The reporter said the video was taken before it opened, so of course there was no traffic. It's pretty busy a few months later as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/YOkW2h2HTD8
You might try naming your functions in Chinese. There's evidence showing that people take advantage of the face recognition machinery of their brains to read Chinese[1].
Coincidentally, native speakers of tonal languages (Chinese being one of them) also seem to have a higher chance of being pitch-perfect [2].
[2] Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., Marvin, E., & Xu H-S (2006). "Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students: Prevalence differences, and evidence for a speech-related critical period". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (2): 719–722.
Yeah, I considered that, but the situation comes up so infrequently I'd never remember the syntax. I use Python everyday anyway, so it almost comes naturally.
Contrary to what the simplified/traditional categorisation might suggest, there is nothing non-traditional about the simplification scheme. Most, if not all, of the simplified characters are taken from existing forms, such as those used in cursive script(草书, aka grass script, cao style) and variants used in certain eras/regions which happen to be simpler in forms. There had being painstaking and rigorous process to validate established usage before any character was approved for inclusion, in order to ensure the coherency and continuity of the whole writing system. During the cultural revolution, there was an effort for further simplification, and in the revolutionary zest, the process was not so rigorous and many poorly designed and indeed ugly forms were invented and included. Thankfully, these late additions were later repealed and are no longer in use.
There was (or still is, politically motivated, I think) opposition to the simplification in Taiwan, but fortunately pragmaticism prevails and nowadays, even the current President Ma Ying-jeou advocates "识繁写简" (recognize complex, write simplified), because the practicality of the simplified version is undeniable.
No. 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 native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I think you are full of shit. No native Chinese speaker I know thinks English is easier to learn than Chinese. And I prefer the Chinese writing system myself if I have a choice.
It's true that many people are learning English, because today Chinese are producing and selling. When the day comes when Chinese become buyers and the rest of the world are trying to get sales from Chinese, they will start learning Chinese.
I seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.
> I seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.
What is the point? I use my own language as a reference point because it's the language I know best. And I hope others would do the same: comment on things you know best and stop spreading lies, myths, pointless memes about things you know little.
When we say "天书", we usually refer to "无字天书" (the divine book without letter); i.e., a blank book for those of us without magical power. Again, I don't see relevancy here. We don't need magical power to learn Chinese.
If you lay apart the expletives, the poster said that Chinese realize their language is hard to pick up for foreigners. So their strategy seems to be learning English instead of holding their breath for rest of the world learning Mandarin. Do you disagree with this assessment?
If you do, where exactly? Do you suggest that all languages and writing systems are equally easy to learn as a second language? If not, do you consider Mandarin to be easier or as easy to learn as English?
I, for one, find Mandarin damn hard to learn (doing it my first year), and the script is indeed the toughest part. While I find it visually elegant, it is fairly irregular, prompting for massive amount of drill and memorization in learning. (I knew two other foreign languages and two natively before approaching Mandarin, so I have some perspective here). Many people seem to share such experience, i.e. people reliably find Chinese hard.
From the western perspective a prosperous China is a good thing. Unfortunately, China is speeding towards one of the largest economic walls the world has ever seen. Mix a rapidly aging population, high levels of corruption, high savings rates, and an unstable government and you have a recipe for disaster.
Growing the Chinese GDP to 3 or 4 times its current size should still be easy, but as per person income starts to approach Japan it’s going to be really rough sailing.
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?
As someone whose native language is neither, having studied both, I'd say English is much easier.
The tones in Chinese really fuck with someone whose native language isn't tonal (and most aren't), and wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols? Makes sense, doesn't it?
Words in Chinese don't get conjugated much (if at all), but you've got a relatively strict word order, whereas in English, you've got particles and a more relaxed word order.
Not having tones and no huge obstacle to becoming literate makes English a hell of a lot easier to learn.
> The tones in Chinese really fuck with someone whose native language isn't tonal (and most aren't),
I speak Chinese by learning the sounds of words, but not the tones, in my active learning. If I speak quickly, in complete contextual sentences, using two-syllable words (instead of the one-syllable ones), then people generally understand me. I learn the tones passively afterwards.
> and wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols?
Most Chinese symbols are made up of components, of which there's about 400 to 600, depending on how you count them. E.g. the one character 解 is made up of four components 勹用刀牛.
> but you've got a relatively strict word order,
Introductory lessons in Chinese only present the standard word order, but, like in English, you can arrange the content words of a sentence in many different orders depending on what you want to make thematic or focus on.
Tone is not that important. Each dialect of Mandarin has its own set of tones, but they can understand each other most of the time. Most non-natives don't follow tones altogether.
For the Chinese, getting the tones right usually means you are not a country bumpkin, which can sometimes affect your job prospect, but if you are a foreigner they don't care.
Chinese has fairly minimalistic and consistent grammar. If you don't take the tones too seriously, it should be one of the easier spoken languages to learn.
>wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols?
Native speakers only memorize a few of the simple radicals, most of the rest come to you through osmosis. After learning some characters you begin to see the pattern. Each radical has a specific placement in a character, so you can usually "spell out" a character by listing the radicals.
One important difference between English and Chinese is that English is something everyone expects you to know. Knowing Chinese on the other hand will get you mad street cred if you are a non-native.
> 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?
I agree that yuan's "I think you are full of shit." is even worse (although he addresses another `you'), and I even agree with your sentiment (if not your wording).
On the other hand, boyter said, the "Chinese realize" their language is hard to learn. And yuan disagreed. Navel-gazing was exactly what was called for.
So I agree with yuan and you. But your message was slightly out of context and does not address yuan's message.
Chinese mandarin could get easily get back to its Lingua Franca status in its area of cultural dominance: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and it could spread from there. It is actually easy and fun to learn the basics, no grammar, just little cute Lego blocks you have to draw, while if you master it you get access to the richest literature and poetry.
I use 3 languages daily, some colleagues have 4, 5... Come on, valley' men, stop thinking languages are hard. It's hard only if you think all the others should talk English e basta.
Yeah, I know hangul is phonetic, but I've also heard they make use of a variant of chinese characters in some limited fashion (mostly give names, place names, and academic histories).
> 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.
If you're interested in Lisp, Objective C and Cocoa, you might also be interested in Clozure[1], a Common Lisp implementation which provides complete access to Cocoa through its Objective C bridge[2].
> ...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.
Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into account.
