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."
Cantonese is superior to mandarin (Score:0, Interesting)
And they don't like hokkien because they don't like the hakka people in general.
Fuck them. It's like telling US southerners that they suck for speaking with an accent.
'learn chinese' (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ;)
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Make it easier (Score:5, Interesting)
There isn't really. The alphabet that's used in Europe is faster to learn than the character set of Chinese characters. But, the Chinese characters each convey far more meaning than a set of words would.
There are pros and cons here, the alphabet is faster to learn to read and write, but it's less efficient to read. Whereas Chinese takes years to learn to read and write, but is substantially more efficient for reading.
My main issue with written Chinese is that they haven't adopted Western style word spacing. Which means that you have to recognize when the words start and stop, which is quite difficult for beginners and those that have poor literacy skills. 90% or so of the time it's the longest possible word containing the characters, but that still leaves about 10% of the time where some of the characters could belong to either of the words.
Still, it's a far more efficient writing system to read than English is.
Re:Make it easier (Score:5, Interesting)
The main issue with translating Chinese characters is that traditionally there are no separations made between words, so the computer has to guess at where the word boundaries are. But, yes, the computer will do better with characters than with pinyin, but really this is an area which is still largely a mess.
Re:and what % of the US does not speak english? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:In the US (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cantonese is superior to mandarin (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: Cantonese is superior to mandarin (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just an accent. My surname is Wu in mandarin, Ng in cantonese and pronounced Go or No in other dialects.
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Interesting)
> honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den [wikipedia.org]
The fundamental problem with romanized Chinese is the fact that nearly every word in Chinese has multiple homonyms (to/too/two), even AFTER you take into account the various inflections called "tones" (which are really just ways of formally representing verbal inflections in writing).
English disambiguates homonyms with silent letters and alternate letter combinations. If Chinese followed the same strategy, the romanized spelling of Chinese words would be almost completely arbitrary, and Chinese kids would spend years memorizing the difference between "shi", "she", "shee", "shii", "shie", "schi", "sche", "schii", and "schie" (plus appropriate tone marks). In the end, it wouldn't be much of an improvement... assuming it were any improvement at all.
At one time, Chinese had a serious "keyboard problem", but it's been largely solved by keyboards like Wubizixing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubizixing [wikipedia.org] ) and Wubihua. At the simple end, Wubihua assigns 5 keys to the most fundamental strokes used to write Chinese: horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling/dot, and hooked/complex. You press the keys corresponding to at least the first 4 strokes, then press the key corresponding to the last, and it presents you with a list of plausible characters that match. The more keys you press, the smaller the list gets, until you're left with either an unambiguous match or you've entered all the strokes.
Other methods, like Wubizixing, go a step further, and assign keys to the radicals themselves (if you think of characters as being like molecules, radicals are atoms, and strokes are quarks; in English terms, characters are words or stems, radicals are letters, and strokes are the way you'd write those letters... like "vertical, vertical, horizontal" for "uppercase H"). Somebody who's good at typing on a Wubizixing keyboard with the key-cadence of somebody who types English at ~100wpm can achieve an equivalent word-rate of about 120-150wpm (because Wubizixing makes more efficient use of the keys on the keyboard, and requires fewer keystrokes per communicated-word than English QWERTY).
The irony is that most people in China are amazed when they first encounter a Westerner who can type on a Wubi keyboard (-hua OR -zixing), because they think they're "too hard" to use. The reality is that stroke-based input is REALLY the only way somebody who doesn't know how to speak Chinese CAN enter characters on a keyboard. There's definitely room for algorithm-improvement in a "westerner-friendly" stroke-based input method, but I can guarantee that whatever we end up with ~10 years from now, it's going to look more like Wubi than anything else. It'll just be more forgiving of someone who enters "zhong" (level 'o' tone) as "vertical, horizontal, vertical, horizontal, vertical" (or some other permutation) instead of "vertical, hook, horizontal, vertical" (just to give one example).
As for "too hard", Wubizixing really isn't any harder for someone in China to master than QWERTY is for someone in the US. For geeks who type all day, every day, nonstop, it's a skill that pays HUGE personal dividends. For people who think computers in general are "hard to use", it doesn't really matter whether they're American or Chinese... they'll dick around with two-finger hunt & peck or Pinyin input, and endlessly predict the death of keyboards in favor of speech recognition. The rest of us, American and Chinese, will laugh at them and keep typing 120-150wpm while they struggle to send email and text messages with amusing autocorrect errors.
Anyway, getting back to romanization of Chinese... it's not going to happen. Chinese has romanized as much as it's ever going to romanize. Twenty years ago, keyboards and fonts were real problems. Now,
Re:and what % of the US does not speak english? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's different. English is pretty much the defacto common language in the US, and it was chosen because it was the overwhelmingly dominant language. Mandarin has always been playing catch up trying to drown out regional languages. This article is not at all a surprise, it's mostly just showing how their ethnic homogenization programs are failing.
Re:Make it easier (Score:5, Interesting)
Romanization systems don't work because there are too many homophones to worry about.
Bzzt! Aside from anything else, there is a standard romanisation sytem called Pinyin (), this is perfectly adequate to represent tones. It's used to teach Chinese both to kids and foreign speakers of Chinese. It's in dictionaries to tell Chinese people how to pronounce new words (since the Chinese orthography only gives you clues to pronunciation and of course no information about tones). Other tonal languages with greater tonal inventories than Mandarin such as Vietnamese have adopted similar schemes as their official orthography. There was even a substantial movement in the PRC to shift towards a roman alphabet at one point. This stemmed from the same political movement that simplified China's orthography from the traditional full form characters. Most of the arguments made about losing information in dumping Chinese characters can also be made about what has already occurred in the shift to simplified.
Even this argument premise betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about language. If you jump on a massively multiplayer game you'll find Chinese happily chatting away in pinyin without even writing the tones (you can do it in ascii by using numbers eg. ni3 hao3. That's because the act of parsing language is deeply rooted in context. Only certain words make sense in a given context or in a given syntactic position.
What most speakers of Western languages don't understand is quite how far along the explicit spectrum European languages are. An example is the English fetish on needing to specify a subject leading to bizarre constructions like "It is raining". Speakers of Chinese are much happier and skilled with the art of disambiguating not just lexical words but pragmatic intention from utterances that don't convey the full meaning in their semantic evaluation.
The high frequency of homophones is no barrier to a romanisation. I also fail to understand why anyone would think radicals are essential. They're very useful in reducing the task of memorising the character set, particularly since they have pronunciation and semantic clues that make it easier to remember how to read (and more importantly write) various words. They are actually quite a lot better at this task for the original full form () orthography because the full radicals often remain where as in the current simplified orthography of China, much has been reduced to arbitrary squiggles discarding semantic and pronunciation information in the process.
That's a circular argument though. If a phonemic orthography was used, you wouldn't be relying on clues any more. It would be enough to hear a word to be able to write it down. You cannot currently do that in Chinese except by using pinyin. I do this all the time. I write down the pinyin and then later check in a dictionary for the hanzi.
China should visit Brittany and Wales (Score:4, Interesting)
And speak some of the natives about the Welsh Not [wikipedia.org] and La Vaches [wikipedia.org]. It worked, and the only thing standing in the way of fluency in the official dialect is bitter resentment.
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never seen Chinese people use anything but pinyin for keyboard input.