*Psst* - *looks around furtively* - I'm English.

You know, those guys who let loose a boat load of people 250 years ago to start a new "Colony". We then promptly let go of what turned into, what is arguably, the most powerful Nation seen in the last two Millenium , but I guess we all have our bad days



Interesting, never knew that re Party Chairman, one more thing learnt from the thread. Yup on a wide overview basis, it is similar. The Devil is in the detail as always. I will leave it to our Colonial Cousins to hit the detail, which no doubt is about to come. There are many more key appointees in a Democratic system at the top end of the structure, so influence is more widely spread and not so concentrated in the hands of a few individuals.


Ouch! And I thought as a child it was a pain learning the letters of the English alphabet ...

How is that all taught to a child in the education process in China? From where I sit, learning the use of 45,000 "letters" (acknowledging they are not "letters" in the context of Mandarin) seems the ultimate nightmare for young children. In the same way as its difficult for Chinese to wrap their head around the concepts of 'tense' 'plurals' 'verbs' etc, its hard for me to get into the concept of a language based - essentially- on pictures(?) - if thats the right way to describe it.

Regards
Zy

Ummnot quite. The President is the commander in chief of the Military that is correct. He is not the leader of his party however. When He assumes the role of president he is removed from any position of power within his political party structure. That does not mean that he cannot wield a lot of influence, it just means he has no official power and cannot tell the party what to do about anything.

Remember also that even though he is the commander in Chief of the military it is congress that controls the money, so if we ever really wanted to stop a president from using our military we could cut off the money to the armed forces. also Congress can pass laws that forbid the president from doing certain things, for instance, We could forbid the president from invading a country, at that point our military commanders would, by law, refuse an order from the president that violates the will of congress.

Our military takes an oath to the constitution, not to the President, in fact the oath in part reads that they will follow the LAWFUL orders of their commanders, they have the right and the duty to refuse to follow unlawful orders. Also each branch of the Service has its own commander. And as an additional safety to prevent the misuse of the military each state maintains it's won military (The National Guard). The Guard units answer to the Governors of their respective state. They can be nationalized by the President but only if the governor agrees.
In our History we have had times where the governors have refused to allow the National Guard units to be federalized. I think the last time was back in 1963 or sometime around then.

The President really has very few powers other than commanding the military. He can veto bills passed by congress but congress can overrule his veto if they can muster 67% of each house.

If he causes too much trouble than the House of Representatives can impeach him, if they do, then the Senate will decide one of two things; Either do nothing which is referred to as a censure, it has not effect but to embarrass the President and tell him off, or remove him from office, at which time the Vice President assumes the office of President.

Our Vice president has only two things to do while in office and they are; if the Senate is tied in a vote the vice president will cast the tie breaking vote. If the President dies, the Vice president assumes the office of president.

In the event that the Executive branch and the Legislative branch cant agrees on what is law, then the issue is sent before the Supreme court, The supreme court has the absolute final say on what is or is not legal. The end… If they say you can’t do, you can’t! The only way to change what they say is to make a new law and any law they pass has to conform to the constitution. The court cannot however, impose any ruling, if no one who has a standing on a law challenges a law then it remains law.

This separation of power helps to prevent anyone from becoming too powerful. In The United States we have a saying “The people should not fear the government. The government should however, fear the people”

It is the reason why our second amendment allows firearms for the people and for each state to have its own army. One of our driving principals is to maintain fear, when our government fails to fear us we always end up in trouble.

I would say that is a bit different then in China would you not agree?

Zydor said:



I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. You've mentioned your English many times in this and other threads   ( 

Here's something I've always thought interesting. To me, the difference between seeing a Chinese, a Japanese and a Korean is extremely obvious. But the difference between an American, an English, a French, a Swedish - though my European friends tell me this is very clear.

Similarly, the Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan accent is almost like night and day to me. But I have very hard to seperate Boston from Bronx or Queen's Oxford from Cockney, although I am told it is too obviously.



Good questions

1. I think there are very few people on the planet who actually know all 45,000 characters of Mandarin. You need 2000 to read a newspaper. I think once you know something like 3500 your considered literate. Everything beyond the 10000 range is rare words like 'the name of the sword used by Prince X when he killed Warlord Y during the Z dynasty' or the 'smell of the favourite form of silk used by the special tailor of XXX province' or the 'chemical compound made from mixing X with Y under deep heat'.

2. It's true that our 'picture' system is very different to the 'alphabet' system. I think this is probably where we find each other's languages so hard to learn. One of the advantages of your system is that each word has more context. If a noun is a plural, I instantly know there are more than one. If a verb is past tense, I know the event happened yesterday. In Chinese, we don't have that context. On the other hand, we find it simpler to just add the word 'yesterday' to convey time meaning or 'two' in front of the noun to convey plural meaning.

