As someone who follows the Taiwan situation, I was very disturbed when President Obama stated that the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by Iran would be a "grave" matter for America. You see, words matter. The Taiwan Relations Act governs America's relations with Taiwan and states clearly that any attempt to resolve the differences between Taiwan and China must be treated as a "grave" matter by America. The act intentionally leaves ambiguous what exactly is meant by "grave". Does it mean we'll respond military? Both sides have to guess and are thus afraid to push things too far.
But when President Obama used the word "grave" to describe a situation it was clear he would do nothing about, it could only make the Chinese feel more confident that America would do nothing if China were to use military force against Taiwan. And if we're unwilling to support an industrialized democracy with more people than Australia, why would we defend a few uninhabited islands?
Nuclear weapons, perhaps? Russia has them, Japan doesn't. In theory America provides a nuclear umbrella for Japan, but in practice America has been a notoriously unreliable ally for the past 50 years.
America's recent actions toward Taiwan have helped underscore this for China. In the 90's, China had to sabre-rattle and make threats to keep try to keep Taiwanese from openly announcing they are independent. But in recent years America has thrown a lot of support behind pro-China candidates that have run for office in Taiwan - and made a big deal about how wonderful it is they want to end Taiwan's independence. China has figured with Taiwan coming their way (whether the people of Taiwan want it or not) they can focus on other claims they would like to make.
American has strongly suggested that it would be much more convenient for us if an industrialized democracy with more people than Australia would just lay down and try to enjoy it. That has to embolden China.
I doubt if this will turn into a real war.* China is mostly just pandering to their own population as a smoke screen for the changes that came out of the recent CCP meeting in Beijing. This sort of pandering works well in China. Because of gender-selective abortions, they have tens of millions of unattached young men in their late teens and twenties, with little chance of starting a family or even finding a GF. It is very easy to stir these young men up into an anti-Japanese frenzy. In fact, the hard part is keeping a lid on it. The last time the Chinese government tried this, they ended up with riots, and torched Japanese cars and Japanese restaurants, despite both the cars and restaurants having Chinese owners.
*OTOH, almost everyone thought the same thing in July of 1914.
So if you can't keep a lid on all those young men, what do you do with them? A war might take care of the problem while giving you even more excuses to suppress civil liberties.
And yet in practice, in historical confrontations against ANY nation, Chinese lost 10 to 1.
They are notoriously impotent fighters.
Then how did China get so big?
China lost in recent centuries fighting western powers (and Japan which had pretty much transformed itself in many ways into a western power). Before that China was pretty much unstoppable.
Japan already owned the islands you're talking about. The private owner (a Japanese citizen) of the islands was planning to sell them. Japan nationalized the islands in an effort to avoid giving China a reason to get irritated. The Japanese government was afraid some very nationalist Japanese citizen would buy the islands and start using them in ways that would make Japanese ownership clearer - maybe someone would plant Japanese flags all over the island, build a lighthouse there, build a Shinto shrine and invite tourists, etc. So Japan nationalized the island to keep things calm. It was China that chose to see it as an opportunity to act all hurt and annoyed.
China is asserting itself. If it senses weakness in the US it will attack unarmed perimeter nations. That's the way of the species. The Chinese government has never ceased its war mongering propaganda about foreign powers; the West, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Its subjects support this aggression and will support more. Apologists that give reason to pretend otherwise will be the cause of great violence, as usual.
In the near future it is unlikely China will start a hot war. America still has too much power. They'll be smart enough to wait a decade or two until America's debt makes American military power unsustainable and China's economic growth allows them to create a much more powerful military.
Of course if they can persuade countries to surrender without a fight in the meantime simply by using threats, or by coaxing them with promises of market access, they'll be happy to do so.
Either way, it appears that like the Germans and Japanese before them, they believe their civilization has been unfairly held down for too long by hostile foreign powers and that it is finally time for their superior race/culture to take its rightful place of leadership on the world stage.
You're driving on a highway leaving a city. At every prime numbered mile marker there's a gas station. As you leave the city the gas stations are close together, with a station at the 2 mile marker, another at the 3 mile marker, another at the 5 mile marker, etc. As you get into the suburbs the gas stations are less frequent. As you get into the desert you find that gas stations are hard to find.
But you notice something - it seems that no matter how far you drive into the desert, you occassionally find gas stations just two miles away from each other. You start calling these pairs "twins". Now someone has told you there are an infinite number of gas stations on the road, but you're wondering if there are an infinite number of twins. Will there always be more twins in front of you, or at some point will you have past the last pair? The Twin Primes Conjecture suggests there will always be another pair of twin gas stations on the road, but it has never been proven.
