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Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#11

Post by jamesli »

afreak wrote: post #2

> 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. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

"Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard."

Strictly speaking, 1) there are many dialects of Chinese, not Mandarin. 2) the language many Beijing people speak is not a dialect. It is an accent. Cantonese is a dialect. Wu Chinese is a dialect. Beijing Chinese is an accent. It is definitely not the national standard, although it is the closest to the national standard, compared to other accents.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#13

Post by abayer »

jamesli wrote: post #11
afreak wrote: post #2

> 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. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

"Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard." Strictly speaking, 1) there are many dialects of Chinese, not Mandarin. 2) the language many Beijing people speak is not a dialect. It is an accent. Cantonese is a dialect. Wu Chinese is a dialect. Beijing Chinese is an accent. It…

Generally, linguists would disagree with that - Cantonese is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, so it's not a dialect, it's a different language, as are Wu, Hakka, etc... There are fairly profound differences between these languages in their spoken form. It is true that they all share a single written language, and a common language ancestry, but Cantonese (the spoken language) is at least as different from Mandarin (the spoken language) as Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#14

Post by saraid216 »

I recently went and saw The Grandmaster, and one of the more interesting subtleties I noticed was that the Northerners were speaking in Mandarin while the Southerners were speaking in Cantonese. That isn't noted in subtitles anywhere.

(I'm ethnically Chinese, grew up in a household speaking Cantonese, and took some lessons for Mandarin.)

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#15

Post by melling »

afreak wrote: post #2

> 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. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

I see 400 million potential customers that I didn't have before. :-)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?...

I'll have audio in 2-3 months. Now I just need that cheaper iPhone for emerging markets.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#16

Post by gaoshan »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #5
speeder wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well". I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects. The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus t…

I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...

And some of them sound rather radically different from Mandarin. My wife speaks something called Hangzhou dialect (spoken just a few hours away from Shanghai) and when other Chinese hear it they sometimes think she is visiting from another country. On one occasion some people thought she was speaking English (it sounds nothing like English).

An example of the differences... in Mandarin to say "It is." you would say "Shi de." but in Hangzhou dialect you would say something that sounds like "Zede ye." The adverb "very" is "hen" in Mandarin but sounds like "molaolao" (though colloquially people often just say "mo") in Hangzhou dialect.

The differences between the various dialects are fascinating sometimes radical and they must have developed for many centuries in near isolation from one another to get where they are today.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#17

Post by abayer »

speeder wrote: post #3
afreak wrote: post #2

> 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. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well". I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects. The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus t…

Tibet is not Mongolian - they've now got connections in terms of their religious background, but Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, while Mongolian is, unsurprisingly, in the Mongol language family (or if you accept the Altaic hypothesis, it's also part of the larger Altaic family with Turkic and Tungusic languages).

And what's more, take a look at the current state of Mongolia some time - it's a functioning democracy with pretty decent respect for civil liberties and no tendency to invade their neighbors. Yes, there's a long history of semi-nomadic tribes coming out of Central Asia and invading the civilized cultures along the edges of the Eurasian steppes, but that pattern wasn't unique to the Mongols (various Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic (i.e., Manchu), Magyar and other peoples have played that role over the millennia), and that's been a thing of the past since horse archers became ineffective in war (i.e., once firearms were widespread).

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#18

Post by laumars »

gaoshan wrote: post #16
flanbiscuit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...

And some of them sound rather radically different from Mandarin. My wife speaks something called Hangzhou dialect (spoken just a few hours away from Shanghai) and when other Chinese hear it they sometimes think she is visiting from another country. On one occasion some people thought she was speaking English (it sounds nothing like English). An example of the differences... in Mandarin to say "It is." you would say "…

I'm no expert, but I always wondered if it was a result of the language being tonal. In England, you have dialects that can sound so different that it could be another language to the untrained ear. However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error (so to speak) - accents can exist without transforming the word. Whereas with a tonal language, an accent could change the language more dramatically.

Though what's also interesting is some of the different languages and dialects in China also have different sentence structures (eg verb placements).

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#19

Post by jamesli »

Many people think Mandarin and Cantonese are basically the same language, or Cantonese is an accent of Mandarin. It is understandable since the majority of early Chinese immigrants were from Canton Province (or Guangdong Province), where Cantonese is the dominant language.

Cantonese is a dialect, with very different sound system, although it shares the same writing system with Mandarin. The difference between their sound systems could be larger than that between English and German, or between Russian and and Bulgarian. It makes sense if one considers the size of China. It is as big as Europe sans Russian. There are as many dialects in China as languages in Europe. In some remote parts in East China, the people in the towns next to each other could not understand each other's dialects. So a common writing system was enforced more than 2000 years ago so that people could communicate with each other in writing.

Native Cantonese speakers is less than 5% of total population in China. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language. It is mostly spoken in Canton and Hongkong. A helpful analogy (not accurate definitely) is to think of it as Spanish in the scope of Europe. A native Mandarin speaker will not understand Cantonese if he doesn't study it, just as a native English speaker will not understand Spanish without study.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#20

Post by schuke »

afreak wrote: post #2

> 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. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

I think you mean Beijing accent. By Chinese standards if one speaks Mandarin with an accent as heavy as Scottish accent is to English, she is deemed to speak Madarin not well enough.
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