machen", "apfel", "hoffen", "zeit", etc. Here's the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift. As you might imagine, this is a much bigger difference than accents in the US. As a native of the US, I've never been completely unable to understand someone's accent, though I can, of course, have some initial difficulty.
It's not just an accent. My surname is Wu in mandarin, Ng in cantonese and pronounced Go or No in other dialects.
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.
Dropping the S from specific does not sound at all like pacific, any more than any other two rhyming words. It was a simple example. For me the worst is when they run all their words together. Old northerners in Germany often sound like they are doing that too.
When something becomes a dialect vs another language seems a bit like selecting where colors change in a rainbow.
wich is German and not Dutch. More about that right here
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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?
I don't know if it counts but the Philippines. -It used to be under US control formally if for only a little while, informally a long time.
They have the same problem China does and it's a smaller area, The most spoken language is Tagalog and even then
so many distance regional differences many can't talk to each other.
That's the way it was when I lived there; hitting the wikipedia it's much worse than I thought, as Tagalog has been replaced
with Filipino and English
Official status
Filipino is constitutionally designated as the national language of the Philippines and, along with English, one of two official languages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_language
I get that. I was merely complaining about the GPs claim.
I should have made that more clear. I have relatives by marriage that are Chinese. One attempted to speak to me in one language, when I did not understand he became louder and spoke in another Chinese language, at that point his wife laughed at him and translated to English.
What reason do you have to make up stuff? Mirror is min ken and light has a lot of words depending iif you mean not heavy, or light in color, or bring me a light, to alight, to light up. Or if you are not making this up, your Cantonese teacher cheated you.
It is most assuredly not modern German any more than it is Dutch. It is low German, which is not what your typical German speaks or understands.
The US (I assume that this is because they got into the game fairly late) is actually sort of odd among imperial powers:
We had massive territorial expansion (pretty much the process that made 'the continental united states' mean what it does today); the whole of which was assimilated and crunched into statehood in the space of a century, with almost nothing left but some French influences in Louisiana, assorted totally-fucked-over native tribal groups, and some Spanish speaking populations that are now linguistically near-indiscernable against the much larger number of post-statehood Latin American immigrants.
Outside of the continental US + Alaska, we almost entirely failed to leave an English-speaking zone corresponding to our imperial possessions. Phillipines and Cuba? Lost, and the Spanish made a much bigger impression during their time there. Even Puerto Rico, retained, speaks a great deal of Spanish. Guam and Hawaii are the only two (aside from a scattering of incredibly small pacific islands, some of which still retained a local language, like the Marshall Islands, despite having a native population barely larger than the assorted military assets we had scattered around during the pacific phase of WWII) that come to mind.
Britain, France, Spain, all have massive chunks of the globe speaking their respective languages as an outcome of colonialism, even as they've mostly lost those colonies. Most of the areas that speak US English and aren't in the US do so for reasons that came after we realized that there are cheaper methods than imperial occupation to get what you want.
It's not analogous to being able to speak the "Queen's English" vs. other varieties of English. Even American's can sometimes make themselves understood over there (worked for me). There really are no mutually unintelligible varieties of English. At worst, a thick accent may take some getting used to.
As I understand it from native speakers, Mandarin vs. Cantonese is completely different, as they're not mutually intelligible. OTOH the writing is a different story. Written Chinese is pretty much the same regardless of dialect. So while the Chinese system of writing is inferior to writing with an alphabet in many ways, it does serve the purpose of bridging dialects.
Can you run air traffic control effectively with it? Sounds like it might be a bit like trying to use Navajo. I don't claim you couldn't; just asking.
You are not really comparing like with like.
When you learn a foreign language, you learn the standard pronunciation. All of your training is done in this standard dialect.
Your description (I think) is is of living with people who speak a certain accent, then interacting with someone who speaks a much stronger or different variation of that accent. If you were to live in the hometown of those people you could not understand for a few weeks, I think you would have no trouble understanding them.
The difference between their speach and standard English is still much smaller than between, for example, German and English. But because you were rarely exposed to that particular version, you found it hard to understand.
It's not just an accent. My surname is Wu in mandarin, Ng in cantonese and pronounced Go or No in other dialects.
Or /eng/ if you follow a particular alternative rock band.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I think if I lived in a foreign country I would quickly learn that language too. Immersion is a quick teacher.
I live in the south for 8 years, Alabama and Georgia. I still have trouble with southern accents. Sure they are not another language, but in some cases they might as well be.
To me, "specific" and "pacific" sound very similar. The vowels and all the consonants except for the initial 's' in "specific" are the same.
It sounds like they are running their words together because you aren't familiar with the accent/dialect/language. People say that about any speech they can't readily understand. I've heard Americans complain about Spanish (and even German) in the exact same way.
In some bits they speak Korean, in others Tibetan and places like the Gobi desert are a very long way from Beijing.
Puerto Rico also counts since China has similar quasi-independant (as in they can make choices on mostly unimportant stuff) provinces like the ethnic Korean one on the Russian/North Korean border.
Maybe five major countries I'd call empires off the top of my head but there could be more - Russia, USA, China, UK, France all have disparate far flung parts that are under some sort of control from home. One good antidote from the simplistic empire=evil newspeak is to read some of the stuff Mark Twain reported from the Austrian-Hungarian empire, it's so familiar he may as well have been describing proceedings in the US Congress. An empire is not evil in itself or even undemocratic in itself, it's just a label based on size.
