10 ms·

I believe the author should have explored another reason: English. One of the legacies of the British Empire is that a lot of the educated people in the world

I believe the author should have explored another reason: English. One of the legacies of the British Empire is that a lot of the educated people in the world use English. Even in Europe, it is the lingua franca for business and academia. (In mighty Germany, the top institutions publish in English). I think the applications and work would have to be done in English for China to effectively attract global talent.

raverbashing 10y ago
Correct The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  Korean's alphabet is simpler than both you listed imho, but that's just my take.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    I disagree, because the Korean alphabet requires composition of glyphs Arabic has some marks and different start/middle/end forms but it is simpler
    - SEJeff 10y ago
      Bonus points that everything in Arabic is phoentic. Something is spelled like it sounds (unlike english) and there is little ambiguity.
      - ginko 10y ago
        Arabic is plenty ambiguous since it omits vowels.
      - TheOsiris 10y ago
        little ambiguity? I beg to differ. no one writes with vowel marks in Arabic and the same word can be interpreted in many different ways without context. even with context but lacking vowel marks the same word can mean different things.
    - monsieurbanana 10y ago
      The Korean alphabet can easily be learnt in a few hours. It's an "artificial" alphabet, meaning that it wasn't born organically over hundreds of years but created by a group of koreans. It's very simple by design, as it was created to allow the general populace to write and read (until then they were using some kind of chinese dialect, too complicated for those in the working class). Case in point: http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-to-read-korean-in-15-minutes?resubmit=hn http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-t... Source: my korean teacher back when I did a year of study in korea. So I might be fuzzy on some details.
    - otoburb 10y ago
      Arabic and Korean both possess phonetic alphabets. If you define a glyph as a pictogram then you'd have to consider Arabic to be under the same umbrella. >>Arabic [has] different start/middle/end forms [...] As far as I'm aware, Korean doesn't have different characters (forms) for the same sound, and doesn't omit vowels in the same manner that written Arabic does sometimes. However, in the grand scheme of things, China has invested too much culturally, traditionally and publicly to walk away from their (relatively recently) simplified writing system and language.
    - jsjohnst 10y ago
      You are completely wrong on your first sentence. Hangul has fewer letters in the alphabet, fewer consonants, and virtually no different forms. It's also a phonetic language written as it's spoken more or less, unlike Arabic which leaves out vowels usually making it ambiguous far to often. Lets also not forget that there's many dialects of Arabic depending on region. Further, Arabic is often written in a script that makes it harder to read, especially from a distance, whereas Hangul is pretty unambiguous even with very small print. (Reply biased a little based on my own experience reading both languages, but still should be pretty factually correct for most)
  - s4vi0r 10y ago
    hangul is probably my favorite writing system, but I wouldn't really consider it any simpler than an alphabet type system. Can't speak for abjads, though. Also, converting spoken Korean into text can be tricky for non native speakers (e.g. 맛 is pronounced 'Mat' although the spelling would indicate 'Mas')
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Not like english do not have a whole lot of weird spellings (never mind that British english and American english spell things differently).
    - lukeinator42 10y ago
      for the most part Korean still follows simple rules though. 맛 -> 'mat' only if it is followed by a consonant, so 맛는 -> matneun, whereas 맛있어요 -> masisseoyo.
  - irrational 10y ago
    I don't know Korean, but Spanish is amazingly regular. Once you learn the 27 letters of the alphabet you can read anything. I'm not saying you can comprehend anything, but you can sound out all the words. It's not like English where you can't tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it (for instance "though"). In Spanish you always know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
    - __derek__ 10y ago
      On top of that, Spanish feels like a pragmatic language: it foregoes French's formality and resistance to borrowed words (e.g., computadora versus ordinateur). It also helps that Spanish speakers tend to be forgiving of gender errors in the rare cases where the spelling misleads (mostly just masculine words that end in -a).
      - oftenwrong 10y ago
        This is more of a split between Latin America and Spain (and the various other places that borrow language from them) Latin America -> computadora Spain -> ordenador
        __derek__ 10y ago
        Huh. I didn't know that. Thank you for the correction!
- Symmetry 10y ago
  Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds and languages like Spanish and Japanese as easy in terms of sounds.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Honestly if you just write characters over and over while listening to Chinese TV you'll be fine. That's how I studied and when I presented in my Chinese class, the two students from Chongqing (who were taking the class to learn traditional characters) were so surprised at my pronunciation their jaws were on the floor.
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      You transcribed TV shows while repeating the words as they spoke them? Did you put an inordinate amount of time in or do you think your methodology was just that good?
      - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
        No I just wrote whatever characters we were studying in class that week over and over while I watched streams of Chinese TV. I watched with Chinese subtitles but I didn't actually try to understand every word. It was mostly about framing my mindset towards a Chinese style of speaking and writing. I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.
  - s4vi0r 10y ago
    Just curious, what are some examples of difficult/weird vowel or consonant sounds that you think English has? And why do you think Spanish is easy in terms of sounds? IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.
- vostok 10y ago
  Cyrillic is not an abjad as far as I know. I'm a native of a country that uses Cyrillic, but it's possible that I misunderstood the meaning of "abjad".
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    No, you're quite right. Cyrillic writes vowels, which is the distinguishing factor between alphabet and abjad.
  - pouetpouet 10y ago
    An abjad is an alphabet of consonants eg Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac. Cyrillic alphabets have vowels.
- sidlls 10y ago
