Use an electronic dictionary, with character recognition. This way you can just write the character on the screen and it will look it up. I have that on my phone (Pleco on Windows Mobile) and it is a life-saver. I like to browse a good old paper dictionary from time to time, but the radical system is just too slow for real life use. This way I have been able to read real stuff much sooner, and it is much more interesting and rewarding than language learning texts.
Remember we are talking about the possibility of a guy saying : "ok, I don't want that much money, I have enough". Of course, if he doesn't have a home and enough to eat he should to have more money.
I guess we have half the chance of getting the whole google.com banned from mainland China and only accessible behind a VPN... How would that be a progress to anyone ?
For Chinese characters (and some accented letters), the limit is not the same, you can only write 70 characters. Still, it is possible to express a lot of things in 70 characters, I think more than in 140 in English.
It is already happening : Youtube, Facebook, Dailymotion, Google groups, Twitter, Blogspot and others are all blocked. The educated Chinese who went abroad already know the extent of the censorship, but what can they do ?
Like their family, an environment in their mother tongue, a culture they actually understand ? You have to understand that it is the US that have to sell something to make them stay. If the standards of living are the same (and it is the case right now for a lot of people), most of the Chinese students will prefer to come back to China. They did not came by love of American culture, but for the quality of the science and the experience of western civilization it gave them.
The Great Firewall is an annoyance, but minor for most Chinese, not many will choose to change their life based on it or a concept of "freedom" which does not have much influence in their everyday life.
That's nice and all to link to Wikipedia, but maybe you should read the articles before... I will help you : * there isn't any american air bases in France. It was decided by De Gaulle quite a long time ago : I quote the article linked in your post "On 23 October 1967, all foreign flags were furled and after 17 years all NATO forces departed France." * France doesn't have any specialized bomber, but now a lot of planes can play the role : for example the Mirage 2000 is a multirole fighter.
Exactly, a lot of Chinese people are accustomed to addresses meaning absolutely nothing to them. You can see website composed only of numbers, or addresses composed of the first letter of the romanisation of each character. It gives a string of meaningless letters, which you can guess from the real name of the website but not the other way around.
There is no Mandarin keyboard, you have to use an input method to input Chinese characters. Computers sold in China are in qwerty. You type the romanisation and you can choose from a dictionary of characters which one you want. Of course you should not have to do it to type an URL to visit a page in English, but I expect all Mandarin speakers to have a way to type Chinese on their computers so it should not be a problem.
You may have more problems with european languages, for example French and its accents. Input methods are available but not widely used because computer sold in France have the accents directly on the keyboard.
So, you feel more comfortable in a system you know and for which you researched online beforehand than on an unknown system without Internet ? How is that surprising ? How is that the fault of Redhat ?
No, it is not that prevalent. You can be arrested if you are a known blogger with an history of criticizing the government, it really happens and it is sad. However, you won't go in jail for a single comment about Wen Jiabao in an obscure website like Slashdot.
Some of them do, and they risk their lives. You can find a lot of stories of bloggers who disappeared in the middle of the night not to be seen again.
The majority of the people don't want to risk their live just to be able to speak of abstract concepts. The censorship is well known of everyone, but is a minor inconvenience for most.
I get real tired of crap like this because what they seem to want to do is work hard to turn kids in to little calculators. "Oh let's make sure our kids can score really high on number crunching tests!" Ya, how about not. We get students like that in university (I work for a university) in particular some of the foreign grad students form China and India. They are great at memorizing and slogging through formulas, horrible at doing any real world problem solving.
To them, knowledge is learning what other people know. If you don't know something, the answer is to find someone who does, or find a book with the answer. You look it up and then you know it. The idea of solving a problem through trial and error is totally alien to them. Thus they have a lot of trouble understanding what our group does (I do computer support and as such trial and error is a large part of the job). If you tell them "I don't know," they look at you like you are an idiot and want to know who does know.
Exactly ! Please don't copy the asian education system, it is broken beyond repair.
The pressure on the kids is enormous, especially with the one child policy of China. They have a lot of additional classes and spend the best part of their childhood working hard at remembering useless trivia to score well in the gaokao (National Higher Education Entrance Examination), while the parents try to work enough relationship to send their child to a better school or give money to the teacher so that he pays more attention to their child.
The number of official classes hour has nothing to do with that. Chinese children do work a lot harder that american ones, but it is not necessarily a good thing. They don't have much free time, the campus life is as boring as possible. A lot of them think of everything as education related, so will do a club or an activity only if it looks good on a resume. A balance has to be found between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Use an electronic dictionary, with character recognition. This way you can just write the character on the screen and it will look it up. I have that on my phone (Pleco on Windows Mobile) and it is a life-saver. I like to browse a good old paper dictionary from time to time, but the radical system is just too slow for real life use. This way I have been able to read real stuff much sooner, and it is much more interesting and rewarding than language learning texts.
This is simply not true. I consider I know around 1500 characters, and I am still a long way to fluency. 3000 is more of a reasonable goal.