Ever since Doc Hollywood, whenever I hear a woman's southern drawl on the phone I see Julie Warner
Written Chinese is pretty much the same regardless of dialect. So while the Chinese system of writing is inferior to writing with an alphabet in many ways, it does serve the purpose of bridging dialects.
Well, yes and no. For the most part, people would write things using the grammatical rules that Mandarin speakers use. Cantonese speakers would end up having to mentally rearrange what they're looking at for it make sense. In a way, you are correct, it does bridge the dialects. But it bridges it in the same way the writing system bridged the gap between ancient Korea & China speakers. Very awkwardly with a fair amount of training involved.
Apparently "yawl", "merkin", "ebonics" or whatever, but don't presume to correct English just because your local version from outside of England uses it that way. I certainly don't assume that my local version of English trumps whatever is used in England. ..."
..."
Both of the below are also English - two versions of text on an aircraft safety card, the latter version being a bit more local than the first:
"In the event of aircraft depressurisation
"If plane go bugger up
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.
Not really.
Way fewer than you think.
Interesting factoid: the only city in America where a Spanish-language TV station has EVER been the #1 station in its media market is Miami (Telemundo, I believe). In San Juan, where Spanish is both the de-facto and official language, the two top channels have always been Fox and NBC. And in Miami's case, it was kind of a weird situation where somebody at Univision said something non-condemnatory about Fidel Castro, Univision refused to denounce and fire them, and for a few years if you were Cuban in Miami, it was (*cough*) socially frowned upon to admit in polite company that you watched Univision as a restult. Meanwhile, Miami had 6 or 7 English-language networks prior to the big consolidation a few years ago, and no one other channel could match the popularity of "Betty la Fea" (just to give one example), so Univision ended up slightly beating out everyone else by a small plurality.
Now, for the harsh truth: it's impossible to live in the United States for 25+ years without achieving some degree of English competency, whether it's intentional or not. Even if you went out of your way to surround yourself only with people who speak Spanish, watched only Spanish TV shows, and read only Spanish publications, every time you leave the house you're going to be surrounded by English... even in the most hardcore Spanish enclaves in America. And regardless of how hard YOU might try to avoid English, your kids are going to watch English-language TV shows and movies with their friends, speak English at school, and around you whenever they don't want you to know what they're talking about with their friends.
Let me emphasize the last point, because I've had to cruelly disillusion many of my Cuban friends who were absolutely *convinced* that their parents, or at least their grandparents and elderly aunts/uncles "couldn't speak English", and would say things in front of them (in English) as though they weren't there. Without exception, they were wrong, and were horrified when the truth finally came out. I still remember when one of my friends told me, "My mom doesn't know English". I pointed out that she was a paralegal for a law firm. He countered with the excuse that it was in Hialeah. I replied that even if the law firm were in Hialeah, there was no... way... in... HELL any law firm would have hired her if she literally didn't speak a word of English. Six months later, he admitted I was right, and that he was shocked to discover that his mother was quite fluent in English. She just never spoke English around *him*, because she liked being able to eavesdrop on him when he was talking to his friends :-D
As a practical matter, anybody who's born in America is going to be fluent in English by the time he's a teenager... EVEN IF his parents try to send him to schools where Spanish is spoken. Anybody who's lived in America for more than 10 years is going to have a grasp of English, and by the time they've lived here for 25 years, they're going to know English at least as well as my 100% Ohio-bred pure-Gringo parents know Spanish after living in South Florida for 25 years. And if they're emigrating to the US via official means, they almost certainly have a college degree, which almost guarantees that they've studied English for at least a few years.
Maybe i am missing something, but what does learning English have to do with "USA! USA! USA!"?
Like English that was imposed to native of America...
It's a different world today than it was during my 1960's childhood when China looked more like famine ridden N. Korea and the two super powers were in a global nuclear stand-off. Today I still live in Australia, I'm a software developer for a Japanese multi-national, the bulk of our coding is done by Russian contractors in Moscow, and the end customer is often Chinese.
All but one of the Australian test team originally hail from the former USSR, they all pleasant people to work with and live up to their nations "MacGyver" reputation for getting something working no matter what. Unsurprisingly they are not the blood thirsty albinos I grew up watching on TV. All the Russians I work with are bilingual, not so common in the Aussies or Japanese, yet often my requirements come written in Japanese (and the end customer is Chinese). My Boss' Boss is not only a technically competent maths major who "grew up" with the software, he also reads/speaks fluent Japanese, that's a rare combination of skills in this country, which is why they pay him the "big bucks".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There are many languages backed by Chinese characters, and the own nature of the characters helps that. You need to remember a few thousands of them to read a newspaper, and in many time the character does not give you a clue on how to pronounce it. The funny thing is that two person may be able to understand themselves by writing but not by speaking.
And English cannot distinguish between "light" the radiation, "light" as not heavy, "light" as not dark. Seems people manage fine anyway.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Immigrants must pass a test that I bet you would not.
