You'll never be Chinese

Mandarin is not totally unrelated to Manchu. There are a lot of loan words in Mandarin from Manchu, for example, 姑娘, 罗嗦, 邋遢, 马虎, 麻利, 别扭, and lots of other common phrases. More importantly, Mandarin is heavily influenced by Manchu in other ways, for example, tones. Southern languages like Cantonese, Minnan have more tones (Cantonese 9, Minnan 8, vs Mandarin 5). Some Chinese believe Mandarin is a language polluted/reduced by Manchu, and they consider southern languages to be more elegant and culturally richer and purer. Cantonese lost to Mandarin by a single vote during the selection of "official" language of China in 1912.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Chinese#Twentieth_century

While the article may have good points, I was once told not to burn any bridges when leaving. It is an illusion that you can change things while giving up the fight. Unless you leaving is an illusion for some other agenda.

"The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished."

I grew up in that culture in America having a Chinese mother and belonging to the local Chinese community. The interesting aspect to it, is that it represents a curve as everyone gets a 97+ on their tests. It felt like 97 was the median in the class. It just happened to be instead of having scores from 50-100, you had them compressed from 90-100. Scoring below a 90 is equivalent to getting an F in the local Chinese community as only a few ever scored that low.

I personally appreciate having gone through that and all the brainwashing that occurred with that mindset. I know one of my strengths is the ability to work well under pressure, where often my motivation is correlated with pressure. While I never made the connection in college, I innately understood the curve and how to play the game due to being curved at a young age.

The worry I have at times with correlating motivation with difficulty is whether I am creating an invalid proxy for value. Sometimes the work leads to something of value, but they are not directly linked as there are plenty of difficult things out there that generate little value to society and oneself.

That said, bringing it back to the OP's concern about his children's education, I don't know what it's like to go through a full Chinese system as I highly appreciate the mixture of Western education in my upbringing. I had a nervous breakdown in high school after realizing the falseness of my quest I had around accomplishments and achievements. If it weren't for the liberal arts of Western culture (arts, music, and literature), I don't know how I would have came out of that mental breakdown. I began to value the Renaissance man who was balanced in a variety of topics and sought the balance of academics, the arts and social skills. I wonder if it weren't for those concepts, if I would have trained myself to seek higher and higher goals in mastery over academics as I saw with some of my childhood friends who had a stricter Chinese upbringing.

>The article comes across overly jaded, though I suppose the idea to not start a media company or buy residential housing are both good pieces of advice!

Building a business then having the state steal it from you would make most people jaded.

> There are a lot of loan words in Mandarin from Manchu, for example, 姑娘, 罗嗦, 邋遢, 马虎, 麻利, 别扭, and lots of other common phrases.

And I acknowledged them. Similarly, southern Chinese languages feature borrowings from Tai, Austro-Asiatic, and Austronesian languages.

Sanskrit is another source of borrowings for many Chinese languages, due to the influence of Buddhism. The word "Mandarin", coincidentally, comes from the Sanskrit word mantrin (मन्त्रिन्), meaning "minister" or "councillor", although that is not used in Mandarin itself to refer to the language.

So it's not just Mandarin that has been influenced by foreign languages. The borrowing of words is very common when two languages come into contact. A prime example is the internet-speak used by Chinese netizens, which is replete with English-based neologisms.

However, that doesn't change the fact that modern Mandarin overwhelmingly bears more similarity to Classical Chinese than it does to Manchu.

> More importantly, Mandarin is heavily influenced by Manchu in other ways, for example, tones. Southern languages like Cantonese, Minnan have more tones (Cantonese 9, Minnan 8, vs Mandarin 5).

Do you have any proof that Manchu influence is the reason for Mandarin's relative paucity of tones in comparison to southern Chinese languages? Middle Chinese, which goes back nearly a millenium before the advent of the Qing dynasty, already had only 4 tones[0]. According to the relationship between Middle Chinese tones and modern Mandarin tones[1], the 4 tones of modern Mandarin are descended from the Ping (平), Shang (上), and Qu (去) tones of Middle Chinese, with some redistribution according to consonant type.

> Some Chinese believe Mandarin is a language polluted/reduced by Manchu, and they consider southern languages to be more elegant and culturally richer and purer.

And one of the major proximal causes of this is the loss of tones, since it's lead to homophonic ambiguity, which has been corrected through the formation of polysyllabic neologisms, which break many millenia-old connections with Classical Chinese. It's not just the addition of Manchu vocabulary and/or phrases.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Rela...