Well, you think, so that's never been proven, but I've also noticed that sometimes I see gas stations just 4 miles apart. Does anyone know whether that will stop occurring? At some point will I pass the last pair of gas stations that are 4 miles apart? Again the answer is, nobody knows. How about 6? 8?
Until recently, the answer was always, nobody knows. Then this Chinese guy proved that if you're looking for pairs of gas stations that are less than 70 million miles apart, there will always be such a pair on the road in front of you.
Then somebody else proved that there would also always be a pair of gas stations in front of you less than 5000 miles apart. Most recently, someone proved that you would always have in front of you some pairs of gas stations that are within 600 miles of each other.
We still suspect that will can always look forward to finding more twin gas stations, pairs that are within 2 miles of each other, but we don't have a proof yet.
You're driving on a highway leaving a city. At every prime numbered mile marker there's a gas station. As you leave the city the gas stations are close together, with a station at the 2 mile marker, another at the 3 mile marker, another at the 5 mile marker, etc. As you get into the suburbs the gas stations are less frequent. As you get into the desert you find that gas stations are hard to find.
But you notice something - it seems that no matter how far you drive into the desert, you occassionally find gas stations just two miles away from each other. You start calling these pairs "twins". Now someone has told you there are an infinite number of gas stations on the road, but you're wondering if there are an infinite number of twins. Will there always be more twins in front of you, or at some point will you have past the last pair? The Twin Primes Conjecture suggests there will always be another pair of twin gas stations on the road, but it has never been proven.
Well, you think, so that's never been proven, but I've also noticed that sometimes I see gas stations just 4 miles apart. Does anyone know whether that will stop occurring? At some point will I pass the last pair of gas stations that are 4 miles apart? Again the answer is, nobody knows. How about 6? 8?
Until recently, the answer was always, nobody knows. Then this Chinese guy proved that if you're looking for pairs of gas stations that are less than 70 million miles apart, there will always be such a pair on the road in front of you.
Then somebody else proved that there would also always be a pair of gas stations in front of you less than 5000 miles apart. Most recently, someone proved that you would always have in front of you some pairs of gas stations that are within 600 miles of each other.
We still suspect that will can always look forward to finding more twin gas stations, pairs that are within 2 miles of each other, but we don't have a proof yet.
Use whiteboards to explain things. Don't be afraid to draw pictures. Don't be afraid to give a little background when answering questions or explaining things. Instead of saying "My program gets stuck in this loop" say "I'm working on some code to...., we need this because we're doing.... This loop here is supposed to.... but it keeps getting stuck."
Say Hi to people in the hall. Keep your eyes on others not on the ground in front of you.
Say "Hi I'm so-and-so" to the people in the cubes or offices next to yours if you haven't already met them.
VERY IMPORTANT: In conversations be sure to say clearly what you mean without making assumptions that people know what you're talking about. "If we fix that thing it will cause the fallout on the subroutine and that will cause the io to slow" Isn't very helpful because people have to know what "thing" "subroutine" and "io" you're talking about. Use complete names for whatever you talk about (this applies to your code as well). If this is difficult, try pretending you're talking to people who have trouble with English and force you to say everything plainly. I recently worked for a team of mostly foreigners and I'm now working with mostly Americans. It was so much easier to understand the foreigners because they had to say things clearly and forced me to do the same. The Americans who are "in the know" bounce stuff around with everyone else in the meeting remaining clueless.
The GP had asked "The Japanese language, especially the written, is even more onerous than Chinese. Yet the Japanese have a 99% literacy rate. Please explain that?". I was responding to that. I can assume that the Japanese kids already know how to speak when they're learning to read I assume they already know the variations. But perhaps I don't know enough of the details. I did learn about, for example, how the n number 1 (-) can be pronounced differently depending on context. When used as an ordinal it may be pronounced one way, when used for counting another, and with other variations based on the word that follows. I would expect this to be similar to a native English speaker learning when to say "thee" and "thuh" for the word "the". Or learning when to say "going to" versus "gonna" when they see "going to" written" ("gonna" is used to indicate future actions while "going to" is a form of "to go". Compare "I'm going to go eat something" vs "Are you going to the store?" The former uses "gonna" while the latter uses "going to".)
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'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.
The Japanese language, especially the written, is even more onerous than Chinese. Yet the Japanese have a 99% literacy rate. Please explain that?