Technically I'm a British citizen with permanent residence status in Australia. I arrived as a child and will have been here for 50yrs next February. I could become an Aussie citizen anytime I feel like it, if such a feeling does one day stir inside of me I will deliberately not study for that fucking degrading test and hope to hell I fail it badly but honestly. My response will be a heavily accented "Struth mate, that's going straight to the pool room. Is there an op-shop around here where I can get a cheap frame?".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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 ----
More than teaching the locals their language, what they did was either exterminate the locals and repopulate with their own people (as Spain did in Latin America and the UK with Australia), or put together an administrative region so diverse that they have to use the colonial language to talk to each other (e.g. India, Nigeria, most African states...), since choosing one local language may be considered a violation of other ethnic groups' status. Pakistan tried to force East Pakistan to speak Urdu instead of Bengali, so East Pakistan seceded and changed name to Bangladesh. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all colonies of European powers at some point, and none uses the colonial language anymore, because they have a strongly predominant local language.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
China has more English speakers than any other country.
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I went to school in the US. The only required language for us was English. You had opportunities to learn Spanish, German, or French, but they were not required to graduate. If all you spoke was Spanish, you still were required to learn English. I don't think its much different over there.
Nelson? whats an 18th century British admiral got to do with it
Indeed. The common consensus among Americans I asked was that a larger part of the US population does not speak or write English well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
But in English those things are symbolically different and used in different contexts. In Cantonese (in its data model, so to speak) lights, windows and mirrors are the same things.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How would that apply to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. generations of Asians?
Even if that's true (which some other commenters have said is not), it's still exactly the same as the English example given by the parent (orzetto). You said "those things are symbolically different and used in different contexts" -- are windows and mirrors not used in different contexts? And if you found a language that distinguished regularly different types of windows, would you then count English as deficient for generally just using one word in that same context?
I'm sorry you find Cantonese confusing. Apparently that isn't a serious issue for Cantonese speakers, as in Cantonese speaking areas they have lights, windows and mirrors, and so presumably have found some way to distinguish when specifying those items.
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.
Written Chinese is pretty much the same regardless of dialect.
Not quite... 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. When you factor in the written language, that's when it gets even more interesting. As far as I can tell, there are only two dialects of written Chinese: simplified and traditional. Pretty much anyone that speaks any form of Chinese in China, except the Cantonese areas, use simplified Chinese. The Cantonese speakers and every Mandarin speaker in most other countries, Taiwan for example, use the traditional form. The two written forms share many similar words, but there are enough words that aren't the same that being fluent in only one means reading in the other is almost unintelligible.
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
But in English those things are symbolically different and used in different contexts. In Cantonese (in its data model, so to speak) lights, windows and mirrors are the same things.
Cantonese is my native tongue and you are either being badly misled, or you are sprouting from you ass.
Too bad /. cannot handle unicode, the characters for them are:
light: http://unicode-table.com/en/5149/
window: http://unicode-table.com/en/7A97/
mirror: http://unicode-table.com/en/93E1/
Perhaps you can share which character you meant that have Cantonese speaking mixing up these 3 things?
One of my coworkers was born and raised in Atlanta, and he barely has an accent. The first time I asked him why he didn't have an accent he blew smoke in my face and said, "Because I'm educated." This from a guy who would launch bottle rockets from his hand and whose idea of a good night out involved a fight.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Cantonese is what they speak in Hong Kong. That's not exactly a backwater. In my experience at semiconductor factories in Asia, they use the English words for technical terms that haven't been adopted into the language yet - this is true in Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, etc. I can't read any of the signs in the clean rooms, yet I can pick out a bunch of English words.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That seems to be minor, though. At least, our Hong Kong (Cantonese) and Taiwanese (mostly Mandarin) field service guys can communicate by writing to one another, but not by speaking.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You are talking past the other commenter. An accent is still using the same language, but pronouncing the words differently. Learn the 40-odd phonemes and you learn the accent. It's like a secret decoder ring - very simple to figure out the encoding... just a simple substitution of what you are used to.
The Chinese dialects are completely different. They are related, but in the same way that English and German are related. It is not at all trivial for a mature speaker of English to learn German and vice versa.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Doesn't matter, since the official language of international civil aeronautics is English.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
While they are German-descended, the language is closer to Dutch than to modern German.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
Not true. Chinese is my first language, and since I'm not Taiwanese, I still have no friggin idea how to pronounce those Zhuyin symbols. They are not actual Chinese words (characters).
Don't quote me on this.
You are making stuff up, or is perhaps based on a half-assed/selective reading of Wikipedia?
Cantonese as written in Hong Kong and Macau uses Traditional characters, along with some characters of its own. Some of the characters as used in Cantonese have different meanings as opposed to when they're used in Mandarin (and not just different pronunciation).
I live with a Cantonese speaker, and have visited Guangdong and Hong Kong numerous times.
Oh, and I've also got a English-Cantonese dictionary and phrasebook that includes words and phrases such as "shopping centre", "department of surgery", "Space Museum", and "hovercraft".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Flattered with your title (it's my first spoken language), but you really have no idea what you're talking about.
There are various "accents" of Mandarin, but Cantonese, Hokkien, etc are not accents. I'd say they're somewhere between dialects and distinct languages. Even discounting phonetic differences, the written vocabulary can be very different -- to the extent that I probably understand written Japanese more than the colloquial use of various Chinese "dialects". (To a Mandarin speaker, I often hypothesize that Cantonese written in Chinese characters can be harder to understand than Japanese-written-in-mostly-kanji... it's a fun fact that shows the divergence of the local dialects/languages)
Not sure whether anyone thinks that people speaking Hokkien "suck" (I haven't heard of any such "dialect-discrimination", though the official discouragement [or even persecution] of local spoken dialects is surely happening), but it's a practical problem for communication if there's no common legible language for people within a country.
