How different is Mandarin? - All fear English Domination *Rawr*

[plarq]

It's like currency. Mandarin plays as a stardard currency as USD, other dialects are local money.

 

[nihilistic]

It's like currency. Mandarin plays as a stardard currency as USD, other dialects are local money.

And it's supported in a significant degree by the Chinese government.

 

[Dann]

But that still doesn't explain why Mandarin as spoken by people of Chinese descent from as far apart as the US, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, even Africa still manage to sound exactly the same. These are places out of Chinese control.

 

[GenMarshall]

But that still doesn't explain why Mandarin as spoken by people of Chinese descent from as far apart as the US, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, even Africa still manage to sound exactly the same. These are places out of Chinese control.

Education? People interested in learning another Language? those are just my theories.

 

[Ansar]

Im still undecided if I want to learn Japanese or Mandarin as my asian language.

Family says to learn Mandarin because it could eventually become a big worldwide tounge just like English, but Japanese is more open (ex. anime).

 

[Shaihulud]

Learn Japanese, Chinese people have no compunction with learning to speak English and any dealing with them is more likely to be a business setting. Dealing with Japanese is different, because you are more likely to be working in their company. In this situation, ability to speak japanese is an advantage to the boss.

 

[Elta]

Learn Japanese, Chinese people have no compunction with learning to speak English and any dealing with them is more likely to be a business setting. Dealing with Japanese is different, because you are more likely to be working in their company. In this situation, ability to speak japanese is an advantage to the boss.

QFT - 10 char.

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

Im still undecided if I want to learn Japanese or Mandarin as my asian language.

Family says to learn Mandarin because it could eventually become a big worldwide tounge just like English, but Japanese is more open (ex. anime).

Japanese is to some extent a safe bet, but Mandarin has the potential to be far more useful in the future. Japanese will never be a world language, but it is very useful in a rather small set of situations. Mandarin will almost certainly become ever more important in a global sense. It all depends where you see yourself in the future. I would never have chosen to learn Japanese from an internationalist perspective, I just happen to live here. It's not as if you need Japanese for anime and manga, though if they are a passion it is a bonus.

 

[Dann]

Actually what limited Japanese I now know I learned for and from playing console games.

 

[plarq]

Actually I got no console since I'm too poor to own anything other than a PC.

My bet is English. Other languages are only worth learning if you have extra time, or you want to live there for more than six months.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Yup. Dialects also evolve wherever the people take root. For instance the Hokkien spoken in mainland Fujian province is slightly different from that in Taiwan, since Taiwanese has some elements of Japanese in it. When I went to Singapore I found that my 'Philippine Hokkien' was mostly unintelligible to a Singaporean Hokkien speaker.

In comparison, Mandarin seems to be able to still maintain its 'purity' wherever it goes outside China. Why is that? (The situation inside China itself is that places like Szechuan, Hunan etc. speak mutated versions of Mandarin, but they don't call it as such but as Szechuanese, Hunanese etc. as opposed to standard Mandarin = Putonghua.)

The standardization of Mandarin as the official spoken Chinese language was only very recent - and was vastly aided by modern media (TV, radio etc).

 

[kcwong]

Japanese is to some extent a safe bet, but Mandarin has the potential to be far more useful in the future. Japanese will never be a world language, but it is very useful in a rather small set of situations. Mandarin will almost certainly become ever more important in a global sense. It all depends where you see yourself in the future. <snip> It's not as if you need Japanese for anime and manga, though if they are a passion it is a bonus.

I agree... though I did have thoughts about learning Japanese for watching manga and anime without translation. I don't start learning Japanese because I have other more important things to do with my time at the moment.

But that still doesn't explain why Mandarin as spoken by people of Chinese descent from as far apart as the US, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, even Africa still manage to sound exactly the same. These are places out of Chinese control.

That's because there's a thing called dictionary. If they'd want to use some other pronunciations they won't call it Mandarin in the first place.

But the above only applies to how a particular word should be pronounced. Mandarin does "sound" different when spoken by people from different regions, because of the different words and phrases they use.

e.g. In Beijing they will add &#20818; er(2) to the end of some phrases - this is called "&#20818;&#21270;".