你会说中文吗？

[Barringtonia]

By Chinese language everyone means putonghua.

That's exactly what I hate. Mandarin doesn't deserve to be the standard Chinese. Oh well.

Here's the article I mentioned earlier..

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/world ... onese.html

From which..

More than 1,000 people gathered Sunday in Guangzhou, in southern China, to demonstrate against a local politician’s proposal to force a major local television network to stop broadcasting in Cantonese and switch to the country’s official language, Mandarin.

The protest, which was raucous and impassioned, ended peacefully after the police broke up the crowd. But any mention of the demonstration was wiped from many Internet forums on Monday, and only one national newspaper carried a detailed report, indicating that the pro-Cantonese groundswell had become a politically delicate matter.

Cantonese is widely spoken in Hong Kong, Guangdong Province — whose capital is Guangzhou — and neighboring areas. Some call it a dialect of Mandarin, a language spoken commonly in the north, but a growing number of linguists say Cantonese is a separate language. Northerners generally do not understand it, but are used to its strongly pitched sounds because of the ubiquity of Hong Kong movies and Cantonese pop songs.

Concern over the loss of languages and dialects in China is growing. In Tibet and Xinjiang, some ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs say the use of Mandarin as the official teaching language in schools has weakened the fluency of the local languages among many young people. Officials say mastering Mandarin is important for students to compete for jobs and university slots.

[Strategion]

Cirona - 我祖先也是从福建省来的，可是我的福建话非常糟. 日常用语还勉强可以，但是我有一次听过夏语新闻广播，一句话也听不懂.

I never really thought of Mandarin being an issue, we more or less just take it for granted that it's the common language over here rather than dialects. Our problem is more that fewer people are reasonably fluent in Chinese now - people complain that English is what's important for jobs and such. Every year they seem to be making the Chinese syllabus easier and dumbing down the textbooks ):

[Zonolia]

是的，我会说中文很好，我可以反正与谷歌翻译方便！

[Strategion]

是的，我会说中文很好，我可以反正与谷歌翻译方便！

That was a mess =P

[Maineiacs]

你会不会说中文？为什么？我学中文在我的学校，所以我的中文不好。我要知道要是NSG会说中文。

If you don't understand that you can put it into google translate, but I'm wondering if I can practice my Chinese with other NSG'ers.

不，我不会说中文。我不得不通过互联网做翻译的。

[Zonolia]

是的，我会说中文很好，我可以反正与谷歌翻译方便！

That was a mess =P

well i cant even translate it I suck...oh well i dont even need it

[Strategion]

well i cant even translate it I suck...oh well i dont even need it

Haha no, I was just laughing at the online translators.

[Zonolia]

well i cant even translate it I suck...oh well i dont even need it

Haha no, I was just laughing at the online translators.

ok then so i cant semi translate chinese! let ww4-7 begin...

[Cirona]

Cirona - 我祖先也是从福建省来的，可是我的福建话非常糟. 日常用语还勉强可以，但是我有一次听过夏语新闻广播，一句话也听不懂.

I never really thought of Mandarin being an issue, we more or less just take it for granted that it's the common language over here rather than dialects. Our problem is more that fewer people are reasonably fluent in Chinese now - people complain that English is what's important for jobs and such. Every year they seem to be making the Chinese syllabus easier and dumbing down the textbooks ):

可惜...真可惜!

[Anime Daisuki]

Cirona - 我祖先也是从福建省来的，可是我的福建话非常糟. 日常用语还勉强可以，但是我有一次听过夏语新闻广播，一句话也听不懂.

I never really thought of Mandarin being an issue, we more or less just take it for granted that it's the common language over here rather than dialects. Our problem is more that fewer people are reasonably fluent in Chinese now - people complain that English is what's important for jobs and such. Every year they seem to be making the Chinese syllabus easier and dumbing down the textbooks ):

As a Singaporean, I'm sure you can appreciate the importance of a common language to nation building. 40 years back our nation not only had fights between ethic groups but also fights within ethic groups. Chinese were using all sorts of dialects and you had a lot of segregation and distrust between groups. Guild halls (同乡会馆) and gangs were formed based on dialect groups. Trade wars and street fights occurred on a daily basis.

Compared it to today. Dialect-group related crime is almost unheard of... I would say the implementation of the Speak Mandarin campaign has had overall positive results.

The promotion of Mandarin over other dialects is not a bad policy. The only regret is that it has always played second fiddle to English, like you pointed out. The extreme irony is that-- even though English is technically Singapore's first language and used as a language of instruction in schools; whenever a Singaporean apply to study in a university overseas (whether in the US, Australia, Britain), he/she is still required to take 'test of english as a foreign language'--which goes to show that Westerners don't consider Singapore an English-speaking society. We are still judged by our skin colour.