Don't quote me on this.
When something becomes a dialect vs another language seems a bit like selecting where colors change in a rainbow.
Indeed it's like trying to define the boundaries of (biology) species and variety. But still, in some cases the differences between Chinese dialects can arguably be greater than some of those within the European "languages".
To illustrate the differences between so called "dialects", "why" is "wei shen me" [1] in Mandarin, but "dim gai" in Cantonese; "who" is "shei" in Mandarin, but "bin gor" in Cantonese. Negatives ("no-something") usually takes a prefix of "bu" in Mandarin but "mm" in Cantonese. Their written forms are totally different too, so it's not like we have a very funny way to pronounce the same thing. I'd say it is the "basic language" that is different, while the large corpus of vocabulary is mostly shared among the "dialects". But then, vocabulary is liberally borrowed between the European languages too.
There's a few things that obscures the wide variation between the "dialects". One is that we write written Chinese in mostly the same way, due to tradition and communicative purposes. Standard modern Chinese is written in the form of modern Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua) and the norm is that "self-respecting" educated Chinese write in that standard form regardless of their spoken dialect. The second is that while our pronunciations are can be markedly different, a large part of the written script remains identical, because Chinese characters are not pronunciation based. So while there may be variations in the script in different European languages (eg. "wine" (en) => "vin" (fr) => "wein" (de)), the written text is the same in Chinese, even though there may be large pronunciation differences.
A fun thing that I like to mention is how written Japanese might in some cases be more legible to Mandarin speakers than written Cantonese. The Kanji in written Japanese has roots in classical Chinese (something comparable to Latin in Europe), and thus if the Japanese text is mostly written in Kanji (i.e. avoiding kana where possible), it's quite legible to those who understand Chinese. For example, the Kanji form of "who" in Japanese ("da-re") is written in the same character as "shei" in Mandarin. Of course, when spoken it is totally mutually illegible, but you can see how a supposedly "different" language (Chinese vs Japanese) can have more similar roots than a "dialect" within the Chinese language family.
[1] ("me" pronounced as in "mermaid" without the suffix)
Don't quote me on this.
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 !
However, many Chinese characters do contain phonetic and/or semantic cues. E.g. pao2 'gun' = huo3 'fire' + bao1 'bag', 'package'.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This is literally true: So long as we retain the Falklands, the empire spans enough time zones that it is always daytime somewhere.
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 first vowel sounds very different to me -- the "e" in "specific" is the same sound used in Pez, television, or pet, while the "a" in "pacific" is either the sound found in paw, caw, and law or the one found in dumb and plumb, depending on the person speaking. (I'm from Northern California, FWIW.)
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Oh for fucks sake, I don't even come from your country and I can understand that accent. You must be wilfully trying not to understand.
There are plenty of mutually unintelligible TERMS in different variations of English. There just happens to be enough compatibility that foreign English speakers can take some time and explain (in English) the bits of the language you don't at all understand.
10 English terms/phrases you would not understand without explanation:
http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/life/10-indianisms-652344
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
"Cogito ergo sum. There, that was easy. Oh, who's this? What? What's he doing? No. NO. NOOOOO! Oh my God, make it stop!"
I don't know where to begin. You are not totally incorrect, but your omissions change the whole idea of how dialects work in Chinese.
First of all, understand that (written) Chinese is a logographic language. You can understand Chinese without being able to speak the spoken varieties. This is what the Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese did for centuries for learning and diplomacy. In the end, a lot of Chinese words were adopted into these languages but that's a discussion for another day.
In the past, the standard for written Chinese was Classical (or Literary) Chinese, based on the rules of vocabulary and grammar of the central plains between 500BC and 220AD. This was used extensively in learning and in government and in the past functioned similar to Latin in western and central Europe.
As the spoken varieties of Chinese started to branch out, the standard form of writing differed more and more to the spoken varieties. However, this did not stop local dialects from writing their vernacular in Chinese characters. In those days, you need to be learned in order to be able to read and write, and if you are learned, you would know how to read and write Literary Chinese (just like Latin). So most of the writing we see in Chinese history until the modern era was done in Literary Chinese.
However, in the modern era in China, and I'm simplifying this quite a lot - to promote literacy, it was decided to standardize on a new type of writing style, that based writing on the Mandarin dialect. This is called written vernacular Chinese and is what you are talking about. However, not everything is written this way.
Local 'dialects' can be written in the local vernacular (or close to it) using words specific to the dialect. This is often done in Hong Kong and in Canton/Guangzhou. In fact, there are many newspapers and magazines in HK that is written in the Cantonese dialect.
However, written Mandarin and written Cantonese for most part is mutually intelligible as the grammatical differences are not huge even though the pronunciation can be very different. There are differences in word use, but these are easily identifiable and can be navigated around.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
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
Sure, but there are many exceptions, and you never get the tone, therefore it does not help if you face an unknown character. At most it helps when learning.
You're conflating the "denotes country of origin" sense of the word and the "denotes continent of origin" sense of the word. If I called someone from Europe "European", I'd be technically correct, but they might correct the label by saying they're "German".