I may be mistaken, but I thought the Japanese had far fewer characters to learn because they have a phonetic system that is used for many common words. The Japanese writing system is screwy because of the poor mismatch between Chinese characters and the Japanese language, but I would think it requires less memorization.
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'm not saying we shouldn't reform our spelling, but the big difference is that English and French spellings are at least usually close to their pronunciation. If a foreigner says to me, what does the word "four egg ner" mean, it might take me a moment but I'll likely be able to realize what he means and provide both the correct pronunciation and the meaning. And if he can tell me the sentence ("There are approximately 40 million 4 egg ners in America today.") thus giving me context clues, I'll almost certainly know what word he means. But in Chinese, I can't even guess at the pronunciation. I can't ask the person across the room. I can't try to remember the word when I get home and ask someone. I can't learn the word from seeing it in context and then try using it in a sentence the next day (thus giving someone a chance to correct my pronunciation and perhaps even my understanding of the meaning). If I can't look up or write down the word right then and there, it's gone. With English, I can guess at the pronunciation and then let the pronunciation and spelling reinforce each other in my mind.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I put a lot of time into learning Chinese - I even lived in an area that where nearly everyone spoke Chinese but hardly any English for a year. What I found most difficult was the lack of connection between spoken and written Chinese. If you're learning English and you encounter a new word, you sound it out and remember it ( you may not be exact, but you'll be close). If you hear a word, you can imagine how it is spelled. This also helps with memorizing words.
In Chinese, the sounds and the writing do not reinforce each other in your memory (they do a little in some cases, but not in most).
I will say though that Chinese grammar is easy. However that is balanced by the difficulty of the four tones.
Until we can actually identify and search everyone coming in, people who want to bring contraband into America can just cross the Mexican border (they could cross the Canadian border too, but at they would have to get into Canada first and Canada has restrictions similar to those of America).
Build a border with a big enough deterrent effect that anyone attempting to cross can be assumed to be up to serious no good - like drugs or arms smuggling - and you can shoot any border-crossers because they won't be people coming for jobs or family. At that point we can also amnesty illegal immigrants already in the country.
Then we can talk about rule for border crossings and immigration policy in general. You say you have a policy if you refuse to enforce it.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who follows the Taiwan situation, I was very disturbed when President Obama stated that the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by Iran would be a "grave" matter for America. You see, words matter. The Taiwan Relations Act governs America's relations with Taiwan and states clearly that any attempt to resolve the differences between Taiwan and China must be treated as a "grave" matter by America. The act intentionally leaves ambiguous what exactly is meant by "grave". Does it mean we'll respond military? Both sides have to guess and are thus afraid to push things too far.
But when President Obama used the word "grave" to describe a situation it was clear he would do nothing about, it could only make the Chinese feel more confident that America would do nothing if China were to use military force against Taiwan. And if we're unwilling to support an industrialized democracy with more people than Australia, why would we defend a few uninhabited islands?
why don't they just go after siberia?
Nuclear weapons, perhaps? Russia has them, Japan doesn't. In theory America provides a nuclear umbrella for Japan, but in practice America has been a notoriously unreliable ally for the past 50 years.
America's recent actions toward Taiwan have helped underscore this for China. In the 90's, China had to sabre-rattle and make threats to keep try to keep Taiwanese from openly announcing they are independent. But in recent years America has thrown a lot of support behind pro-China candidates that have run for office in Taiwan - and made a big deal about how wonderful it is they want to end Taiwan's independence. China has figured with Taiwan coming their way (whether the people of Taiwan want it or not) they can focus on other claims they would like to make.
American has strongly suggested that it would be much more convenient for us if an industrialized democracy with more people than Australia would just lay down and try to enjoy it. That has to embolden China.
but no, not this time either.
I doubt if this will turn into a real war.* China is mostly just pandering to their own population as a smoke screen for the changes that came out of the recent CCP meeting in Beijing. This sort of pandering works well in China. Because of gender-selective abortions, they have tens of millions of unattached young men in their late teens and twenties, with little chance of starting a family or even finding a GF. It is very easy to stir these young men up into an anti-Japanese frenzy. In fact, the hard part is keeping a lid on it. The last time the Chinese government tried this, they ended up with riots, and torched Japanese cars and Japanese restaurants, despite both the cars and restaurants having Chinese owners.
*OTOH, almost everyone thought the same thing in July of 1914.
So if you can't keep a lid on all those young men, what do you do with them? A war might take care of the problem while giving you even more excuses to suppress civil liberties.
every few years i get the crazy idea that we've out grown this sh#t.
but no, not this time either.
Even if we outgrow it, that doesn't mean everyone else will.
