4 ms·

Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink. I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China r

by ggm 2y ago

Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink. I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China reconstructs" magazines there were suggestions it was coming, and then it just went away. BBC newsreaders explained it was the new official look. Like Turkey-> Türkiye. I suspect all syllabery/ideogram scripts have this latent problem. At 2,500 ideograms for "literate" there's a lot of potential to lose non core elements. "Educated" means over 5,000 heading to 10,000 and the complete set is north of 40,000 from what I understand. I can't imagine the investment in time to get there.

lazide 2y ago
China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests. The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it. This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?
- looping__lui 2y ago
  That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools. Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
  - lazide 2y ago
    Made up how? It’s still more merit based and class mobile than caste anything. But the tests are the tests and require massive prep, eh? And the tests require massive amounts of memorization and time to prep for, compared to western tests - even now. Historically it was orders of magnitude worse though.
    - looping__lui 2y ago
      Kid’s ability to make it through the ranks of academia in my personal anecdotal evidence depends less on financial ability or social standing in China compared to the US or India. I agree that it is merit driven above anything else - not sure I would agree that this is favoring wealthy kids/certain social class in a more disproportionate way than what we see in India or the US. Now, I will say that neither university nor high school in China or India imho prepare kinds for success in life or the corporate world. Europe (with a hands-off “you get no help and will just struggle your way through life and learn quick”) and the US (“here are actual experts dedicated to help you succeed) seem imho to produce capable graduates for the corporate world.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Eh, see alephnerds comment above - that lines up with my experience as well.
        looping__lui 2y ago
        Ok, the point being though (it seems): advantages are not universal geographically across China; I agree, that I also observed that.
        lazide 2y ago
        In that geographical advantages are expressly tied to income and ‘official ness’ in an area (the Hukou system)? If one is a poor rural immigrant in an otherwise high end area, you don’t get to send your kids to the nice schools.
        alephnerd 2y ago
        The issue with hukou is two-way. Urban cities of course don't want to hand out urban hukou easily because they don't want an influx of migrants straining social services. But conversely, a lot of rural hukou holders do not want to give up rural hukou because it gives retirement benefits at 55 and is a requirement in order to keep their rural landholding. This is why you have migrants with a rural hukou working in urban China but not gaining an urban hukou. The problem with hukou is fundamentally a social safety net problem - there is little to no social safety net in China, so the "migrant to urban area with rural hukou" is the least bad option out of multiple bad options (keep rural hukou and live in rural China barely eking a living or give up rural hukou and lose the only appreciating asset you had along with benefits at 55). In essence, the lion's share of Chinese development is overly concentrated in a handful of urban agglomerations, and isn't spreading to rural China where 45-50% of Chinese still live to this day.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China). And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents. That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao. Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university. Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy. The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2] [0] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-2023-0412/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-20... [1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075 https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075 [2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf
    - looping__lui 2y ago
      Thanks for the additional details. In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university after two-years of exams that determine your final grade (and chances). There are literally only public schools. I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”. Thanks for sharing additional detail and it resembles what I remember - but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”. Imho a 30% ratio for university graduates is a sweet spot for society. We have great (free) vocational training programs in Germany that empower all those who did not go to university to make money quicker and they more often that not end up in financially better situations. University often pays off only for top university graduates once they pass 35/40 years of age.
- nneonneo 2y ago
  Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
  - lazide 2y ago
    That is rather the point I was making, wasn’t it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
otabdeveloper4 2y ago
There are only about 200+ Chinese ideograms. Certainly not in the thousands.
- nneonneo 2y ago
  This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/ https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms". You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little. There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    The vast majority of Chinese characters aren't ideograms.
- orwin 2y ago
  I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
- vitus 2y ago
  Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself. You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 2y ago
> nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks. I wonder if it's been fixed since.
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words. The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      English equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
      - Terr_ 2y ago
        No, because without tones it can be ambiguous even for native speakers. If you still don't believe me--or those Wikipedia links I already provided--you test it yourself by finding a native Mandarin speaker. Ask them to decisively determine the meaning and pronunciation of certain Chinese words only from their pinyin with the accents stripped out, such as ma or hua. There's a store with snacks and produce. Do you want to eat lizi, or do you want to eat lizi? (Don't bother squinting, it's the same letters.)
jannesan 2y ago
Official standard defines around 8k characters in modern usage. I’d guesstimate native highly educated speaker recognizes maybe 6-7k at most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standard_Chinese_Characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standa...
mik09 2y ago
iirc, the official story from the mainland was that during around 1957 in order to boost literacy the govt simplified the characters, something like that... today i learnt

by ggm 2y ago

lazide 2y ago

China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests. The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it. This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?