Here's why people from the USA are commonly called "American". It's quite simple. What is the term for someone from the United States of America if not "American"? It sure as hell isn't United Statesian, or Statist, or Uniter, or some other nonsense.
There is a dual meaning for "American", but there is no label for country of origin when referencing someone from the USA. Beyond the fact that you don't normally call someone from China an Asian if you know they're Chinese (the by-far more common reference is by country, not by continent), the separation between continent term and country term just doesn't exist for this particular country.
Then there's the issue of North America and South America, which makes this whole derpathon by people not from the USA even more complicated. America isn't even a continent, so the term "American" in reference to people "from America" doesn't make sense on its own. It's like calling people Eurasian, as in they're origin is somewhere in a third of the world...
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 !
And English cannot distinguish between "light" the radiation, "light" as not heavy, "light" as not dark. Seems people manage fine anyway.
That was very enlightening
I think if I lived in a foreign country I would quickly learn that language too. Immersion is a quick teacher.
I live in the south for 8 years, Alabama and Georgia. I still have trouble with southern accents. Sure they are not another language, but in some cases they might as well be.
That totally amazes me. My wife moved from Texas to Yorkshire and went from not understanding a word to understanding everything in about a month. I had a contract in Glasgow and for the first week I had difficulty understanding people with stronger accents but after that it just sounded ordinary. After 8 years my wife had to change her accent when visiting America to be understood (for some reason my accent doesn't seem to change).
Before Mao ruled China, there were still a lot of ancient stone castles left in China. Today, there is nothing left, other than that long stonewall.
Similarly, the communist Chinese "reformed" the Chinese written words due to political reason.
The "simplified Chinese" was born not because it's simpler to learn, but because the Communists wanted to get rid of EVERYTHING that they thought not-conforming to their Marxist ideology.
Over 90% of the Chinese in China are from the Han tribe, and they have been using the common written form of the Chinese language ever since the Qin Dynasty (not to be confused with the qing dynasty of the 17th century), only in recent years (in the 1990's) that they found a secretive written language, handed down from mother to daughter (or daughter-in-law), has existed in the Hunan province for the past 2 millennia.
What you have said
However, this did not stop local dialects from writing their vernacular in Chinese characters
is erroneous, as the "specialized characters", such as the "mou" in the Cantonese dialect, is far too few in between to be counted as "former vernacular writing system".
Of the about 50K characters of the Chinese characters, fewer than 100 "localized vernacular characters" (among the Han tribe) have ever existed.
It's akin to the way Americans use "gotten" and "mown" instead of the Queen's language's "got" and "mowed".
Are you going to state that the American English is incompatible with the Queen's language just because of the spelling deviations ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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?
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".
Russian was very widespread in the Soviet Union. Especially in cities. Some republics have almost switched to Russian. For example in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan Russian is still used by the majority of the population.
We do the same in English: does it really bother anyone to use an Italian vocabulary when talking about music?
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.
Literally true.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
English has borrowed so many Romance language words (perhaps almost 60% between French and Latin) that the vocabulary is significantly Romance in origin. I even took Latin in the hopes of helping my SAT scores!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This is because those who propose nationalingizing languase are in deed, racist.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Chinese is a big group of spoken languages and calling the different languages dialects is misleading. They're a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
All correct, except that the "language" spoken at the northern coast of german is not considered a dialect but "its own language" (like dutch).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That's only if you intentionally pronounce each syllable fully (with knowledge of the spelling -- which you have because you are literate). In normal speech, all vowels except for the stressed one (the one before the 'f') are reduced to schwas. The words could be written "puh-SIFF-uhk" and "spuh-SIFF-uhk". Note that there is sometimes variety in the nature of the schwas, but there is very slim evidence that they are different within, say, a word. If there are differences, they are between dialects. If you put your speech into a program like Praat, you would not likely see evidence of the schwas being pronounced differently.
I was using "dialect" here to refer to different varieties of continental west Germanic (that is, everything except Danish, which is north Germanic). I should have used the word "language" as that was my intent. Sorry for the confusion.
I guess only westerners who never digged into the topic consider the various chinese languages a dialect. (Same for India).
Even in Spain, where a lot of languages are very similar, most of the "regional dialects" are considered a "language" and not a dialect, e.g. Catalan.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Low german does not exist. Perhaps you meant "platt deutsch" in the sense of "platt" equaling "low".
There are about 15 german dialects, perhaps a few more. The modern "high german" is only considered "high german" because Martin Luther wrote the german translation of the bible in "that dialect". Hence it became the "upper class" german and is now the german used in TV and printing.
Most people today in germany still speak their local dialect at home, or a mixed language which is by wording high german but by pronunciation a dialect.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Half those Indian phrases I understood. Of course, I'm a way old Canuck. Some were odd, or unknown.
and in many time the character does not give you a clue on how to pronounce it.
That is nonsense on two points:
a) yes, the character usually gives a clue how to pronounce it
b) more important: you don't need that as you obviously read a word you know, so you also know how to pronounce it
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They are not the same thing as they all are written with a different "Kanji" (don't know the chinese term for Kanji).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Many, many Americans speak only Spanish. The vast majority of them live Central or South America, of course.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
yes, the character usually gives a clue how to pronounce it
Here is an example: sòng, which means give. Where is the hint for prononciation?