3. Although we don't have 'letters', we do have 'radicals' (it's the official English translation... I think it is very odd since radical seems to translate to 'extremism' so I don't know why they chose this). Each character is made up of a series of radicals.

For example, we have the radical called '3 drops of water'. Characters that has something to do with water usually has the radical '3 drops of water'. It's literally three 'dots' on the left, each dot on top of another dot.

River 河
Lake 湖
Ocean 海
Sweat 汗
Tears 泪

Another radical is 'symbol of fire'. It looks like this 火

Roast 烤
Burn 烧

And so on. I'm not sure how many radicals there are - not TOO many... (maybe 60 or 70?) Other radicals include 'sign of the mouth', 'related to animals', 'covered by a roof' and so on.

So when we teach children, we usually teach the very basic characters (big, small, sun, moon etc.) and the very basic radicals (3 drops of water, symbol of fire etc.). One by one, we then add more complicted characters and more complicated radicals. Since most complicated characters are just combinations of basic characters plus basic radicals, you get up to 2000 pretty quickly.

Spacepony:

Thank you - very helpful. The system of separation of powers I think is very interesting and I need to read it more.

I never knew each State had its own army, that is indeed very different to what we have here.

I will take a bit of time to understand your posting more deeply. From your words, the President has a lot less power than I thought which makes me have a lot of questions - and I want to be clear on a few things before I ask them.

Dont give it a second thought, its not an issue - in any case you are far from being an idiot .....

Regards
Zy

mightygoobi,

I will send you some links via your private email so that you can do some research on the subject..

@mightygoobi

Mandarin is the hardest language to learn. I speak mandarin, cantonese (chinese dialect), english and some french. I thought Korean was hard to learn or arabic. I read somewhere as far as for language learning goes, arabic and korean are two languages that people have to spend more classroom hours on in order to obtain fluency. As far as a tonal language goes, mandarin is pretty easy, it has only 4 tones.

There was an interesting historical story about how mandarin became the offical language of china. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, there was a vote to decide which dialects of chinese will be the offical language of the country. To make a long story short, Cantonese as the choice for china national language was lost by one vote to mandarin.

In Cantonese, there are 9 different tones, well 8 tones, plus one half tones. If i were a foreigner, i would not want to learn cantonese in comparison to mandarin, because it is harder. But then, cantonese has more colorful curses and million times more colourful adjectives and slangs. In a nutshell, mandarin is more refine and gentle a language in civilized discourse and conversations.

As far as reading goes, it depends on where you are learning and using your chinese. In Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the amount of characters that one needs to know to be able to read everything and anything is around 4000, but this is becuase the writing system used is the traditional system where as in mainland china, it is only 2500-3000 characters. There is this big debate still about how china should not have screw around with the writing system as in simplifying it. My mainland friends find this debate really weird, outdated and sometime funny. While my Taiwan and some Hong Kong friends finds this issue infuriating.

Why this is..well that is another story all together. I will let someone else to explain this.

Hmm, after reading that post I'm inclined to go learn a little Mandarin, as I know quite a bit of Japanese and a lot of it seems similar (there's limited tonality there too, but the copula, plurals, suffixes, and of course the kanji are all quite alike).

I absolutely love Chinese characters as there's such intuitive and beautiful meanings behind not only the shape of each character but how they compound. Of course, the multiple sounds for each character can be a pain, but it's also kind of neat how you can choose a name from the character and have it pronounced all sorts of different ways, or find a nice pronunciation in the first place and work our its written form.

Carobn016 said:



As I believe, Japanese has three 'alphabets' - one of which is Chinese characters. I also believe that the Koreans once used Chinese characters before they developed their own alphabet. It is interesting to me that we can't talk each other's language, but we can still write to each other.

Elias001 said:



Regarding Korean - since it is a phonetic alphabet, I guessed that it would be similar to learning any of the western languages that follow A B C. Is there a reason it is so hard? As far as I know, they just fit the C, A and T symbols together to make 'cat'. ( I speak no Korean beyond 'kimchi' and 'Grace Park').

Regarding Mandarin is the hardest language to learn. Just query - is it the same for all cultures? Is Mandarin the hardest for 'Asian' cultures as well as 'western' ones? I have no scientific proof, but I just get the feeling that Japanese, Korean people might find Mandarin language easier to learn than German or French language.



Hehe... I'm glad to hear you say it... and I have a feeling that the Hong Kong people might have a different view We in Beijing are forever being told our tongues are too fat when we speak compared to the soft delicate tones of the Hong Kongese.

Also, when it comes to the 'colour curses', I think Hokkien must be close to the trophy. It's quite amazing to have a dialect with so many references to your mothers body, bad smells and interactions between humans and animals.



