沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too.

沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints (mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but also with Literary Chinese. The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction. The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language... [2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13 [3] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...