Apparently your English is not as good as you think it is.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
High and low refer to terrain and not prestige. Low German languages were spoken in the lowlands along the North Sea coast, and high German languages were spoken much further inland. High German is traditionally further split into central and upper dialect groups, with the upper groups being in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, and central being in between those places and the lowlands. It should be noted that low German languages include Dutch and also English, which derives from an amalgam of Saxon and some other low German dialects (dialects at the time, though everything is now separate languages). English and Dutch are certain prestige languages, but still low Germanic.
Platt Deutsch == Low German. I've never seen any indication that these are anything other than synonyms. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German
Are you speaking of the legal variety of immigrants or illegal? I don't know of any test required of illegal immigrants. And why would you desire to wage on my ability to pass or not pass a test in comparison to an immigrant - legal or otherwise?
Britain, France, Spain, all have massive chunks of the globe speaking their respective languages as an outcome of colonialism, even as they've mostly lost those colonies
Including the US.
The US is one of the colonies. Now bow to your queen ;-)
I think if they used an alphabet they would truly rule the world.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
They never invented a specific term for themselves because their self-centeredness is so great that no other culture/society in the area is given any thought or importance. Hence the reason why all other cultures in the area have given them names in deference to their self-importance.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Lots of spanish tv stations have been number one in America. Never been to mexico or any other spanish speaking country in america?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If one becomes familiar with say, cantonese, hokkien, and toi-san, and has any knowledge of linguistics then the paths each dialect took in terms of sound aggregation, consonant drift, certain emphasis on certain parts of the mouth start to become obvious which opens up even more understanding of an unknown dialect.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Interesting in what dialect is it Go? Wondering what interactions they had with japanese since that's the japanese pronounciation.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Actually, they are. You can't graduate from high school without at least 4 years of English. At least, that's what my stepdaughter (a 2010 HS graduate) and wife (both Chinese nationals) tell me...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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!
The last thing I want is 220VAC located in close proximity to my nether regions and copious supplies of water...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The character you linked dis composed from two "radicals". :D
The left one, which means "foot" and is part in characters like "way" (dao, tao) and the right one which looks like the character for heaven with two accents on top of it.
Very often the whole character is pronounced like one of the two "radicals." However I don't know if this is the case for this particular character
Radicals in quotes as if I remember right only the left one is indeed a so called radical and the right one might be not.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.)
Mandarin is Chinese mangled by for foreign rulers like the Mongols.
Nearly all countries define a "high language" and one or a few "low language"(s). That has not much to do with "hight above the sea".
In your case "low german" seems to be the name the english speaking language researchers gave to "platt deutsch". Forgive me but something like this a german can not really know :D
The "high german" we speak now is coming from the area of Muenster, not very high above sea level.
Bavaria is even higher and most germans consider its language a "low german".
I guess you try to tackle it from a language researcher point of view? The post I previously answered to, was not clear in that regard.
"Low German or Low Saxon (Plattdüütsch, Nedderdüütsch; Standard German: Plattdeutsch or Niederdeutsch;"
"Low german" is ambigious in translation. It either means the opposite to "high german" which is "rural dialect" (simplified :D) or "Niederdeutsch" which is what you refer to.
However I now read the article completely and I find it pretty far sketched.
"Plattduetch" is certainly not so wide spread as this article claims. In our times it is _only_ spoken at the coasts. That there are minorities in Mexico or Bolivia who speak Platt, I doubt. I guess the article is mixing up several variations of "Niederdeutsch" and is considering them the same language? Perhaps because they evolved all from "lower saxon"?
Looking at the linked contrast article about "high german" now ... I really wonder if german language researchers would agree with any of the two definitions.
Switzerland e.g. certainly does not speak what a german considers "Hochdeutsch". While "Plattdeutsch" is a Saxon dialect, "Switzerduetch" is an "Alemannien" dialect.
Seems there are indeed two interpretations for "Hochdeutsch", one for languages that are indeed spoken relatively south and high, and one which most laymen will refer to is "Standard German".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I've never read any linguistics book that says anything other than what I wrote above. They all explicitly mention that High German is called such because it came from the higher terrain of Germany.
There's no relevant to what you've said about there being different varieties of low German. That was never in dispute and is not, in fact, in dispute. I even mentioned it in my post.
Don't let the current distribution of dialects fool you. Historically, places like Muenster would have been solidly low German. Once East Central German became the prestige dialect, it spread and supplanted the other dialects, even in the north. The same thing happened in France, where historically, what we now call French was in fact a minority language from the areas around Paris.
and in many time the character does not give you a clue on how to pronounce it. That is nonsense on two points: a) yes, the character usually gives a clue how to pronounce it b) more important: you don't need that as you obviously read a word you know, so you also know how to pronounce it
The character doesn't give a very good clue, certainly not enough that you can guess at it without someone having already told you.
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.
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.
Yeah that's also true, but in the case or Music (and cooking, and physics) these terms aren't really incorporated into the language but are treated as domain-specific jargon.
Compare "angst" or "romance" or "pyjamas" to "eigenvector" or "da capo a la fine". The former three are simply words, used in any context and even with meanings that have evolved slightly from their origins. The latter two have specific meaning (even though in German or Italian they have a perfectly straightforward meaning) and in English are only used in one context.
My point is to respond to the claim that English is somehow superior because non-speakers must use it for air traffic control, computer programming and the like.
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.