  What. I am a native english speaker. I don't find the tonal character of various chinese dialects to be significantly more difficult to understand than other tonal languages, like spanish.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Spanish isn't tonal. It contrasts stress, but not pitch. Words with the same syllables but a different stressed syllable are different in Spanish, but in tonal languages the same syllable pronounced with a different pitch and pitch change is different. That said, as a native-English-speaking Chinese learner I don't find the tones of standard Mandarin to be particularly hard (Hokkien, on the other hand…). Standard Mandarin phonology is also pretty easy (some parts are tricky for native English speakers like contrasting aspiration but not voice (English is the opposite), but overall it's not terribly complex).
- jasshiru 10y ago
  Having tones does not make a language inherently easier to learn, nor does having ideographs. If China would truly be better off using a non-tonal language with an alphabetic script, it's only because the language of the British Empire was non-tonal with an alphabetic script. Actually, the mess that is English orthography is hardly more "manageable" than Chinese script. There are loads of phonetic elements in Chinese characters.
  - beevai142 10y ago
    It's unquestionable the Chinese script is more difficult to learn than alphabetic scripts. This is directly reflected in the amount of time children and language learners have to spend on it, and the resulting reading ability.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  The problem would be way way smaller if the language were more phoenetic. I've gotten into arguments with Chinese language speakers, and they insist that the language has phoetic elements, with certain ideograms giving clues on how to pronounce words. That's all well and good, but phoentic implies the other way around too. After hearing a word, you'll have to be able to write it. For instance, "kill", "sand", and the "shark" word in the phrase "shark" all have exactly the same tonal pronunciation, but with completely different ways of writing it. And don't get me started on traditional vs. simplified.
  - hawflakes 10y ago
    In this case parent is referring to the phoneme [shā] which map to the characters 殺，沙，and 鯊. (using traditional) and mean "kill", "sand", and "shark" respectively. Note that the last one, 鯊 is composed of two components 沙 and 魚. So the top component is the phonetic hint and the bottom is semantic, as 魚 means "fish". Many characters for types of "fish" (I use "fish" loosely as things like whales 鯨魚 are considered fish) use the fish radical, as the characters are called when used as a component of a character. 鯉魚 carp the 里 is phonetic 鮑魚 abalone 包 is phonetic Of course, this is just a small sampling and there are plenty of things that are inconsistent. I typically just use it as a mnemonic. And to the point of tones, I leave 傻 [sha3], which means stupid.
    - jimmywanger 10y ago
      Thanks for your input. I think my main point is that a phonetic language goes both ways. Without any context, or meaning, you should be able to write a word just by hearing it. Similarly, without any context or meaning, by seeing a word, you should be able to pronounce it. Now, of course it's a sliding scale. But I think Chinese is on one end of the scale, where if you're just given the phenome shā without context or meaning, it's literally impossible to figure out how to write the word. In English and all romance languages, you can try to spell it somewhat, and then give it to a native reader to see what it means. This helps a lot when you're reading subtitles for television programs or listening to the radio. If you're reading subtitles, you can sorta figure out what matches up to what. If you're listening to the radio, you can make a best guess on how to spell a word and ask somebody what it means.
- dilemma 10y ago
  All languages have tones. See how the 'a' sound is different in 'car' and 'can', or 'make'?
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    That's not a tone in the sense of how mandarin has them. A better approximation of tones in english is saying these phrases out loud: "Yes!" "Yes?" "Yes..."
  - grzm 10y ago
    That's not the same thing. That's an inconsistent mapping of sounds (phonemes) to symbols (and one of the reasons English can be so frustrating to learn). Tones when referring to linguistics are changes in pitch to distinguish words. Given that these differences in pitch (tonemes) are created with the same system (mouth, tongue, lips, vocal chords, &c) as phonemes, you can argue that they're the same, but it's an important enough distinction that linguists find it meaningful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
stevesun21 10y ago
If US attracts talent and they are all speak English, what reason you think that China cannot attract talent who are going to speak Chinese?
- inputcoffee 10y ago
  There are a few reasons: 1. You are usually effective and comfortable in the language you were educated in. 2. If you want to do business with a person in another language, you usually both default to English because it is usually second language if it is not their first. I mean look at your own situation. I assume that you are fairly well educated (on Hacker News, decent grammar, and asked a good question). Suppose you had to leave the US, where would you go? Your top choices might be other English speaking countries (Ireland, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand). Your next set of choices would be places you could do business in English (Berlin perhaps). Globally, a lot more educated people know English than Chinese. Its not impossible but it is a far larger barrier to entry than, say, blocking youTube.
  - rconti 10y ago
    After Ireland, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, I'd probably go for Scandinavian countries and Iceland. They have smaller native-speaking populations, a high level of exposure to English, and great foreign language training. Then I'd probably go for countries like Latvia, Romania, etc. I'd consider Germany and France to be third-tier in that sense because they have large native-speaking populations and a greater expectation that people know their language.
  - inputcoffee 10y ago
    Ugh! Too late to edit this now but I meant to say Mandarin, not "Chinese." Mea Culpa.
  - stevesun21 10y ago
    I agreed with you about English vs Mandarin from education perspect and business trade perspect. What I am saying is that China attracts talent who live in China and why don't communicate with others in Mandarin? Learn Mandarin isn't a binary choose for these talents who live in China -- they can still learn stuffs in English and do business with other people around world in English. From my experience that learn English is not only about helping me to communicate with others, but also, help me to learn a different mindset and culture.
mtw 10y ago
It is true. However there are valid reasons for most of us to learn mandarin, or at least for our children. You cannot ignore 1/5 of the world's population.
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  You can not-ignore them without learning Mandarin...

