Category Archives: Chinese

HK Putonghua and Pinyin test

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The Examinations & Assessment Authority released today the results of the September Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers. Some 29% of English teachers have acquired the basic requirement in writing, with 43% and 64% of candidates attaining the basic requirement in English speaking and listening.

For Putonghua papers, 43% of teacher candidates attained the basic requirement in listening and recognition, 63% in Pinyin and 42% in speaking.

It’s interesting that people do so much better in Pinyin than in not only listening and recognition but also speaking. Moreover, compare those with the figures for English. Hmm.

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English signage proposal for Chinese-dominant area of Canada

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Dec. 9, 2004
VANCOUVER – Richmond city council is being asked to consider a bylaw requiring shops and other businesses to display signs in English as well as Chinese.

The recommendation comes from a committee established by council to examine what it calls “intercultural issues.” According to the 2001 census, 59 per cent of Richmond residents say they are members of a visible minority and 40 per cent claim Chinese heritage. Committee chair Shashi Assanand says the intent of the law is to help everyone in the community feel more included by offering signs that everyone can read.

“So as a result, if there are people who can’t read Chinese, we definitely would need to have English,” she says. “We don’t want to have parallel cultures building. We want to have intercultural communication, intercultural relationships, so that we can work as equals, with a lot of harmony here in Richmond.”

Danny Leung agrees. He’s the senior manager at the new Chinese-themed Aberdeen mall, where the signs are in both Chinese and English.

Leung says he’d support an English language sign bylaw. And he suggests restricting the size of Chinese characters to address a problem he sees along No. 3 Road. “I think the signage is a little bit of overkill, in terms of the Chinese characters. I think it should be neutralized a little bit, and make it more tourist friendly.”

There’s no word on whether Richmond council is prepared to pass a language bylaw. A spokesperson for the city’s planning department says it would likely be a last resort, and passed only after much discussion.

China moves against ‘dialects’ again

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Here’s an AP story, with a lot of bad information (“dialects” instead of languages, etc.). But it’s still useful as a reminder of what China is doing to suppress languages other than Mandarin as part of Beijing’s struggle to create the “one China” that it claims has existed forever and ever, amen.

Thousands of years of Chinese linguistic heritage have come down to this: a squabble over Tom and Jerry.

Dubbed into regional Chinese dialects, the warring cat and mouse have been huge TV hits – and a good way to pass home-grown culture down to the younger generation, programmers say.

Not so fast, says the central government up north in Beijing, which for decades has promoted standard Mandarin as the only Chinese language worthy of the airwaves. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ordered an end to broadcasting in dialect, saying kids should be raised in a “favorable linguistic environment.”

The move has put Tom and Jerry – or “Cat and Mouse,” as the show is called here – at the center of a long-running debate about how to maintain national cohesion amid a linguistic sea of highly distinct regional accents, dialects, and wholly separate language groups.

“As an artist, I think dialect should be preserved as a part of local culture,” says Zhang Dingguo, deputy director of the Shanghai People’s Comedy Troupe which does Tom and Jerry in Shanghainese.

“Schools don’t allow Shanghainese to be spoken, and now TV doesn’t either. It looks like Shanghai comedy will be dying out,” he adds.

The government calls the Mandarin policy vital to promoting a common Chinese identity in this vast land of 1.3 billion people, 56 ethnic groups and seven main Chinese dialects spoken by the Han ethnic majority.

“Thank you” is pronounced “xie xie” in Beijing, “do jey” in Hong Kong, and “sha zha” in Shanghai. Need to know a price? Ask “wa tsui gim” in Fujian, but “duoshao qian,” in Mandarin-speaking northern China.

The notion of “pronunciation” should be a red flag, indicating that the author is thinking in terms of characters rather than languages.

The pronunciation of Chinese surnames can induce mild identity crisis. Mr. Xu (pronounced “shoe”) in northern China becomes Mr. Ko in Fujian, which itself is called Hokkien in the local dialect.

Promotion of Mandarin – known here as “putonghua,” or “common tongue” – began in the 1920s and became policy in 1955, six years after the communists seized power. Its use has been encouraged through an unending series of social campaigns, including the current one featuring TV presenter Wang Xiaoya on billboards exhorting Shanghainese to “speak Mandarin … be a modern person.”

In the latest campaign, Shanghai city officials are being required to attend classes on perfecting their pronunciation, schools are nominating contestants in city-wide Mandarin speech contests and foreigners are being invited to Mandarin classes.

Totally distinct from Chinese, the languages of minority groups such as Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians are officially recognized and taught in schools. Important documents are translated into major minority tongues and four of them – Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and Zhuang – appear on Chinese bank notes.

Chinese dialects are based on the same system of writing.