looping__lui 2y ago
That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools. Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
- lazide 2y ago
  Made up how? It’s still more merit based and class mobile than caste anything. But the tests are the tests and require massive prep, eh? And the tests require massive amounts of memorization and time to prep for, compared to western tests - even now. Historically it was orders of magnitude worse though.
  - looping__lui 2y ago
    Kid’s ability to make it through the ranks of academia in my personal anecdotal evidence depends less on financial ability or social standing in China compared to the US or India. I agree that it is merit driven above anything else - not sure I would agree that this is favoring wealthy kids/certain social class in a more disproportionate way than what we see in India or the US. Now, I will say that neither university nor high school in China or India imho prepare kinds for success in life or the corporate world. Europe (with a hands-off “you get no help and will just struggle your way through life and learn quick”) and the US (“here are actual experts dedicated to help you succeed) seem imho to produce capable graduates for the corporate world.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Eh, see alephnerds comment above - that lines up with my experience as well.
      - looping__lui 2y ago
        Ok, the point being though (it seems): advantages are not universal geographically across China; I agree, that I also observed that.
        lazide 2y ago
        In that geographical advantages are expressly tied to income and ‘official ness’ in an area (the Hukou system)? If one is a poor rural immigrant in an otherwise high end area, you don’t get to send your kids to the nice schools.
        alephnerd 2y ago
        The issue with hukou is two-way. Urban cities of course don't want to hand out urban hukou easily because they don't want an influx of migrants straining social services. But conversely, a lot of rural hukou holders do not want to give up rural hukou because it gives retirement benefits at 55 and is a requirement in order to keep their rural landholding. This is why you have migrants with a rural hukou working in urban China but not gaining an urban hukou. The problem with hukou is fundamentally a social safety net problem - there is little to no social safety net in China, so the "migrant to urban area with rural hukou" is the least bad option out of multiple bad options (keep rural hukou and live in rural China barely eking a living or give up rural hukou and lose the only appreciating asset you had along with benefits at 55). In essence, the lion's share of Chinese development is overly concentrated in a handful of urban agglomerations, and isn't spreading to rural China where 45-50% of Chinese still live to this day.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China). And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents. That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao. Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university. Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy. The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2] [0] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-2023-0412/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-20... [1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075 https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075 [2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf
  - looping__lui 2y ago
    Thanks for the additional details. In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university after two-years of exams that determine your final grade (and chances). There are literally only public schools. I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”. Thanks for sharing additional detail and it resembles what I remember - but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”. Imho a 30% ratio for university graduates is a sweet spot for society. We have great (free) vocational training programs in Germany that empower all those who did not go to university to make money quicker and they more often that not end up in financially better situations. University often pays off only for top university graduates once they pass 35/40 years of age.
nneonneo 2y ago
Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
- lazide 2y ago
  That is rather the point I was making, wasn’t it?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

otabdeveloper4 2y ago

There are only about 200+ Chinese ideograms. Certainly not in the thousands.

nneonneo 2y ago
This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/ https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms". You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little. There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  The vast majority of Chinese characters aren't ideograms.
orwin 2y ago
I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
vitus 2y ago
Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself. You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 2y ago

> nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks. I wonder if it's been fixed since.

emmelaich 2y ago
Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words. The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    English equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      No, because without tones it can be ambiguous even for native speakers. If you still don't believe me--or those Wikipedia links I already provided--you test it yourself by finding a native Mandarin speaker. Ask them to decisively determine the meaning and pronunciation of certain Chinese words only from their pinyin with the accents stripped out, such as ma or hua. There's a store with snacks and produce. Do you want to eat lizi, or do you want to eat lizi? (Don't bother squinting, it's the same letters.)

jannesan 2y ago

Official standard defines around 8k characters in modern usage. I’d guesstimate native highly educated speaker recognizes maybe 6-7k at most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standard_Chinese_Characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standa...

mik09 2y ago

iirc, the official story from the mainland was that during around 1957 in order to boost literacy the govt simplified the characters, something like that... today i learnt