raverbashing 10y ago

Correct The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)

jsjohnst 10y ago
Korean's alphabet is simpler than both you listed imho, but that's just my take.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  I disagree, because the Korean alphabet requires composition of glyphs Arabic has some marks and different start/middle/end forms but it is simpler
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Bonus points that everything in Arabic is phoentic. Something is spelled like it sounds (unlike english) and there is little ambiguity.
    - ginko 10y ago
      Arabic is plenty ambiguous since it omits vowels.
    - TheOsiris 10y ago
      little ambiguity? I beg to differ. no one writes with vowel marks in Arabic and the same word can be interpreted in many different ways without context. even with context but lacking vowel marks the same word can mean different things.
  - monsieurbanana 10y ago
    The Korean alphabet can easily be learnt in a few hours. It's an "artificial" alphabet, meaning that it wasn't born organically over hundreds of years but created by a group of koreans. It's very simple by design, as it was created to allow the general populace to write and read (until then they were using some kind of chinese dialect, too complicated for those in the working class). Case in point: http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-to-read-korean-in-15-minutes?resubmit=hn http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-t... Source: my korean teacher back when I did a year of study in korea. So I might be fuzzy on some details.
  - otoburb 10y ago
    Arabic and Korean both possess phonetic alphabets. If you define a glyph as a pictogram then you'd have to consider Arabic to be under the same umbrella. >>Arabic [has] different start/middle/end forms [...] As far as I'm aware, Korean doesn't have different characters (forms) for the same sound, and doesn't omit vowels in the same manner that written Arabic does sometimes. However, in the grand scheme of things, China has invested too much culturally, traditionally and publicly to walk away from their (relatively recently) simplified writing system and language.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    You are completely wrong on your first sentence. Hangul has fewer letters in the alphabet, fewer consonants, and virtually no different forms. It's also a phonetic language written as it's spoken more or less, unlike Arabic which leaves out vowels usually making it ambiguous far to often. Lets also not forget that there's many dialects of Arabic depending on region. Further, Arabic is often written in a script that makes it harder to read, especially from a distance, whereas Hangul is pretty unambiguous even with very small print. (Reply biased a little based on my own experience reading both languages, but still should be pretty factually correct for most)
- s4vi0r 10y ago
  hangul is probably my favorite writing system, but I wouldn't really consider it any simpler than an alphabet type system. Can't speak for abjads, though. Also, converting spoken Korean into text can be tricky for non native speakers (e.g. 맛 is pronounced 'Mat' although the spelling would indicate 'Mas')
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Not like english do not have a whole lot of weird spellings (never mind that British english and American english spell things differently).
  - lukeinator42 10y ago
    for the most part Korean still follows simple rules though. 맛 -> 'mat' only if it is followed by a consonant, so 맛는 -> matneun, whereas 맛있어요 -> masisseoyo.
- irrational 10y ago
  I don't know Korean, but Spanish is amazingly regular. Once you learn the 27 letters of the alphabet you can read anything. I'm not saying you can comprehend anything, but you can sound out all the words. It's not like English where you can't tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it (for instance "though"). In Spanish you always know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
  - __derek__ 10y ago
    On top of that, Spanish feels like a pragmatic language: it foregoes French's formality and resistance to borrowed words (e.g., computadora versus ordinateur). It also helps that Spanish speakers tend to be forgiving of gender errors in the rare cases where the spelling misleads (mostly just masculine words that end in -a).
    - oftenwrong 10y ago
      This is more of a split between Latin America and Spain (and the various other places that borrow language from them) Latin America -> computadora Spain -> ordenador
      - __derek__ 10y ago
        Huh. I didn't know that. Thank you for the correction!
Symmetry 10y ago
Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds and languages like Spanish and Japanese as easy in terms of sounds.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Honestly if you just write characters over and over while listening to Chinese TV you'll be fine. That's how I studied and when I presented in my Chinese class, the two students from Chongqing (who were taking the class to learn traditional characters) were so surprised at my pronunciation their jaws were on the floor.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    You transcribed TV shows while repeating the words as they spoke them? Did you put an inordinate amount of time in or do you think your methodology was just that good?
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      No I just wrote whatever characters we were studying in class that week over and over while I watched streams of Chinese TV. I watched with Chinese subtitles but I didn't actually try to understand every word. It was mostly about framing my mindset towards a Chinese style of speaking and writing. I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.
