> You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?
Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective. Boyter said, "The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system." As a Chinese speaker living among many Chinese speakers and having some proficiency in certain alphabet system, I think I have a say on such thing. Perhaps my sampling size is insignificant, it's still better than a complete baseless lie.
> [Personal anecdotal narrative elided.]
Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.
There has been too much hot air, lets introduce some substance and data: how hard is it to attain literacy in a language?
Take a look at India, a country of similar size, population and economic status to China. According to UN Developement Programme Report 2009(pg. 172-173)[1], India's literacy rate is estimated to be at 66%, while China is at 93.3%.
If GDP percapita is any indication to access to education, Brazil and Mexico have significantly higher GDP/capita than China, but China's literacy is actually slightly better.
You may attribute it to cultural difference or whatever, still, it'd be less of a complete lie to say Chinese is not harder to learn than these other languages than otherwise.
To the rest: sorry for the language and this offtopic debate, but I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love. I said what I have to say and I will stop now.
> Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective.
You said "you're full of shit", which I thought lacked tactfulness. You're right, I didn't read the earlier comment carefully enough. I guess it needed to be quite forcefully pointed out that Chinese people don't realize how hard their language is to learn.
> Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.
Well, let's go through what I said again:
Not having tones and no huge obstacle to becoming literate makes English a hell of a lot easier to learn.
I still think that's true. You seem to be saying that people find it easier to learn languages that are more related to their native language than some others, but how is that related to my point about Chinese being quite an undertaking to learn?
You quote some literacy statistics, but that's not really relevant to what I said either, is it? An intentional distraction, perhaps.
Chinese has got a huge alphabet, and most other languages don't. This means that it's much more difficult to attain literacy in Chinese. Whatever amount of characters you want to draw the line at, it'll still be much more than 26.
> I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love
Oh please. No one has slandered your beloved language. The fact remains though, that the tones and characters are a big burden on someone who wants to learn it.
Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective. Boyter said, "The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system." As a Chinese speaker living among many Chinese speakers and having some proficiency in certain alphabet system, I think I have a say on such thing. Perhaps my sampling size is insignificant, it's still better than a complete baseless lie.
> [Personal anecdotal narrative elided.]
Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.
There has been too much hot air, lets introduce some substance and data: how hard is it to attain literacy in a language?
Take a look at India, a country of similar size, population and economic status to China. According to UN Developement Programme Report 2009(pg. 172-173)[1], India's literacy rate is estimated to be at 66%, while China is at 93.3%.
If GDP percapita is any indication to access to education, Brazil and Mexico have significantly higher GDP/capita than China, but China's literacy is actually slightly better.
You may attribute it to cultural difference or whatever, still, it'd be less of a complete lie to say Chinese is not harder to learn than these other languages than otherwise.
[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2009_EN_Complete.pdf
To the rest: sorry for the language and this offtopic debate, but I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love. I said what I have to say and I will stop now.