Yup. Like I said, this reporter is repeating myths about the Chinese languages and characters. What the author is saying isn’t so different than claiming that Chinese people wrote their languages before they spoke them, which is of course absurd. But this is typical of how the myths about characters and languages have confused people, even about what ought to be fairly obvious.

That means Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong can enjoy subtitled Mandarin movies and Mandarin-speakers can order off Chinese menus in the far west of the country.

Because speakers of Cantonese and other Chinese languages learn to read and write not their own languages but Mandarin. There’s nothing magical or especially language-transcending about Chinese characters.

Rising incomes, greater travel freedom and the spread of education are also helping to break down linguistic barriers. Yet no one is predicting they’ll dissolve entirely – or soon.

“Many parts of China are heading for a situation of what linguists call diglossia, where there is one ‘high’ or public language … and one ‘low’ or local language that is used among friends and family,” said Stevan Harrell, an expert on Chinese languages at the University of Washington.

Use of dialects may even be strengthening in some areas with strong local identities, sometimes for economic reasons. In Guangzhou (that’s Mandarin for the great southern city of Canton), broadcasters are allowed to speak Cantonese to compete with the nearby Hong Kong stations.

In places like Guangzhou and Shanghai, prevalence of the local dialect helps exclude outsiders from social networks that are key to securing good jobs and entry to better schools. Outsiders say it smacks of bigotry.

“If you want to find a good job and be a success in Shanghai, you have to speak Shanghainese. Even if you do, they can pick you out by your accent and discriminate against you,” said Steven Li, an accounting student flying home to the western city of Chongqing.

Preservation, not exclusion, was the purpose of Tom and Jerry in dialect, said Zhang, the producer.

“You’ve got Shanghainese kids who can’t even speak Shanghainese,” he complains. “I have friends who’ve moved to Shanghai and want to learn the language to better integrate into local society.

“Isn’t watching TV easier than studying textbooks?”

Zhang cites semilegal Shanghainese broadcasting that pops up on local radio as evidence of continued demand for dialect programming. For now, Tom and Jerry will continue in Shanghainese on video, along with other versions in close to a dozen dialects.

Oddy enough, Tom and Jerry didn’t speak in the original cartoons, so the dialect versions give them voices they never had.

Despite support for dialects, Mandarin’s influence reaches deep. Speaking the language well is considered a sign of good breeding and education. And because China has bound use of Mandarin so closely to the idea of national unity, promotion of other dialects can sometimes be seen as insulting if not traitorous.

Self-governing Taiwan’s efforts to promote its local dialect have been angrily denounced in Beijing as “anti-Chinese.” Even at an entertainment awards show in Shanghai, Chinese reporters drown out Hong Kong celebrities speaking in Cantonese with exasperated shouts of “speak Mandarin.”

The annual meeting of China’s legislature is a jamboree of regional accents and languages. Delegates, including Tibetans, Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and Macau and Turkic Uighurs from Xinjiang in the remote northwest, struggle to make themselves understood in Mandarin. Other delegates and Chinese reporters strain to understand.

The farther from Beijing, though, the tougher communication becomes.

In the bazaar in Minfeng, a town deep in the Xinjiang desert, ethnic Chinese strain to understand Turkic Uighurs’ thickly accented, broken Mandarin.

“Every Uighur student who comes here has already learned Chinese in elementary school. Their levels vary wildly, but they can all understand it at certain levels,” says Li Qiang, principal of Middle School No. 1 in Korla, a town in central Xinjiang.

But, he allows, “We sometimes need to work very hard to understand each other.”

Chinese characters for Seoul

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Hmm. This is a strange one.

Seoul to Have New Chinese Name
The new Chinese name of Seoul, the capital of Korea, will be decided on Dec. 3, Seoul City said Sunday.

Seoul City received proposals for a new Chinese name for the metropolitan city from both Chinese language experts and citizens in May as the current Chinese characters, 漢城 (Hansong), have a different pronunciation.

The city has picked two of the most suitable names with close pronunciations: “首爾 (seoual),” which means “city full of flowers,” and “首午爾 (seowooal),” which means “bright city in broad daylight.”

The city initially planned to choose one of the names on Aug. 24 in order to celebrate the 12th anniversary of diplomatic relationship between South Korea and China. However, it had to postpone its plan due mainly to the lack of positive response from the Chinese government.

The city plans to choose an official Chinese name and will strongly urge China to use it. The new name will be used for maps, street directions, airports and public transit systems to help the increasing number of Chinese travelers to the city.

“It will be of no use to have a new Chinese name for the capital city if the Chinese government and people do not accept it,” a city official said.

The municipal government will continue to request the Chinese government to use the same Chinese characters through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

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Taipei street names and the monosyllabic myth

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I spent much of the weekend revising and correcting the list of Taipei’s street names that I have on an old Web site on romanization. (I’m afraid I’ve almost completely neglected that site since getting Pinyin.info running. I’m trying to rectify the situation some because the new edition of the Taiwan Lonely Planet is to mention both sites.)