- s4vi0r 10y ago
  Just curious, what are some examples of difficult/weird vowel or consonant sounds that you think English has? And why do you think Spanish is easy in terms of sounds? IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.
vostok 10y ago
Cyrillic is not an abjad as far as I know. I'm a native of a country that uses Cyrillic, but it's possible that I misunderstood the meaning of "abjad".
- PeCaN 10y ago
  No, you're quite right. Cyrillic writes vowels, which is the distinguishing factor between alphabet and abjad.
- pouetpouet 10y ago
  An abjad is an alphabet of consonants eg Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac. Cyrillic alphabets have vowels.
sidlls 10y ago
What. I am a native english speaker. I don't find the tonal character of various chinese dialects to be significantly more difficult to understand than other tonal languages, like spanish.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Spanish isn't tonal. It contrasts stress, but not pitch. Words with the same syllables but a different stressed syllable are different in Spanish, but in tonal languages the same syllable pronounced with a different pitch and pitch change is different. That said, as a native-English-speaking Chinese learner I don't find the tones of standard Mandarin to be particularly hard (Hokkien, on the other hand…). Standard Mandarin phonology is also pretty easy (some parts are tricky for native English speakers like contrasting aspiration but not voice (English is the opposite), but overall it's not terribly complex).
jasshiru 10y ago
Having tones does not make a language inherently easier to learn, nor does having ideographs. If China would truly be better off using a non-tonal language with an alphabetic script, it's only because the language of the British Empire was non-tonal with an alphabetic script. Actually, the mess that is English orthography is hardly more "manageable" than Chinese script. There are loads of phonetic elements in Chinese characters.
- beevai142 10y ago
  It's unquestionable the Chinese script is more difficult to learn than alphabetic scripts. This is directly reflected in the amount of time children and language learners have to spend on it, and the resulting reading ability.
jimmywanger 10y ago
The problem would be way way smaller if the language were more phoenetic. I've gotten into arguments with Chinese language speakers, and they insist that the language has phoetic elements, with certain ideograms giving clues on how to pronounce words. That's all well and good, but phoentic implies the other way around too. After hearing a word, you'll have to be able to write it. For instance, "kill", "sand", and the "shark" word in the phrase "shark" all have exactly the same tonal pronunciation, but with completely different ways of writing it. And don't get me started on traditional vs. simplified.
- hawflakes 10y ago
  In this case parent is referring to the phoneme [shā] which map to the characters 殺，沙，and 鯊. (using traditional) and mean "kill", "sand", and "shark" respectively. Note that the last one, 鯊 is composed of two components 沙 and 魚. So the top component is the phonetic hint and the bottom is semantic, as 魚 means "fish". Many characters for types of "fish" (I use "fish" loosely as things like whales 鯨魚 are considered fish) use the fish radical, as the characters are called when used as a component of a character. 鯉魚 carp the 里 is phonetic 鮑魚 abalone 包 is phonetic Of course, this is just a small sampling and there are plenty of things that are inconsistent. I typically just use it as a mnemonic. And to the point of tones, I leave 傻 [sha3], which means stupid.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    Thanks for your input. I think my main point is that a phonetic language goes both ways. Without any context, or meaning, you should be able to write a word just by hearing it. Similarly, without any context or meaning, by seeing a word, you should be able to pronounce it. Now, of course it's a sliding scale. But I think Chinese is on one end of the scale, where if you're just given the phenome shā without context or meaning, it's literally impossible to figure out how to write the word. In English and all romance languages, you can try to spell it somewhat, and then give it to a native reader to see what it means. This helps a lot when you're reading subtitles for television programs or listening to the radio. If you're reading subtitles, you can sorta figure out what matches up to what. If you're listening to the radio, you can make a best guess on how to spell a word and ask somebody what it means.
dilemma 10y ago
All languages have tones. See how the 'a' sound is different in 'car' and 'can', or 'make'?
- lacampbell 10y ago
  That's not a tone in the sense of how mandarin has them. A better approximation of tones in english is saying these phrases out loud: "Yes!" "Yes?" "Yes..."
- grzm 10y ago
  That's not the same thing. That's an inconsistent mapping of sounds (phonemes) to symbols (and one of the reasons English can be so frustrating to learn). Tones when referring to linguistics are changes in pitch to distinguish words. Given that these differences in pitch (tonemes) are created with the same system (mouth, tongue, lips, vocal chords, &c) as phonemes, you can argue that they're the same, but it's an important enough distinction that linguists find it meaningful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

