I am a native English speaker, and only a beginner learner of Mandarin (early primary level plus a set of technical words related to my work). Are you sure you

I am a native English speaker, and only a beginner learner of Mandarin (early primary level plus a set of technical words related to my work). Are you sure you are not conflating monolingual Chinese speakers with the rural or less educated Chinese demographic? Going purely from my own experience of learning the language and interacting with educated Chinese in the major cities, both the language and the people are perfectly capable of abstract ideas and concepts. It is also uncommon to find an educated yet monolingual Chinese speaker. In fact, there are studies that the tonal nature of the spoken language as well the complex structure of the written characters improve the ability to learn abstract concepts such as occur in mathematics[0]. Finally, regarding classical versus modern written Chinese, while someone who is fluent in modern Chinese can read the individual characters of classic Chinese, unless they have studied it seperately, they will be unable to make much sense of the sentences. Classical Chinese is extremely concise and relies much more on single character words, rather than the multi-character words used in modern Chinese. A lot of the characters in classical Chinese also take on archaic meanings no longer actively associated with that character. [0] http://languageboat.com/2013/09/07/scientists-claim-learning-chinese-makes-you-smarter/ http://languageboat.com/2013/09/07/scientists-claim-learning...