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."
It's not just China.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Including a few on /.
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.
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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 i
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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.
That's just a stupid thing to say. Mandarin is not "playing catch up trying to drown out regional languages" - the Chinese government has for a long time had an active policy of protecting minorities, their cultures and languages. However, it is important that everybody is able to communicate in the same language, so Mandarin is being taought in school, just like the Queen's English is being taught to all school children in UK, even if they speak another language at home.
And I think it is worth remembering
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I find that statement extremely difficult to believe.
And I think it is worth remembering that it was us proud, freedom-loving and democratic Westerners that went about ttrying to strangle local dialects and minority languages: in UK Welsh and Gaelic were suppressed, the Danes tried to eradicate inuit in Greenland, etc etc.
And apparently you do too, since you immediately start making excuses for them. Not that Danish or British doing bad things to fourth parties actually excuses anything the Chinese might do to unrelated ones.
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Just ask the happy and contented people of Tibet. Oh, you can't, the Chinese government doesn't let them talk to foreigners. Well, they're happy and contented. Just take our word for it.
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Just ask the happy and contented people of Tibet. Oh, you can't, the Chinese government doesn't let them talk to foreigners. Well, they're happy and contented. Just take our word for it.
You're just being silly now. It is perfectly possible to go to Xizang and talk to people; it is rather expensive, but not impossible, and even less so, now the new, high-speed railway is operating. I have travelled all over China in the last 10 years - Yunnan, Hainan, Hunan, Xinjiang, just to mention a few. This is not North Korea, nobody follows you around, discreetly intimidating the general population; but don't take my word for it - go and see for youself.
Of course the Tibetans are not all entirely happ
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Oh, I see. I googled a bit around, as I was wondering when such a voting has happened. Seems this claim is only an urban legend ... strangely repeated often.
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but they have us beat again... only about 300 million Americans can't speak Mandarin.
Re:It's not just China.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Canada isn't the 52nd state either
That's because we don't want to get stuck with Quebec. Louisiana is bad enough as it is.
Make it easier (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Maybe if the language wasn't so difficult it would see more widespread adoption.
Save for tones, which come natural to child learners anyway, there's nothing intrinsically difficult about the Chinese language. Please note that script and language are two different things - and apparently, this problem has nothing to do with writing (you may have noticed the phrase "cannot speak" if you read the fine summary. I hope I'm not asking for too much here!)
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: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: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.
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that that's part of the problem; but in a way that the Chinese government is (fairly sensibly) spinning as an 'Oh, gosh, look at the need for educational improvements!' problem: How many of the 400 million non-Mandarin speakers are just really-badly-educated speakers, and how many are speaking-something-other-than-Mandarin-just-fine-thanks?
It isn't exactly news that China is less homogeneous than Beijing would prefer, and includes a number of both ethnic and linguistic groups that aren't entirely fuzzy toward the capital.
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From what I've heard the Chinese have been using Roman letters to help their students learn their own language for years now, and especially use roman letters to make it easier to enter Chinese text into a computer.
But there are still good reasons to use their traditional characters - including the fact that although China has many spoken languages, the use of characters allows most of them to share a single written form.
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For traditional => simplified, it's a matter of adjusting a few days and thinking wtf why does it have to look so ugly, but it's still trivial. I never really spent time "learning" the simplified characters beyond trying to read a few novels in simplified Chinese. The difficulty is probably about the same as adjusting to read 1337 5p34k.
Not sure about the other way round. Might be harder, but I can't imagine it's as hard as learning another language or dialect...
What I really meant though, was that regar
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:Make it easier (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make it easier (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never seen Chinese people use anything but pinyin for keyboard input.
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You think there is no objective way to compare written languages? Really?
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.
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I'm the opposite. I generally seem to read English at a much faster rate, even though Chinese is supposed to be my "first language". It might have something to do with "practice". The amount of English I read is probably an order of magnitude greater than Chinese.
It also might have something to do with the content though. It feels like Chinese fiction is easier on my eyes, whereas English is better for technical and (complex) argumentative writing.
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It also has huge historical implications. The Qur'an was written in Arabic (and according to Islam, a Qur'an is only a Qur'an in Arabic, a translation is at best a rough approximation. God was apparently a monoglot). So we have today this historical collection of works which many people base their lives on and take as a matter of life and death (their own and others') which can be interpreted in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. People die over these disagreements literally every single day, and have b
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sure they have.
there's inherent value in having different characters for different sounds so you don't have to second guess if it's kolor, solor or color.. written english with latin alphabet isn't particularly good at it but it's at least ok, but a set where you have different characters for large combinations of sounds - words - are insane for everyday living. the chinese writing system was never meant to be used for peasants in their everyday affairs though...
there's value in limiting it to reasonable nu
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.
Well, yes. (Score:2)
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. Shenzhen, the high-tech region near Hong Kong, was mostly using Cantonese two decades ago, but is now mostly Mandarin.
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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
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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.
'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 ;)
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I remember very recently there was a sort of "learn Chinese" fad going around...
It was usually some techie MBA type...
Probably Firefly fans.
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Well if you want business relations with China speaking Mandarin is as useful as speaking Spanish in Mexico, you'll find English speakers but only where they expect foreigners. Even here in Norway with 90%+ English speakers and a massive amount of language training through non-dubbed series and movies it's only in some international businesses everyone can seamlessly switch to English. Everyone where I work now could probably hold a basic conversation in English but many would be severely impeded and would
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Howdy Mr. Norway, interesting thoughts.
I was a bit baffled by this:
and your point about middle managers...could you maybe explain it a different way?
also, I'd like to hear more of your evidence for this statement:
Is this from your experience in *both* China and Mexico?
