400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin 562
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."
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make it easier (Score:5, Informative)
As somebody who spent a year living in the PRC, I went in wondering the same thing. But the fact of the matter is that their are so many homophones that they would need to invent a new language just to make it work.
The radicals and tones are an essential portion of the language, removing them would be like taking English words and removing the spaces and punctuation marks. It would turn it into a mess.
The radicals themselves are essential to learning to read and write the Chinese language. Romanization systems don't work because there are too many homophones to worry about. And what's more there are hundreds of different Chinese languages out there whose only point of intersection is the written language. Removing that would require teaching 600m or so people a new language and nearly 1.5b people to read and write in a new language.
Stroke order isn't quite as silly as you make it out to be, the stroke order is like it is primarily because you draw the radicals in a certain way, and when those radicals are put into a character they retain their order. This cuts down on the amount of time and energy that it takes to learn to write.
As far as legacy goes, Chinese is far easier than you seem to recognize. Sure, learning the characters is a PITA, but it's not hard, it's just a lot of work. And it's held up remarkably well for millenia. The grammar is simple enough as well.
As far as "the language" goes, Mandarin is just a voice given to silent characters. It's not any easier or harder than any other Chinese language. It has 5 tones, which in some ways is easier than some with more tones, but it means that you spend more time and energy determining which homophone you're dealing with.
Re:Cantonese is superior to mandarin (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:'learn chinese' (Score:4, Informative)
Those 400m people are mostly in rural areas. Legally all schools are supposed to be conducted in Mandarin, although exceptions are made for foreign language schools as Beijing is keen on having people learn foreign languages.
But, the difficulty level is pretty low. Of the languages I've studied, Mandarin is by far the easiest one to learn. The grammar is astonishingly simple and even the feared characters are mostly a matter of study. If you start with the radicals and skip learning individual characters in favor of whole words, its' not that tough. Most Chinese words are either one character or the newer style which are compounds of 2 or 3 of the older characters. And considering that the PRC has achieved a literacy rate over 85% it's clearly something that's doable for anybody that's willing to put in the effort and time.
Tones, do take some getting used to, but none of the tones in Mandarin are ones that we don't have in English, it's just that they use them differently than we do in English.
I don't personally think that Chinese is likely to be mandatory, however, it is going to be increasingly useful in coming years. Especially the written form that tends to scare people away. But, after a year of looking at them in China, I found after a while that there's a pattern to them, and whenever I see simplified Chinese characters, I get a warm fuzzy feeling that everything is going to be OK.
Re:Cantonese is superior to mandarin (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Informative)
The radicals and tones are an essential portion of the language, removing them would be like taking English words and removing the spaces and punctuation marks. It would turn it into a mess.
Radicals, maybe, but there do exist tonal languages written with an accented version of the Roman alphabet [wikipedia.org].
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Informative)
Romanization systems don't work because there are too many homophones to worry about.
Using pinyin with tone marks, the homophones are no more ambiguous than when speaking out loud. Yet people seem to manage just fine using Chinese as a spoken language. Could you comment on this? I'm genuinely curious about it. I've been learning Mandarin, and I've heard other people say the same thing about radicals: that you need them to resolve which homophone you're writing. Yet I don't see how this can possibly be as serious a problem as all that, given that the same problem exists when speaking.
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:2, Informative)
Well for a start, USA doesn't have a national language, and if it did entertain such an idea, it would be a State level decision as much as a Federal one. This differs markedly from both China and mandarin, and the UK and english.
Re:Why don't they just learn English? (Score:5, Informative)
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.