Well your first post, and hence our discussion, was unclear in the way if you ment "low german" in the linguistic sense (hence I asked about Plattdeutsch in my first line) or in the sense of "low prestige" or even in the sense (what many people for strange reasons believe) that the "lower dialects" are some bastard variants of the "higher language".
Also I was not aware that the term Niederdeutsch is translated into "low german" in english. It is a typical problem of germans, because if you translate it back to german you somehow see it as "opposite" of high german, and "high german" you interprete as "Standard german" not as a linguistic term for south german dialects.
Nevertheless, thanx for the info ... I should digg around in languages again.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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
Chinese is a ... a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
A reasonable summary, based on various linguistically knowledgeable source that I've read. A useful comparison seems to be with the Romance languages. The Chinese politically-based practice of calling their languages "dialects" is often explained by imagining that Europeans did something similar: All the Romance languages would be considered "dialects" of Latin. Only Latin would be taught in schools, and other languages would be written using Latin spelling and grammar. This was tried for some time in Europe, but they finally came to their senses during the last few centuries, and developed reasonable spelling systems for each of the modern "Latin dialects" such as French, Portuguese, and R[ou]manian. Latin writing simply doesn't work well for those modern languges.
I've seen criticism of the "All Chinese dialects are written the same" based on this. It was true a few centuries ago that most literate people in Europe wrote the same, in Latin, but this only made communication possible with others who had learned Latin. It wasn't really usable as a way of writing Italian or Spanish, though; it was just writing in the predecessor language. Similarly, the various Chinese languages are different enough in grammar and vocabulary that using "standard Chinese" writing doesn't really constitute writing their native language; it is really just writing in the predecessor language (or its modern descendant spoken in one major northern city ;-).
But it can be interesting to read discussions of such topics by linguistically-naive people, to see just how confused they usually are about language-related topics. And we've seen a bit of linguistic nonsense here, both by the native speakers of various Chinese languages, and by others just reporting what they've learned from other misinformed sources.
An interesting point about the Romance languages is that their speakers often do find the others' written forms easier to understand than the spoken forms. This is because the spelling systems have tended to preserve original Latin spellings that hide many of the phonetic differences in the way that letters are used. This makes understanding the writing possible in some cases where the pronunciation would be too different to understand without special study.
Something similar does seem to be partially successful with Chinese writing. But in both cases, the result is often misunderstandings, or simple confusion about what that funny writing could possibly mean. And, like the Romance languages, the Chinese have invented a lot of new characters to improve understandability. English has done this, too. Thus, Latin didn't have the letters 'J', 'K' or 'W', which many European languages find useful. Cantonese similarly has a long list of characters never used in Mandarin, to fix some of the major problems with using Mandarin to express Cantonese. Most of the other Chinese languages are simply not written, because the standard writing system doesn't work for them.
But I wouldn't expect the misunderstandings in such topics to disappear. People would have to pick up some actual linguistic understanding for that to happen, and that'd be too much work.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yeah, I was in agreement with you, and just adding that English has borrowed the heck out of other languages.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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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.
Most Taiwanese speak Chinese because following WWII America put the Chinese government in charge of Taiwan (like the allies put various countries in charge of parts of Germany for the purpose of administration during the period of occupation). The Chinese who were in charge of Taiwan declared it to be part of China and then lost the civil war in their own country and moved their government and army to Taiwan. They worked hard to make Taiwan seem like part of China - teaching people Chinese, renaming streets, restricting the use of Taiwanese languages. Anyone educated in Taiwan after the beginning of the Chinese occupation had to learn Chinese.
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.
Uruguay and Argentina are "whiter" the the USA, while Costa Rica, Cuba and Chile are majority Caucasian descent. Brazil is just under 50% and Columbia and Venezuela have large Caucasian populations. Most of Latin America is still ruled by Spanish descendants and once you move into Mestizo (mixed Caucasian/native) you're talking about the vast majority of the population having "recent" Caucasian ancestry.
He said the symbols "come from" actual Chinese words, not that they "are" actual Chinese words (although in at least one case the symbol actually is a Chinese word, the character for "one" is used as a Zhuyin symbol).
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.
From what I've been told, Taiwanese kids are still spending hours learning how to write well into fourth grade. By that time, American kids pretty much know their stuff. Sure they have spelling classes, but that is mainly to correct spelling of words they already know how to read and for which they can guess at the spelling if they need to. For Taiwanese kids they're still learning tons of characters by rote because there is just no other way.
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.
I've worked at learning Chinese as well. I even lived in Taiwan for a while (unfortunately I was supporting myself by teaching English and dating an English-speaking girl, so I didn't become fluent or even learn much).
What I found regarding tones was that learning them by rote was very hard, but that being exposed them sometimes made them come naturally. For example, (this is sad), the words for "I don't want to" (buyau) are something i can say quite fluently. Because I've heard them said with much feeling so many times. I don't have to think about the tones (I'm not even sure what tone the "bu" is), I can just repeat what I've heard.
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.
Outside of the continental US + Alaska, we almost entirely failed to leave an English-speaking zone corresponding to our imperial possessions. Phillipines and Cuba? Lost, and the Spanish made a much bigger impression during their time there.
I know a couple others replied to this, so I will keep it short. The Philippines really does not belong in this list.
