Russian is past, Chinese is future? (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Russian is past, Chinese is future?
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150 messages over 19 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 18 19 Next >>

Ari
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Norway
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Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

Message 137 of 150

30 September 2010 at 3:15am | IP Logged

jasoninchina wrote:

By the way, what part of China do you live in and how do you like it? I live in Hainan and I'm going to venture a guess that it's a whole different brand of Chinese than you have wherever you are.

I'll answer that in a PM, so as not to derail the thread.
1 person has voted this message useful

CheeseInsider
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
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Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
Studies: French, German

Message 138 of 150

21 November 2010 at 4:49am | IP Logged

Ari wrote:

Chairman Mao tried to romanize Mandarin (Pinyin was designed as a replacement for the characters) and failed. That's a clear indicator that it's hard to get rid of them.

Then again, there are today many Chinese who find it difficult to write Mandarin with a pen. They can read without problems, and they can write with a computer (using pinyin), but sometimes they find it hard to write the characters with a pen. Add to this the fact that the relentless push for everyone in China to speak Mandarin and not their local languages is both removing the very reason the characters didn't evolve into phonograms like in the rest of the world and making sure that more and more people know pinyin.

The oft-cited argument that Mandarin has too many homophones to be written phonetically is doubly ludicrous: first of all that would make the spoken language impossible and secondly there already is a dialect, the Dungan one, very similar to Standard Mandarin but written phonetically with Cyrillic letters. The argument holds validity for older texts written in Classical Chinese, however. It would be difficult to understand those texts if they were written phonetically, at last with modern Mandarin pronunciation (a bit easier if one used Cantonese). Most Tang dynasty poems are incomprehensible if read aloud to a person who have never seen them written down; they only make sense in written form.

All in all, I think it'll take a lot to get rid of the Chinese characters, but there are forces at work today that makes it easier than in the fifties. I doubt it's enough, though, and I don't think they'll disappear anytime soon.

However, I also think their difficulty is overrated. It's basically a very irregular spelling system. With English, you have to learn the spelling of each and every word, and the same goes for Mandarin. There's a logic to the characters that's not evident to people who haven't studied them and once you get into it, learning new characters is very simple.

I agree 100% The only function that characters serve now is to unite all the peoples of China with 1 common writing system. But since students are now learning Mandarin as their operative language in school, there is no longer a need for a united written form.
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RIchieP
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 4840 days ago
13 posts - 14 votes
Speaks: English*

Message 139 of 150

02 February 2011 at 5:13pm | IP Logged

You're all assuming it will be advantageous to learn the dominant language in 30 years time...

http://www.slashgear.com/google-translator-phone-project-pro mises-real-time-translation-0873110/

This is already in development - it should work "reasonably well in a few years". It's not a far stretch to say this technology will be well in place in 30 years.

Certainly for business and trade, voice-recognition and real-time translation technology is going to make the need for language-learning redundant sooner or later. It might well be before China becomes the giant it's heading toward.

Edited by RIchieP on 02 February 2011 at 5:15pm
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ChiaBrain
Bilingual Diglot
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United States
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Studies: German

Message 140 of 150

13 May 2011 at 10:52pm | IP Logged

...and thats how World War 3 starts, from a Google Phone mis-interpretation.

I am joking, but there is so much cultural context that would need to go into such a
device.
I have no doubt that it's eventually possible, but it's really ultimately a matter of
developing the software.
And its a LONG road to debug something with logic that fuzzy.

What's Mandarin for: "I'm sorry Mr. Han, I didn't have the latest service pack for Google
Phone!"

Edited by ChiaBrain on 13 May 2011 at 10:54pm
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Ellsworth
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United States
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Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish

Message 142 of 150

15 May 2011 at 7:04am | IP Logged

Learn a language for enjoyment rather than utility. Some languages are fun to speak and have great cultures. I
wouldn't just base your language decisions off of the countries in which the language is spoken.
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Nguyen
Senior Member
Vietnam
Joined 4882 days ago
109 posts - 195 votes

Speaks: Vietnamese

Message 143 of 150

18 May 2011 at 4:58am | IP Logged

I don't think Russian is on the way out. Right now in my country people are scrambling to learn this language. Russian people are a much larger tourist base than our Chinese neighbours. They are generaly friendly and not cheap either. Our tourist base has alot of Russian folk. We watch Chinese movies though (with subtitles). We share some culture; however, there is little intrest in learning Chinese in Vietnam.

Really why bother, the writing system is far too problematic?
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jimbo
Tetraglot
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Canada
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Message 144 of 150

18 May 2011 at 5:04am | IP Logged

CheeseInsider wrote:

I agree 100% The only function that characters serve now is to unite all the peoples of
China with 1 common writing system. But since students are now learning Mandarin as their operative language in
school, there is no longer a need for a united written form.

Not unless you want to read anything written in the past few thousand years.

Edited by jimbo on 18 May 2011 at 5:04am

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