stevesun21 10y ago

If US attracts talent and they are all speak English, what reason you think that China cannot attract talent who are going to speak Chinese?

inputcoffee 10y ago
There are a few reasons: 1. You are usually effective and comfortable in the language you were educated in. 2. If you want to do business with a person in another language, you usually both default to English because it is usually second language if it is not their first. I mean look at your own situation. I assume that you are fairly well educated (on Hacker News, decent grammar, and asked a good question). Suppose you had to leave the US, where would you go? Your top choices might be other English speaking countries (Ireland, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand). Your next set of choices would be places you could do business in English (Berlin perhaps). Globally, a lot more educated people know English than Chinese. Its not impossible but it is a far larger barrier to entry than, say, blocking youTube.
- rconti 10y ago
  After Ireland, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, I'd probably go for Scandinavian countries and Iceland. They have smaller native-speaking populations, a high level of exposure to English, and great foreign language training. Then I'd probably go for countries like Latvia, Romania, etc. I'd consider Germany and France to be third-tier in that sense because they have large native-speaking populations and a greater expectation that people know their language.
- inputcoffee 10y ago
  Ugh! Too late to edit this now but I meant to say Mandarin, not "Chinese." Mea Culpa.
- stevesun21 10y ago
  I agreed with you about English vs Mandarin from education perspect and business trade perspect. What I am saying is that China attracts talent who live in China and why don't communicate with others in Mandarin? Learn Mandarin isn't a binary choose for these talents who live in China -- they can still learn stuffs in English and do business with other people around world in English. From my experience that learn English is not only about helping me to communicate with others, but also, help me to learn a different mindset and culture.

mtw 10y ago

It is true. However there are valid reasons for most of us to learn mandarin, or at least for our children. You cannot ignore 1/5 of the world's population.

1_2__3 10y ago
You can not-ignore them without learning Mandarin...