Seeing as you are Norwegian, I'm incli
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.
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Yet, all other things being equal, if they could buy from someone who spoke their native language, they would. With the exception of truely multi-lingual people, generally people who grew up speaking two or more languages, you'll always be more comfortable in your m
Know this is about Speaking (Score:2)
But one of the things I stumbled upon trying to learn some asian languages is the logographic writing. Unlike our alphabet, where you can sound it out, in logographic systems you either know the 1 of many thousands of symbols or you don't. Which is why in Japanese writing, particularly geared for younger folk, the more advanced kanji (for that age group) usually has kana (a type of phonographic alphabet) over the Kanji, so they can sound out the words. Don't know how it works in Chinese.
Anyway, a long wh
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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 m
Phew -- make me feel better (Score:2)
I learned some Chinese in high school and even won an inter-school award for "excellence", but I could not even hold a conversation. This makes me feel a lot better about my lack of Chinese speaking skills after devoting some years to it.
same written language means not every has to or wa (Score:3)
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.
But on the other hand India (Score:3)
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.
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.
Baffled to read comments here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Spoken like someone who has not realized that this is pretty common in the USA. Often a person will not be hired for a job that involves lots of client facing interaction if his accent is too bad. A rather famous tv personality Alton Brown had to learn to speak without an accent to be able to do his geek cooking show.
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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.
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Funny how people who are bigoted against Chinese always project their biggotry.
Hokkien is not Mandarin with an accent, it's more comarable with Pennsylvania Dutch. A native English speaker can understand a strong Southern accent with effort. Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien (and Taiwanese and Shanghaiese for that matter) are not mutually intelligible at all. I would suggest you work on improving your tiny knowledge of China if you are going to speak on this issue, and examine your own prejudices rather th
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There are some southern accents with no amount of effort can I understand. Deep Georgia is one. They say specific as pacific, well becomes whale and on and on it goes. It would take as long as learning a new language for me to learn that.
To the rest of you comment, I have no idea. I don't how to say much of anything in any Chinese language.
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I lived there for 4 years in my youth, this was after living for 4 years in Alabama. Even then I regularly ran across people who I simply could not understand.
Last year I was speaking to dell tech support about a server that needed some parts and as I could not understand the CSR I asked for a native english speaker. He then slightly more clearly yelled something about Georgia, I am assuming he was in that state. He did eventually transfer me to someone I could understand.
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But even the thickest of southern accents are still English, with pretty the same grammar and vocabulary, and even a lot of pronunciation in common ("well" and "whale" are close, but not the same, however, "well" and "wohl" [the German equivalent] are quite differently pronounced and also have somewhat divergent meanings). What people often fail to understand about Chinese dialects is that they are actually separate languages, and usually only called dialects because of the apparent cultural and political u
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Pacific and Specific do not even start with the same letters. Well and whale is easy compared to some changes.
I understand that fine, German my first language is like that. I cannot understand some old northerners.
Bavarian German has whole other words, as another example.
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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 grea
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Dropping the S from specific does not sound at all like pacific, any more than any other two rhyming words. It was a simple example. For me the worst is when they run all their words together. Old northerners in Germany often sound like they are doing that too.
When something becomes a dialect vs another language seems a bit like selecting where colors change in a rainbow.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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 hypothesi
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And yet somehow people manage to have perfectly normal conversations in it. If you're going to argue that a language isn't "useful" then your dealing with pretty insurmountable evidence to the contrary when, you know, people use it.
Plus, the reason that Chinese local languages haven't developed is because they're being actively suppressed by the central government in Beijing. It's not a damned coincidence.
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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.
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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: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:Cantonese is superior to mandarin (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Empire (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This is because "the country" is really an empire, not a country. Would you find it odd that people in places under the US's imperial control (either formally or informally) don't always speak English?
I don't know if it counts but the Philippines. -It used to be under US control formally if for only a little while, informally a long time.
They have the same problem China does and it's a smaller area, The most spoken language is Tagalog and even then
so many distance regional differences many can't talk to each other.
That's the way it was when I lived there; hitting the wikipedia it's much worse than I thought, as Tagalog has been replaced
with Filipino and English
Official status
Filipino is constitutionally
Re:Oops (Score:4)
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.
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In English the word american means someone from the USA. What language are we conversing in?
If we were speaking in Portuguese you might have a point.
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Also, I don't imagine all of the former Soviet Union spoke Russian, or did they?
No. It was more common, and taught in schools, but not universally known.
If you travel round Eastern Europe you will find old people often know German or Russian, younger people learn English.
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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.
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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: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.
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China has more English speakers than any other country.
Re:Why don't they just learn English? (Score:4, Funny)
Because even God does not trust those bastards in the dark.
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The sun never sets on the British Empire, but it's mostly cloudy with light showers ; ).
I think many countries have roughly the same percentage of people that don't speak "The Queen's English" or whatever the local equivalent of that may be, or are even unintelligible upon arrival in the capitol so to say.
Re:Why don't they just learn English? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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.
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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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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
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What in the hell does this have to do with the article? This has to do with a Chinese dialect, not race. It's kinda hard to even relate the article vs what you're saying because they're not even dealing with a major race issue over there.
They probably meant to post in the "Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'?" article, which demonstrates that racists aren't too bright.
Re:Why don't they just learn English? (Score:4, Funny)
Get a Japanese toilet. Luxury models are almost self-aware at this point.
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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.
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It is not a sad truth and not all of China wants to convert to one language or this article would not exist.
The USA is great because it is a melting pot, not because we are uniform and unbending.
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.
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AFAIK only in Guangdong and Hong Kong, outside of those regions, nobody uses Cantonese, at least not that I heard. Most business will be done in either the local language or Mandarin.