Remember we are talking about the possibility of a guy saying : "ok, I don't want that much money, I have enough". Of course, if he doesn't have a home and enough to eat he should to have more money.
You can buy pretty much anything with money.
I really don't want your life ...
The Chinese high-speed trains are already at the European level of confort.
In China it is called Biying, which is more like "surely" + "answer"
I guess we have half the chance of getting the whole google.com banned from mainland China and only accessible behind a VPN ... How would that be a progress to anyone ?
For Chinese characters (and some accented letters), the limit is not the same, you can only write 70 characters. Still, it is possible to express a lot of things in 70 characters, I think more than in 140 in English.
It is already happening : Youtube, Facebook, Dailymotion, Google groups, Twitter, Blogspot and others are all blocked. The educated Chinese who went abroad already know the extent of the censorship, but what can they do ?
Like their family, an environment in their mother tongue, a culture they actually understand ? You have to understand that it is the US that have to sell something to make them stay. If the standards of living are the same (and it is the case right now for a lot of people), most of the Chinese students will prefer to come back to China. They did not came by love of American culture, but for the quality of the science and the experience of western civilization it gave them.
The Great Firewall is an annoyance, but minor for most Chinese, not many will choose to change their life based on it or a concept of "freedom" which does not have much influence in their everyday life.
That's nice and all to link to Wikipedia, but maybe you should read the articles before ... I will help you :
* there isn't any american air bases in France. It was decided by De Gaulle quite a long time ago : I quote the article linked in your post "On 23 October 1967, all foreign flags were furled and after 17 years all NATO forces departed France."
* France doesn't have any specialized bomber, but now a lot of planes can play the role : for example the Mirage 2000 is a multirole fighter.
So you really are reading not only the posts, but also the name of the posters. Wow, you do have a lot of time to lose !
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for Texas"
Wikipedia is not blocked in China. Some "sensitive" articles are censored, but almost everything is there (even the Chinese version).
Do you know on Korea you can watch Starcraft games on TV ? With excited commentators and all ? Didn't know a word of Korean but that was fun anyway.
Well, you have a right to use an idiosyncratic unit of temperature, but please at least specify it, ok ?
Exactly, a lot of Chinese people are accustomed to addresses meaning absolutely nothing to them. You can see website composed only of numbers, or addresses composed of the first letter of the romanisation of each character. It gives a string of meaningless letters, which you can guess from the real name of the website but not the other way around.
Well, you can copy and paste, follow a link, use a search engine, etc. How often do you really type an address anyway ?
Your friends and family can write to you and you just have to answer to them, how difficult is that ?
There is no Mandarin keyboard, you have to use an input method to input Chinese characters. Computers sold in China are in qwerty. You type the romanisation and you can choose from a dictionary of characters which one you want. Of course you should not have to do it to type an URL to visit a page in English, but I expect all Mandarin speakers to have a way to type Chinese on their computers so it should not be a problem.
You may have more problems with european languages, for example French and its accents. Input methods are available but not widely used because computer sold in France have the accents directly on the keyboard.
So, you feel more comfortable in a system you know and for which you researched online beforehand than on an unknown system without Internet ? How is that surprising ? How is that the fault of Redhat ?
No, it is not.
You mean www.python.org right ? I can access it without any problem from Beijing.
No, it is not that prevalent. You can be arrested if you are a known blogger with an history of criticizing the government, it really happens and it is sad. However, you won't go in jail for a single comment about Wen Jiabao in an obscure website like Slashdot.
Some of them do, and they risk their lives. You can find a lot of stories of bloggers who disappeared in the middle of the night not to be seen again.
The majority of the people don't want to risk their live just to be able to speak of abstract concepts. The censorship is well known of everyone, but is a minor inconvenience for most.
I get real tired of crap like this because what they seem to want to do is work hard to turn kids in to little calculators. "Oh let's make sure our kids can score really high on number crunching tests!" Ya, how about not. We get students like that in university (I work for a university) in particular some of the foreign grad students form China and India. They are great at memorizing and slogging through formulas, horrible at doing any real world problem solving.
To them, knowledge is learning what other people know. If you don't know something, the answer is to find someone who does, or find a book with the answer. You look it up and then you know it. The idea of solving a problem through trial and error is totally alien to them. Thus they have a lot of trouble understanding what our group does (I do computer support and as such trial and error is a large part of the job). If you tell them "I don't know," they look at you like you are an idiot and want to know who does know.
Exactly ! Please don't copy the asian education system, it is broken beyond repair.
The pressure on the kids is enormous, especially with the one child policy of China. They have a lot of additional classes and spend the best part of their childhood working hard at remembering useless trivia to score well in the gaokao (National Higher Education Entrance Examination), while the parents try to work enough relationship to send their child to a better school or give money to the teacher so that he pays more attention to their child.
The number of official classes hour has nothing to do with that. Chinese children do work a lot harder that american ones, but it is not necessarily a good thing. They don't have much free time, the campus life is as boring as possible. A lot of them think of everything as education related, so will do a club or an activity only if it looks good on a resume. A balance has to be found between the two.
This page seems to say they have been addressed : http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html