[Anime Daisuki]

I'm Singaporean and we're forced to learn this silly language.

If english is good enough for me its good enough for everyone!

饮水思源， 不能忘本啊!

[Strategion]

Oh, I don't really have much against our promotion of Mandarin over dialects either. It was a very pragmatic policy (like always xD) and I think it's a good idea for it to be implemented in China as well, where standardization is even more important. Our dialects are only southern dialects, look at how many dialect groups China would have to attempt to integrate...While I suppose the rationale for selecting Mandarin over any other dialect as the standard Chinese is a bit dubious, it was decided in China almost a hundred years ago and it's a bit too late to change that. Besides, it's easier to learn putonghua than a dialect like say, Hokkien anyway, which has double the number of tones.

I think the selection of English as our common language has as much to do with colonial legacy as it has to do with the PAP having the farsight to bet on English as the new global language. I doubt whether they would have been wise enough to pick English, a completely foreign language, as the common language of instruction/interaction if we happened to have been colonized by the French instead, like Vietnam. As to why we didn't use Chinese instead, most of them were English-educated (and if I'm not wrong LKY's Chinese wasn't particularly good then, haha). Between Chinese and English, English was the more pragmatic and probably the more convenient choice. Anyway, we were pretty lucky that Singapore started off with a 'foundation' in English.

What I don't like is them promoting English at the expense of Chinese. It's perfectly possible to learn two (or more) languages fluently, but under the current system you can still graduate secondary school barely being able to speak Chinese at all. I think it was a terrible idea to remove the Chinese language requirement for university admission, it really reduced the number of people taking Chinese in JC for A levels. At O level standard, with L1R5 you can pretty much just focus on english since you only need one language grade, and if you're in the IP O-level Chinese results technically don't even matter - all you have to do is scrape a pass. Essentially you really only have to get a good score in Chinese at PSLE to be able to forget about it forever. And they were even talking about reducing the weighting of Chinese at PSLE this year! ): Our standard of Chinese is low enough already.

Forget Speak Mandarin campaigns, just increase the importance of Chinese in national exams and I guarantee Singaporeans are going to learn it well

The promotion of Mandarin over other dialects is not a bad policy. The only regret is that it has always played second fiddle to English, like you pointed out. The extreme irony is that-- even though English is technically Singapore's first language and used as a language of instruction in schools; whenever a Singaporean apply to study in a university overseas (whether in the US, Australia, Britain), he/she is still required to take 'test of english as a foreign language'--which goes to show that Westerners don't consider Singapore an English-speaking society. We are still judged by our skin colour.

Actually, I applied to overseas universities last year and I didn't have to take TOEFL or its equivalent. Granted that practically everyone who applies to American unis take the SATs which include verbal reasoning and writing, so taking TOEFL on top of that would be pretty redundant. I'm quite sure most UK universities wouldn't require TOEFL either, but I'm not certain if Australian unis require it.

(Yeah, I know I missed your point about discrimination xD)

Is your flag from Fushigi Yuugi btw?

[Angleter]

There's a lot of talk about Mandarin and 'dialects' of Chinese. I'd like to clarify that the Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Hakka, Min, Xiang, Gan, and to a lesser extent Jin and Southwestern Mandarin are all pretty much separate but related Sinitic languages. Chinese is by no means a single language, and these minority languages to my mind deserve to be recognised as such, protected, and promoted in local Chinese government.

Mandarin is not 'Standard Chinese', but the Beijing dialect is rather the standard form of Mandarin.

[L3 Communications]

scary language is scary.

that said, I'd rather have learnt chinese than french or german at school.

Indeed. European languages seem to be dying off as far as world business languages are concerned, save English. And even then, that seems like it might be replaced by Mandarin soon.

[New Urcea]

scary language is scary.

that said, I'd rather have learnt chinese than french or german at school.

Indeed. European languages seem to be dying off as far as world business languages are concerned, save English. And even then, that seems like it might be replaced by Mandarin soon.

For just four cents each day, you can help save a poor and dying English language.

Please, its the right thing to do.

[St George of England]

Indeed. European languages seem to be dying off as far as world business languages are concerned, save English. And even then, that seems like it might be replaced by Mandarin soon.

For just four cents each day, you can help save a poor and dying English language.

Please, its the right thing to do.

I really should learn Chinese...

[Lunatic Goofballs]

the problem with killing a chinese zombie thread is that an hour later, I want to kill another one.