I wonder - how many English words I need to know to read a newspaper?

Actually, on the interaction between traditional and modern writing style - something interesting from my point of view. Taiwan and Hong Kong use the traditional system of Chinese. Mainland uses the modern form. Since we've been using the modern form for about 2 or 3 generations, our parents / grandparents maybe use modern form. But these days, influence from Taiwan and Hong Kong is large on the young people. I've posted before, our nightclubs, karaoke bars, comic stores, internet cafes are filled with Taiwan hip hop, Hong Kong techno, Hong Kong comics and Taiwan MMPORGs - which all use the traditional form. So the young people are learning a lot of 'traditional' Chinese in order to keep up with the latest dance tracks or play the best computer games. I think we must be one of the few cultures in the world where the young people may even know more 'traditional' words than the older generation

Good question, I've never really thought of it in those terms - I have no idea no doubt there is some esoteric calculation along those lines somewhere, but its purely theoretical as the English language is not constructed from pictures, purely single letters. Although they have changed a lot over time - see the Wiki on the English Alphabet. There are "rules" on how you pronounce the words when speaking, so many will initially be able to pronounce the written words before they know its meaning.

As you indicated we just string together letters from a collection of 26 to form a word. There is no other motivation behind that, no deep meaning, just an accepted collection and order of letters. Its true that many words are a derivative of older words, extracts from other languages (French and Latin for example), but even then the original source had the same logic, just a common accepted order of letters. "Cat" could just as easily have been spelt "Wxk" as weird as that seems now.

There is even a legitimate case for naming a new language "American" as the common use of the original English has changed over time, and many words although spelt the same have different meanings in the UK and the US.

We are often referred to as "Two Countries separated by a Common Language"

Regards
Zy

roughly 2000 words are needed for basic conversation, but once you get into more technical reading the prescribed number goes up quite a bit. For academic fluency in English you need to know about 14,000 words, however, this is for fluency across subjects. If there is a certain subject you are particularly interested in it might behoove you to learn the technical words of that field and just use a good dictionary for the rest

mightygoobi

What access do you get to news Sites like MSNBC. There is lots of noise over here re access to "open" International News and Current Affairs Sites from within China. I am just genuinely curious what the reality is, in terms of learning about life in other countries (keeping away from the political angles) and their histories in a factual non political sense.

Regards
Zy

@mightygoobi

Regarding Mandarin being the hardest language to learn in asia, no..Korea beats Mandarin hands down. Next comes Arabic. For some reasons, there is the standard formal version of arabic that every foreigner learns, native speaker knows it, but they speak in dialect and only revert to it when discussing serious subjects like philosohpy or current news. This is what a friend from Syria told me.

And regarding Hong Kong people have soft delicate tones. I take it as a compliment. I don't think people from Guandong or Xian Gang/Hong Kong has delicate tones. Guandong and HK is so crowd so people talk over each other. I mean they literally shout over each other in conversations. The slangs in cantonese are so rude and to a non native speaker of the dialect, they will find it insulting if they do not understand the context in which it is used. I think Mandarin has much more soft tones than cantonese. I don't think Beijing people has fat tongues. I just think you guys curl your tongues a lot, which is how i speak mandarin. Actually, my cousin which is a part of my generation, she is the only one i know that can curl her tongue consistently when she speaks mandarin. I think because she learned it when she was young in school.

And as far as reading and speaking in english goes. I think i read somewhere that most people will need on average of 800 words to read everyday stuff, but for those who are on the literate side of things, they can recognize around 10,000 words on paper. Not that they can recall all of it in any one instant. it is just that they recognize it when they see it.

Excellent way of describing it

Regards
Zy

I am working my way through a proper response to Spacepony who posted and emailed a lot of helpful information on American government. Haven't gone through everything yet - and I haven't forgotten

A quick posting though... Zydor said:



What is the "noise" - I'm not quite clear on the meaning. Does it mean the website is censored? I clicked on thr link and there's no problem to read anything there. I click on the Beijing Olympics link, the 'Asia Pacific' link and every thing was clear. I then tried to search for as 'controversial' terms as I could like 'Dalai lama' and 'human rights' and all the stories came up.

Actually, a lot of the stories there seem to be taken from the English-language Chinese media (or vice versa - maybe the English lanauge Chinese media took it from MSNBC). There is almost identical language for the 'coal mine collapse kills 21 miners' story and the 'golf tees off in China' story and 'demand of 1.3 billion Chinese on oil' story.

Hope that is helpful.

re "noise" - sorry that is a slang term, not proper english - broadly it refers to making lots of extreme comment on an issue usually (not always) one sided comment and unbalanced.

Thanks for having a look, interesting, puts into perspective the more extreme claims over controlled Net Access in China made by those of more extreme views.

Regards
Zy