And yet in practice, in historical confrontations against ANY nation, Chinese lost 10 to 1.
They are notoriously impotent fighters.
Then how did China get so big?
China lost in recent centuries fighting western powers (and Japan which had pretty much transformed itself in many ways into a western power). Before that China was pretty much unstoppable.
Japan already owned the islands you're talking about. The private owner (a Japanese citizen) of the islands was planning to sell them. Japan nationalized the islands in an effort to avoid giving China a reason to get irritated. The Japanese government was afraid some very nationalist Japanese citizen would buy the islands and start using them in ways that would make Japanese ownership clearer - maybe someone would plant Japanese flags all over the island, build a lighthouse there, build a Shinto shrine and invite tourists, etc. So Japan nationalized the island to keep things calm. It was China that chose to see it as an opportunity to act all hurt and annoyed.
Yes, you're right to clarify that they also see it as restoring their rightful role as leader.
China is asserting itself. If it senses weakness in the US it will attack unarmed perimeter nations. That's the way of the species. The Chinese government has never ceased its war mongering propaganda about foreign powers; the West, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Its subjects support this aggression and will support more. Apologists that give reason to pretend otherwise will be the cause of great violence, as usual.
In the near future it is unlikely China will start a hot war. America still has too much power. They'll be smart enough to wait a decade or two until America's debt makes American military power unsustainable and China's economic growth allows them to create a much more powerful military.
Of course if they can persuade countries to surrender without a fight in the meantime simply by using threats, or by coaxing them with promises of market access, they'll be happy to do so.
Either way, it appears that like the Germans and Japanese before them, they believe their civilization has been unfairly held down for too long by hostile foreign powers and that it is finally time for their superior race/culture to take its rightful place of leadership on the world stage.
Explanation by car analogy:
You're driving on a highway leaving a city. At every prime numbered mile marker there's a gas station. As you leave the city the gas stations are close together, with a station at the 2 mile marker, another at the 3 mile marker, another at the 5 mile marker, etc. As you get into the suburbs the gas stations are less frequent. As you get into the desert you find that gas stations are hard to find.
But you notice something - it seems that no matter how far you drive into the desert, you occassionally find gas stations just two miles away from each other. You start calling these pairs "twins". Now someone has told you there are an infinite number of gas stations on the road, but you're wondering if there are an infinite number of twins. Will there always be more twins in front of you, or at some point will you have past the last pair? The Twin Primes Conjecture suggests there will always be another pair of twin gas stations on the road, but it has never been proven.
Well, you think, so that's never been proven, but I've also noticed that sometimes I see gas stations just 4 miles apart. Does anyone know whether that will stop occurring? At some point will I pass the last pair of gas stations that are 4 miles apart? Again the answer is, nobody knows. How about 6? 8?
Until recently, the answer was always, nobody knows. Then this Chinese guy proved that if you're looking for pairs of gas stations that are less than 70 million miles apart, there will always be such a pair on the road in front of you.
Then somebody else proved that there would also always be a pair of gas stations in front of you less than 5000 miles apart. Most recently, someone proved that you would always have in front of you some pairs of gas stations that are within 600 miles of each other.
We still suspect that will can always look forward to finding more twin gas stations, pairs that are within 2 miles of each other, but we don't have a proof yet.
Explanation by car analogy:
You're driving on a highway leaving a city. At every prime numbered mile marker there's a gas station. As you leave the city the gas stations are close together, with a station at the 2 mile marker, another at the 3 mile marker, another at the 5 mile marker, etc. As you get into the suburbs the gas stations are less frequent. As you get into the desert you find that gas stations are hard to find.
But you notice something - it seems that no matter how far you drive into the desert, you occassionally find gas stations just two miles away from each other. You start calling these pairs "twins". Now someone has told you there are an infinite number of gas stations on the road, but you're wondering if there are an infinite number of twins. Will there always be more twins in front of you, or at some point will you have past the last pair? The Twin Primes Conjecture suggests there will always be another pair of twin gas stations on the road, but it has never been proven.
Well, you think, so that's never been proven, but I've also noticed that sometimes I see gas stations just 4 miles apart. Does anyone know whether that will stop occurring? At some point will I pass the last pair of gas stations that are 4 miles apart? Again the answer is, nobody knows. How about 6? 8?
Until recently, the answer was always, nobody knows. Then this Chinese guy proved that if you're looking for pairs of gas stations that are less than 70 million miles apart, there will always be such a pair on the road in front of you.
