Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin • Hacker News Board

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#21

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

abayer wrote: post #13

jamesli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 Man…

[deleted]

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#22

Post by niuzeta » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:47 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #7

Waiting for tokenadult to comment on this...

who's that and why?

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#23

Post by jarek » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #15

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.

And to compete with the Chinese state, which has always made an enormous effort to get its subjects to speak a common language. But iPhone!

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#24

Post by jl6 » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:51 PM UTC

While it makes me uncomfortable to think of anyone being forced into a new language, I like the idea that this increases the number of people who can talk to each other.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#25

Post by a8da6b0c91d » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

What is the reality of Wu on the ground in Shanghai? Do you hear both Mandarin and Wu often, or mostly just one? Which one? I assume everybody can actually speak and understand Mandarin?

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#26

Post by ihsw » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:58 PM UTC

niuzeta wrote: post #22

w1ntermute wrote: post #7

Waiting for tokenadult to comment on this...

who's that and why?

According to his profile[1] he seems to be somewhat of an expert on Chinese languages.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#27

Post by notahacker » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:58 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #18

gaoshan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Thou…

The multisyllabic nature of English and relatively complex sentence structure probably aids comprehension with different accents too.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#28

Post by contravert » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 5:06 PM UTC

jamesli wrote: post #19

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 s…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#29

Post by mmorris » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

abayer wrote: post #13

jamesli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 Man…

I am not a linguist, per se, but my understanding is that there is no formal definition (or even agreement) on what constitutes a separate language versus a separate dialect. Rather, a number of factors are taken into consideration (including political factors), and the distinction is almost always debatable.

While it is desperate for citations, it looks like the Wikipedia article supports that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language

There is also an episode of one of my favorite podcasts (Slate's Lexicon Valley) that focuses on this issue, particularly in regards to what has sometimes been called "Ebonics": http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#30

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 5:13 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]