The country is very much a like-minded ally. English isn't just one of the official languages, it is the most unifying and dominant. English will help you there where people do not speak Tagalog. Further, the US didn't really "lose" the Philippines--they granted them independence for reasons other than the Philippine-American War. Then did it again after WWII.
I would say that you are right about the US being different, though. I generally hear a distinction about the old powers being colonial imperialists, and the US being capitalist imperialists. I generally agree. Why try to hold territory by force when you can make friends while dominating the culture and exerting strong influence over the economy?
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Actually China was messed up prior to that which is why it wasn't able to deal with the modernization required contact with a more advanced civilization. Europeans started reaching China by sea pretty early - at least by the early 1600s if not much much earlier. They had a lot of ocean to protect them while they adopted foreign technologies. But even in the lat 1700s they were pretending to be the most advanced civilization and refusing to meet others as equals or accept the more advanced technology. Eventually the Europeans had so far surpassed them that it was impossible, people being people, that they would be treated as equals anymore.
And let's not forget that after the 1950s the Chinese proceeded to "fuck up" themselves far worse than the Europeans ever did.
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.
Chinese is a ... a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
A reasonable summary, based on various linguistically knowledgeable source that I've read. A useful comparison seems to be with the Romance languages. The Chinese politically-based practice of calling their languages "dialects" is often explained by imagining that Europeans did something similar: All the Romance languages would be considered "dialects" of Latin. Only Latin would be taught in schools, and other languages would be written using Latin spelling and grammar. This was tried for some time in Europe, but they finally came to their senses during the last few centuries, and developed reasonable spelling systems for each of the modern "Latin dialects" such as French, Portuguese, and R[ou]manian. Latin writing simply doesn't work well for those modern languges.
I've seen criticism of the "All Chinese dialects are written the same" based on this. It was true a few centuries ago that most literate people in Europe wrote the same, in Latin, but this only made communication possible with others who had learned Latin. It wasn't really usable as a way of writing Italian or Spanish, though; it was just writing in the predecessor language. Similarly, the various Chinese languages are different enough in grammar and vocabulary that using "standard Chinese" writing doesn't really constitute writing their native language; it is really just writing in the predecessor language (or its modern descendant spoken in one major northern city ;-).
But it can be interesting to read discussions of such topics by linguistically-naive people, to see just how confused they usually are about language-related topics. And we've seen a bit of linguistic nonsense here, both by the native speakers of various Chinese languages, and by others just reporting what they've learned from other misinformed sources.
An interesting point about the Romance languages is that their speakers often do find the others' written forms easier to understand than the spoken forms. This is because the spelling systems have tended to preserve original Latin spellings that hide many of the phonetic differences in the way that letters are used. This makes understanding the writing possible in some cases where the pronunciation would be too different to understand without special study.
Something similar does seem to be partially successful with Chinese writing. But in both cases, the result is often misunderstandings, or simple confusion about what that funny writing could possibly mean. And, like the Romance languages, the Chinese have invented a lot of new characters to improve understandability. English has done this, too. Thus, Latin didn't have the letters 'J', 'K' or 'W', which many European languages find useful. Cantonese similarly has a long list of characters never used in Mandarin, to fix some of the major problems with using Mandarin to express Cantonese. Most of the other Chinese languages are simply not written, because the standard writing system doesn't work for them.
But I wouldn't expect the misunderstandings in such topics to disappear. People would have to pick up some actual linguistic understanding for that to happen, and that'd be too much work.
The only objection I have to that is that that Romance languages definite descendants of a language we know -- Latin. With Chinese the common ancestral spoken language is not so clearly identifiable. Also, I don't think it's known whether Chinese should be thought of as a group of languages that evolved from a common ancestor in historic times or whether their common roots are prehistoric and pre-written.
The UK and the US; two nations separated by a common language.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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.
I can't speak Mandarin either and i'm pretty smart.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Nothing funnier than a debate between somebody from the Bronx and somebody from Alabama.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide".
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Mandarin is an 'encoded' language
Casteism
Poor bastards.
Oh, I finally got what he meant.... thanks.
Don't quote me on this.
@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.
As an American, I have never heard someone say either "gotten" or "mown". I hope I never do.
People seem much brighter once you light them on fire.
We are conversing in English, it is called low german in English.
I am quite aware of what germans speak at home, considering I was born there, was a child there and visit frequently.
"gotten" used to be the Queen's English (King James translation of Genesis includes "I have gotten a man from the Lord"). UK English use has deviated over time from early modern. Just sayin'
I'm curious how you learned so many.
I've gotten used to it...
While not trivial, I personally ( being a native English Speaker) found German to be the easiest to learn of the languages I've studied/dabbled with: This includes Spanish, Russian, Thai, and Japanese as well.
It's the only one that seemed I could reasonably become fluent.
Oddly enough, there's a strong similarity between strong southern US and British English. For the life of me, I can't remember where I saw it, but one of the linguistic coaches to actors showed how flipping a few sounds transformed each into the other. He'd flip between them interchangeably, and it was startling.
Then you'd probably find Southern Alabaman even easier :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I can't seem to find your point. In my last sentence I said that (formal) written Mandarin and Cantonese is largely mutually intelligible.
There are two kinds of written Cantonese - formal and vernacular. Formal written Cantonese is used in book, newspapers and magazines.
You can also write out vernacular Cantonese. This is what the courts did in Hong Kong to record the exact testimony that witnesses or defendants give.
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That is actually still true.