The street names (632 in all) are almost exclusively disyllabic. The only monosyllabic name is 後街 (Hou St.), unless people want to count a few others like 安東街 (Andong St.) and 安西街 (Anxi St.); but even those wouldn’t work because people in Taiwan see those names as single units rather than as distinct parts: “Andong Street” and “Anxi Street,” not “An East Street” and “An West Street.” And I’m not so sure that Hou St. isn’t a typo, because it doesn’t really pass the “sounds OK” test.

The list has only three names longer than two syllables. But two of these are not “Chinese” but loan words: 羅斯福路 ([Franklin Delano] Roosevelt Rd.) and 凱達格蘭大道 (Kaidagelan Blvd., which is from one of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes). And the final example, 竹子湖路 (Zhuzihu Rd.), is a good example of the exception proving the rule, because the road is named after a lake (hu) with a disyllabic name (Zhuzi); I’ve written the name solid (i.e., with no space before “hu”) only because there’s no longer any lake there alongside the road.

Yet misunderstandings about Mandarin and the other Chinese languages persist, despite refutations of the monosyllabic and other myths.

For the sake of comparison, let’s look at the 20 most common street names in the United States:

Second, Third, First, Fourth, Park, Fifth, Main, Sixth, Oak, Seventh, Pine, Maple, Cedar, Eighth, Elm, View, Washington, Ninth, Lake, and Hill.

All but five of those are monosyllabic, but no one goes around claiming English is predominantly monosyllabic.

An examination of the street names reveals a few other interesting points.

Another myth is that Chinese characters are needed to resolve the supposed problem of homophony in the language. So, let’s look at the street names. Would anyone care to guess how many of the 632 names are homophonous?

The answer is zero. For that matter, just a handful would need tone marks to distinguish themselves from similar — but not identical — sounding names: Jinghua St. (Jǐnghuà and Jǐnghuá), Tong’an St. (Tōng’ān and Tóng’ān), Wanqing St. (Wànqīng Wànqìng), Wuchang St. (Wǔchāng Wǔcháng), and Xiangyang Rd. (Xiāngyáng Xiàngyáng).

Finally, I want to note that not even one ü (u with an umlaut) is needed in any of the street names.

S’pore gov’t approves changes in teaching Mandarin

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SINGAPORE: The Government has accepted the recommendations made by a review committee on the way Chinese language is taught here.

The bold changes set the foundation for a more interesting and less stressful learning experience for students.

It took 10,000 participants and nine months to come up with the recommendations.

From next year, Chinese language lessons will shift its focus from memorising characters to communication skills and reading.

Songs and even Chinese comics are expected to become instructional materials.

And a modular approach to primary Chinese education will be in place by 2008.

Under the modular approach, all students will take the same core Chinese lessons.

But students who have little exposure to the Chinese language will take bridging modules which focus on listening and speaking skills at Primary 1 and 2.

Students who need additional support can take reinforcement modules at Primary 3 and 4.

Those who display ability in the language can take enrichment modules throughout their primary education.

Schools can determine their own Chinese language and English language subject time allocation.

For example, Tao Nan School will implement two additional Chinese language periods per week next year.

These two periods will replace the time allocated for one English and one Science lessons.

PSLE examinations for the Chinese language will also change by 2010.

Project work and presentations are likely to be components of the overall assessment.

There will also be a shift to school-based assessment instead of a centralized examination system….

Teachers on their part are upbeat about the changes.

Lay See Neufeld, principal of Tampines North Primary, said: “We will be able then to tailor more interesting, more relevant lessons for children so that we know whether they need reinforcement or bridging or actually enrichment, so that we may be able to meet the children’s needs at a more personal level compared to what we’re doing now.”

But one concern is manpower.

Foo Suan Fong, principal of Nan Hua Secondary, said: “As far as this review is concerned, the teachers will be the key personnel to roll out all good programmes in school. So I can see that in future the demand of the teachers in both quality and quantity will be an area of concern.”

Ngee Ann Polytechnic will offer a Diploma in Chinese next year to train more Chinese teachers.

And the Language Elective Programme will be launched in one more junior college to nurture the talent pool.

With such widespread changes, the Government is confident in grooming bilingual Singaporeans.

Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said: “Our bilingual education policy must succeed. It is how we retain our pride and identity as Singaporeans, and how we will engage with Asia and the world.”

These proposed changes will be put in a White Paper and debated in Parliament this month.

full story

wide-ranging discussion on writing Mandarin and the ‘threat’ of English

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Various scholars discuss ???????????????. Some of the participants mouth the usual alarmist, nationalist nonsense common in the PRC. But there are also some who take a different approach:

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