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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.
Maybe if the language wasn't so difficult it would see more widespread adoption. I honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization like pinyin, even if it does not have100% of what the Chinese characters provide. I understand the heritage and cultural proudness of having your own characters, but that way you still keep your language, and second you don't waste vauable time thhat can be used to learn something else. Chinese atm is like a legacy programming language with lots of ancient functions that can make the code messy. Learning the radicals, stroke sequences and others on top of all the tones is absurd to me.
But hey, if somebody can make a counterpoint I will be happy to debate.
I 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
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.
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.
Because even God does not trust those bastards in the dark.
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.
I used to live a couple hours from there, and it's the only part of China where I would routinely run into people that couldn't speak any Chinese. The local Cantonese is still very strong there, which makes it difficult for those that don't speak Cantonese and can't read and write.
Hong Kong was even worse because if they didn't speak English, they probably wouldn't speak Mandarin and the writing system in use is mainly traditional Chinese rather than the simplified system in use in the PRC.
My Chinese isn't particularly good, but in most of China it was good enough to order food and conduct basic business.
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.
It is actually a dialect, called AAVE (African American Vernacular English). It's still fairly similar to standard American, but it has some additional verb forms and new or different vocabulary. See the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAVE
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 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.
No Good English is a dialect of the English language spoken by those who have previously been associated with the US Penal system.
It is named for it's ability to disguise conversation from those in a position of authority as to allow for those who understand it to speak with others without the intent of their communications being used against them.
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
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.
The Vietnamese used to write using Chinese (Han) characters, but switched to Roman letters. It wasn't their culture though, so I don't think they had much attachment.
In China, one person I asked to read something said they "couldn't read the font", but I /think/ that was just an excuse to avoid talking to me.
I don't know how realistic your example is -- I'm sure it could happen, but I don't know how "stupid" the boy would need to be. Would 99% of 15 year olds have managed, or only 80%? I have an app on my phone that can do reliable, accurate OCR of the characters (Pleco), from touch or camera input, so it won't be too long before "stupid" people don't need to remember the rarer/harder characters. (The app is great for reading restaurant menus.)
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.
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.
The process has been going on for far longer than that. A number of ancient poems that do not rhyme in modern Mandarin Chinese will do so when spoken in Cantonese.
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.
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.
You read that whole article and *that* is the only thing you came with? I think that speaks more about you than the wikipedia or AAVE.
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
China has more English speakers than any other country.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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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 !
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 !
Exactly: in a free democracy people should be free to speak whatever language they want, and the government, since it works for the people, should make reasonable accomodation.
Of course, this all hinges on what's reasonable: if I am the only one who chooses to use "fleeble" instead of "frog" I really don't think the government should go to any effort to accommodate me. But if enough citizens want to speak spanish/hmong/whatever the government should make an effort to communicate back in the same language in various contexts.
Then again:are there free democracies any more?
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!
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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