One day, my friend asked me this one questions. How chinese/mandarin (language) are important to chinese people.
Well its the language that we speak, the language that we communicate to other people in.. other then english I guess. Without language itself, life would be very meaningless
Mandarin is good around the world....that's the reason that a girl 100% italian want learn mandarin, after had improved her english for long time ^^
cantonese or mandrian is all important to us. it is who we are. some chinese ppl who i know don't know how to speak, i feel sorry for them. when i have kids i WILL teach them and make them learn. it makes us different from everyone else
That's like asking how important French is to French people, how English is important to British people, etc. -_-
I think it's because china will become the most important country of the world, because of his population and china is big and the industry too, so later mandarin will become important like English. I want to learn mandarin too, but I'm too lazy and don't how to start with, if I go to a mandarin school I won't even know what they say >_>. But I like to learn writing reading Cantonese too =). I want to learn many things. Like Piano, Chinese xD
chinese is the most spoken language in the world >< i know how to speak but not how to writte T_T still learning it =/
lol... really... most spoken? I thought english was since... seems everyone in the world speak some english. Even in china English is present. Seems lots of international pro sport players can speak english (nadal, yao ming etc) yao is actually quite good lol... went from saying only "Yao!" to using words like "actually"
Chinese is not a language. Therefore it can't be the most spoken language on the planet. That title belongs to the English language.
I'm not planning to work in China or in the other Asian countries so Mandarin is totally not important to me.
Fine if you want to get technical Manderin is the worlds most spoken language in the world then. I was quite surprised when I found that out like most people I alway thought that it was english
Mandarin IS the most spoken language in the world, as the majority of population in China (if not Chinese people in general) would know the language. Even when we are not counting Mandarin, English is NOT the most spoken language in the world, it's Spanish... As cited from Wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
ya i guess chinese is important cuz its our culture... my cantonese is good.. but even if i learned 7 years of mandarin.. i still cant say anything in mandarin
The obvious answer before the 1960's was that any Chinese language for overseas Chinese people was VERY LITTLE importance. Most people avoided learning any Chinese and spoke just the local languagesor dialects plus English! So people spoke Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Viet, Hananese, Miao, Malay... they spoke it overseas because of their cultural heritage and they valued their cultural heritage and valued the need to communicate with their parents or elders. Today in the 2000's overseas people value Mandarin above their own dialect because they are afraid of loosing out to the BUSINESS and POPULAR usage of Mandarin or Putonghua. They have learnt to abandon their own cultural origin and diversity of regional and localised cultures and customs in favour of unificationn and one single universal language. In a wide spread adoption of Putonghua it is reversing entirely the intent of nature which is to produce localised or regional cultural and dialect diversity. Nature works in diversification through evolution BUT mankind works in the opposite direction with languages especially the Chinese people. Imagine a whole world with just one type of food, one type of clothes, one type of cars, one type of perfume ... and one type of Putonghua! Yes, we are moving towards one Putonghua and one size fits all, sadly, but true! In conclusion but it can only happen to Chinese people and only the Chinese people pose this question of putonghua as a single one size fits all. Most of all the other nations on this planet preserve their own dialects and languages by LAW. For example:- 1) United Kingdom: Welsh language is official language by law in Wales 2) Belgium: Flemish and French are officlal languages 3) Canada: Canadian French and English 4) South Africa: Afrikaans and English 5) India: Hindi, Gujareti, Tamil, Kerela.... 6) Switzerland: Swiss German, French and Roman .. on and on it goes. Do these parents from these nations promote their own language/dialect, of course they do. However with Chinese people they make their children abandon their own dialect and learn Putonghua even they don't even speak it at home themselves! And of course, this very thread poses the threat of the question of the extinction of the Chinese dialects!
English is definitely by far the biggest language and most popular language in terms of coverage on the surface of this planet. If you place a dot of everyone who can speak English on the surface of a model of the globe you will find that English has the biggest penetration on the planet. When it comes to Spanish and Chinese, although more people speak it they are concentrated in certain areas only. For example, if you go to Falklands , Finland, Iceland, Burma, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Katzastan, Pakistan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Zambia, Sierra Leone.. .... and this list is very long. It will be far easier to find someone who can speak English rather than Chinese and Spanish. So although people say more people speak these language they are pretty useless as a language to communicate with. Moreover for learning a useful second language English is far more popular. Therefore English is the most spoken language when you are in a multi-lingual conversation.
Definitely agree! I know lots of Cantonese-speaking Overseas Born Chinese forced to learn Mandarin. The only time that they are exposed to mandarin is for 2.5 hours every Saturday, other than that, it is a life of English and some Cantonese. So what's the point!.... This puzzles me.... most of them care little about the Chinese language, they will probably never travel / go to Asia to work, etc. With the minimal time that they are exposed to Chinese language - reading and writing - (ie. Saturday mornings) they are wasting it on Mandarin, when maybe they can try to "work" / "perfect" a dialect that they at least have SOME fundamentals versus a dialect (Mandarin) in which they have VIRTUALLY NO EXPOSURE AT ALL!
^ I think it's better than no exposure at all, bear in mind, chinese language is the origin of Korean and japanese language too. That's why we see some similar characters/pronunciation in Korean hangul and also Japanese kanji.. I think it's great and meaningful knowing Chinese. I know how important as I can't even read the whole chinese newspaper... some of my non-Chinese friends were surprised when i told them I don't know how to read and write properly.
