My Experience Working and Living in China

Re:My Experience Working and Living in China by mango7283 on Sunday March 13, 2022 @05:53AM (#30659728)

I mean for Malaysia, schoolchildren of Chinese descent already have to pick up at least 3 standard languages Mandarin <- standard malaysian mandarin English <- duh Malay <- the official language of Malaysia On top of that, you add on the dialect, now there are practical considerations 1) Penang <- dominant dialect hokkien, and a penang kid who isn't even hokkien is going to need to figure out which dialect to use, hokkien, his native dialect or mandarain or english 2) KL <- cantonese in general, BUT certain places have certain stronger dialects etc etc etc

For practical reasons alone most people are going to focus on those top 3. I know some people who are reasonably fluent in no less than 5 languages but it's not that common and you will obviously see at least two or 3 are passable at best. These are going to happen even if the schools could somehow teach 4-5 dialects + standard mandarin +_ english + malay!

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Re:My Experience Working and Living in China by LAC-Tech on Sunday March 13, 2022 @06:50AM (#30660084)

Right, but that's what I don't understand. Why introduce mandarin into the mix at all?

Malay: National Language

English: International langauge

Hokkien: Mother tongue

Mandarin: ???

I genuinely don't understand why a brand new language that wasn't traditionally spoken into the area was introduced.

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Re:My Experience Working and Living in China by mango7283 on Sunday March 13, 2022 @09:41AM (#30661118)

For starters, hokkien is only a majority dialect in Penang... In KL its Cantonese or Hakka, for example. Much like (British) English, if there was going to be formal education in a Chinese dialect it was going to be Mandarin in line with what both the ROC and PRC did, since the whole point is to eventually enable everyone of Chinese ethnicity to communicate in a common tongue ( that isn't English...)

And in those days of the early 20th century when the foundations of formal education were laid if one was an educated person it would have been either in Mandarin or English (that said HK Cantonese is/was a huge pop culture influence but I don't think it ever was in an pan-sino educationist sense)

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Re:My Experience Working and Living in China by LAC-Tech on Sunday March 13, 2022 @04:01PM (#30665142)

since the whole point is to eventually enable everyone of Chinese ethnicity to communicate in a common tongue ( that isn't English...)

Yeah, the strong desire to do that is something I don't understand. But thanks for getting to the crux of it - it's all about having a chinese exclusive lingua franca.

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Re:My Experience Working and Living in China by mango7283 on Monday March 14, 2022 @01:23AM (#30668789)

This really isn't that hard to understand, much the same way English was adopted as a lingua franca, Malaysia's Chinese population is itself heterogeneous and so at the national level the lingua franca of the Chinese nation, mandarin, is adopted over that of the disparate dialects that only had local superiority at city level.

A unified Chinese identity takes precedence over the local one, this is even more so when you are at the mercy of divide and conquer techniques. The only other alternative was Cantonese but then why would the Hokkien buy into that and vice versa? Educational resources are thin enough as it is.

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Re:My Experience Working and Living in China by mango7283 on Sunday March 13, 2022 @09:58AM (#30661253)

I should probably also add that myself, a english speaking Malaysian Chinese would probably have to use english or malay with a random group of penang people since I can't speak mandarin - so from a purely practical point of view, given Malaysia and Singapore are a mishmash of southern dialects, we again come back to

English Mandarin Malay Then one of the various major dialects - and even then once you start moving around the country the Penang hokkien speaker in KL has to either switch to english or mandarin and the KL cantonese speaker in penang has to switch to mandarin and english and at the end of the day, with both the PRC and ROC using Mandarin as the common tongue, and the same situation existing for any other sinophere country bar Hong Kong...there we go.

If you go overseas and meet a random other Chinese person, your heuristics of common language are again going to skew

English or Mandarin then Cantonese then only one of the others so...

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