> ...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word.
Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).
> Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation.
Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2].
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon.
From experience, Mandarin and Cantonese are fairly close to each other, in my opinion. But Shanghainese (and basically the Wu dialects) is not intelligible to me. 我們 (wo men = "us" in english) in Mandarin is not so far from 我哋 (ngo de) in Cantonese, but is pretty far from colloquial Shanghainese, 阿拉 (a la).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation.
That is nonsense, people are people and will do what makes them happy. If they don't care about Mandarin, nothing will stop them from not using it. Personally, I totally enjoy the fact that there are different dialects, each with it's own flavor in expressing certain concepts(especially profanities!). For example, everyone's favorite profanity in Cantonese, 仆街 (pok gai/pok kai) "go to hell" (transliteration is "go lay on the street (and die because you'll get trampled/ran over)". Over time, this has bled over to English and the English bled back over to Chinese speakers into PK. And in today's Taiwan reality shows (I'm sure mainland China uses this term today as well), we have PK rounds where contestants get eliminated from the shows. In these contexts, PK has turned into a term about competition!
Sure, having a standard is good so that there can be less ambiguity in communication between people, but at the same time, diversity is what breeds new ideas and innovations. Take computers, programming languages, designs as an example; 1 processor to do computation and graphics? "unifying" everyone to C# be such a good idea? Is a centralized versioning system the most awesome?
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
At least half the TV in mainland China has subtitles. If you can speak and read one Chinese language/dialect well, you can learn another by immersing yourself in TV with subtitles for a few months. I meet many people here who say, e.g. "they learnt Cantonese because they lived in Guangzhou for a year".
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly
I suspect you have some exposure to Cantonese, then. My experience in discussing this with many native Chinese speakers is that Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Fujianese are all mutually unintelligible. And not just slightly so, but as difficult to convey understanding as I (an English speaker with a touch of French) experience in Mexico.
But don't just take my word for it:
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. [1]
(The above quotation bears this footnote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages." )
As you suggest that I may be prejudiced for political reasons, I respond that in this subject I have absolutely no bias. And let me add that the very same criticism could be directed at you.
A final criterion in differentiating language from dialect involves a language's political status, a factor that is external to the form of the language and sometimes even at variance with the culture of the speakers. Do the political authorities in a country consider two language forms to be separate languages or dialects of a single language? Extremely different, non-mutually intelligible language forms may be called dialects simply because they are spoken within a single political entity and it behooves the rulers of that entity to consider them as such: this was the case with Ukrainian and Russian in the days of the Russian Empire, where Ukrainian (called Little Russian) was considered a substandard variety of Russian (called Great Russian). This could also be said to be the case with the so-called dialects of Chinese in the People's Republic of China.
On the other hand, language forms that are quite mutually intelligible can be considered separate languages also for purely political reasons. Such is the case with Serbian and Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. Linguistically, these two language forms are more similar than the English spoken in Texas and New York; linguists, in fact, usually called them both by the name Serbo-Croatian. However, for entirely political reasons the Serbs and the Croats have deliberately invented separate literary standards to render their language more divergent than it really is. Furthermore, the Croats, being Catholics, use the Latin alphabet, while the Orthodox Serbs use a version of Cyrillic. A similar situation pertains is other cases, notably Hindi/Urdu, and Bengali/Assamese. [2]
Finally, you note that Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used in movies, etc. This is true for most of the PRC, but is not true for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (I think) Tibet. But I don't see what it proves in any case. I will add, though, that in Chinese movies I frequently see Chinese subtitles, presumably put there so that those used to different "dialects" can understand.
Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).
> Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation.
Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2].
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon.
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical
[2] http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-CN&...