bakedbean

I saw this news the other day http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12050067

Quote from BBC
China has banned newspapers, publishers and website-owners from using foreign words - particularly English ones.

China's state press and publishing body said such words were sullying the purity of the Chinese language.

It said standardised Chinese should be the norm: the press should avoid foreign abbreviations and acronyms, as well as "Chinglish" - which is a mix of English and Chinese.

The order also extends existing warnings that applied to radio and TV.
Unquote

So, what is the reality of this? Do all websites have to be in Chinese now? Is this sub-forum going to have to be translated?

shakh your bootie

Blimey.... I better start learning Mandarin, then....

bakedbean

Heh heh, you better get started. Mandarin is the way to go anyway. If I was still working (and I am not) I would seriously think about it, as China is the big Player in the World for the foreseeable future.

Norm_uk

I agree and think more people should learn Mandarin due to China's status as a rising world leader. Seems odd anyone would want to go to China, the world's oldest civillisation and not learn their language!

N.

CountryBumpkin.

Well even though it might be a bit unfair for those who speak English only, I find the idea not bad. Just need to think of how it is in Germany, where in some cases every second word is English or pseudo English. Certainly it makes life for English speakers easier but one has also a bit the feeling that the diversity of all these languages is lost in time. At times you wonder why even bother with the local language and not switch totally to English? But that is just my opinion.

nonthaburi

In Thai there are many English words that are used in everyday speech that are sort of Thai - ified a bit. Words like ' computer ' or ' U-turn '. I don't really think that anyone could say that Thais are losing their cultural identity over this. I don't see the problem for the Chinese. My son gets Chinese at school and from the few bits I've picked up even words like ' coke ', ' computer ' etc are completely different and Chinese. Sounds more like the government trying to control things for the sake of having control to me.

bakedbean

It sounds like that, doesn't it.

What amazed me the other day was understanding the diversity of the different dialects. I think someone told me once that Cantonese and Mandarin are kinda similar and you can get by with one of those. I wouldn't know as I don't speak either dialect but maybe someone can confirm.

What I hadn't realised though was that Hokkien (which is spoken in Penang) seems to be totally different to Mandarin.

nonthaburi

There are actually a quite a few dialects in Thai too. At school everybody learns the central dialect and that is what is spoken on the TV when they are reading the news, but there are also a NE , N , and Southern dialect too. My wife comes from the NE and when I first lived there having already spent six years living in Thailand it really did my head in that I didn't have a clue what anyone was saying. They speak more like people in Laos. About half the words are the same as Thai but half aren't. It took me a good two years to get my head round that and I'm still not totally sure I know what they are going on about even now. It's quite funny sometimes but you see it on the news sometimes and there will be a Thai person speaking but they will have subtitles on. That's when you know they are from out of town !

andrewrh

Subtitles for the news, tv programmes and films is standard on CCTV as well.

HK2UK

Cantonese and Mandarin and very different, there are SOME words that are similar enough to understand but you could not get very far with just Cantonese in China and Mandarin speakers may struggle with more complex stuff in Hong Kong (you'd be better off in English imo in HK).

Hong Kong is tri-lingual - Cantonese, English & Mandarin (well that is what they are aiming for!)

Mandarin can also differ throughout China I'm told as in accents and choice of words etc, even though it is the 'official' language of China, a lot of people's first/mother language will be some dialect that most people will never of heard of, kind of like how English is widely used but Americans and Brits will still struggle with a lot of words

nonthaburi

so what words do Americans and British people struggle with ? care to give some examples.

bakedbean

Americans don't seem to know their car parts. They think the boot is a trunk.

HK2UK

Well I meant more difficulty through accents actually, I.e when I asked for water, sometimes they just didn't understand me so I'd drop the T and then it was easier.

But there are actual differences in words such as;
pants/trousers, garden/yard, chemist/pharmacy, crisps/chips, toilet/restroom, C.V/Resume, cinema/movie theatre, flat/apartment, petrol/gas, garage/gas station, holiday/vacation etc...

Sometimes it just takes extra few seconds to register but other times it just like 'say what now?' Brits understand a lot of American terms through their TV programs (thank you Friends) but I'm not so sure how much they know the other way around?

Sooooo disappointing when I'm offered chips only to realise they mean crisps !

x524x

Comparing Cantonese and Mandarin is like comparing Italian with Spanish. A native speaker of Italian might understand a lot of the words used in Spanish, but won't be able to fully understand the Spanish speaker.

China has a lot of regional languages. Travelling around China Mandarin will suffice. Most Chinese are at least bilingual speaking their regional language and Mandarin. Though those in Hong Kong might not speak Mandarin as well as they can speak English.

nonthaburi

I don't really think that people struggle that much. It doesn't really take much to learn a few different ways of saying things. I even find myself using " gas " instead of petrol because that is what everyone else does. I think spelling settings on the computer are annoying though, they are always fixed to American. I only realised a while back about pyjamas / pajamas. Zed and Zee are annoying too. My own son was telling me that I was wrong for saying Zed because his teacher ( Filipina ) told him it was Zee !