Then somebody else proved that there would also always be a pair of gas stations in front of you less than 5000 miles apart. Most recently, someone proved that you would always have in front of you some pairs of gas stations that are within 600 miles of each other.
We still suspect that will can always look forward to finding more twin gas stations, pairs that are within 2 miles of each other, but we don't have a proof yet.
Use whiteboards to explain things. Don't be afraid to draw pictures. Don't be afraid to give a little background when answering questions or explaining things. Instead of saying "My program gets stuck in this loop" say "I'm working on some code to ...., we need this because we're doing .... This loop here is supposed to .... but it keeps getting stuck."
Say Hi to people in the hall. Keep your eyes on others not on the ground in front of you.
Say "Hi I'm so-and-so" to the people in the cubes or offices next to yours if you haven't already met them.
VERY IMPORTANT: In conversations be sure to say clearly what you mean without making assumptions that people know what you're talking about. "If we fix that thing it will cause the fallout on the subroutine and that will cause the io to slow" Isn't very helpful because people have to know what "thing" "subroutine" and "io" you're talking about. Use complete names for whatever you talk about (this applies to your code as well). If this is difficult, try pretending you're talking to people who have trouble with English and force you to say everything plainly. I recently worked for a team of mostly foreigners and I'm now working with mostly Americans. It was so much easier to understand the foreigners because they had to say things clearly and forced me to do the same. The Americans who are "in the know" bounce stuff around with everyone else in the meeting remaining clueless.
The GP had asked "The Japanese language, especially the written, is even more onerous than Chinese. Yet the Japanese have a 99% literacy rate. Please explain that?". I was responding to that. I can assume that the Japanese kids already know how to speak when they're learning to read I assume they already know the variations. But perhaps I don't know enough of the details. I did learn about, for example, how the n number 1 (-) can be pronounced differently depending on context. When used as an ordinal it may be pronounced one way, when used for counting another, and with other variations based on the word that follows. I would expect this to be similar to a native English speaker learning when to say "thee" and "thuh" for the word "the". Or learning when to say "going to" versus "gonna" when they see "going to" written" ("gonna" is used to indicate future actions while "going to" is a form of "to go". Compare "I'm going to go eat something" vs "Are you going to the store?" The former uses "gonna" while the latter uses "going to".)
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'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.
The Japanese language, especially the written, is even more onerous than Chinese. Yet the Japanese have a 99% literacy rate. Please explain that?
I may be mistaken, but I thought the Japanese had far fewer characters to learn because they have a phonetic system that is used for many common words. The Japanese writing system is screwy because of the poor mismatch between Chinese characters and the Japanese language, but I would think it requires less memorization.
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'm not saying we shouldn't reform our spelling, but the big difference is that English and French spellings are at least usually close to their pronunciation. If a foreigner says to me, what does the word "four egg ner" mean, it might take me a moment but I'll likely be able to realize what he means and provide both the correct pronunciation and the meaning. And if he can tell me the sentence ("There are approximately 40 million 4 egg ners in America today.") thus giving me context clues, I'll almost certainly know what word he means. But in Chinese, I can't even guess at the pronunciation. I can't ask the person across the room. I can't try to remember the word when I get home and ask someone. I can't learn the word from seeing it in context and then try using it in a sentence the next day (thus giving someone a chance to correct my pronunciation and perhaps even my understanding of the meaning). If I can't look up or write down the word right then and there, it's gone. With English, I can guess at the pronunciation and then let the pronunciation and spelling reinforce each other in my mind.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I put a lot of time into learning Chinese - I even lived in an area that where nearly everyone spoke Chinese but hardly any English for a year. What I found most difficult was the lack of connection between spoken and written Chinese. If you're learning English and you encounter a new word, you sound it out and remember it ( you may not be exact, but you'll be close). If you hear a word, you can imagine how it is spelled. This also helps with memorizing words.
In Chinese, the sounds and the writing do not reinforce each other in your memory (they do a little in some cases, but not in most).
I will say though that Chinese grammar is easy. However that is balanced by the difficulty of the four tones.
Until we can actually identify and search everyone coming in, people who want to bring contraband into America can just cross the Mexican border (they could cross the Canadian border too, but at they would have to get into Canada first and Canada has restrictions similar to those of America).
Build a border with a big enough deterrent effect that anyone attempting to cross can be assumed to be up to serious no good - like drugs or arms smuggling - and you can shoot any border-crossers because they won't be people coming for jobs or family. At that point we can also amnesty illegal immigrants already in the country.
Then we can talk about rule for border crossings and immigration policy in general. You say you have a policy if you refuse to enforce it.