Re: Half of all Chinese people can't speak Mandarin!


"Austin P. So (Hae Jin)" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:d7h282$b0o$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Lee Sau Dan wrote:
>>>>>>>"Tak" == Tak To <takto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>
>> Even better: avoid such a complicated construction. That sentences
>> can be broken down into simpler sentences, making it much more
>> intelligible and removing the ambiguity:
>>
>> China has 1.3 billion people. 53 percent of them can speak
>> Mandarin. But many of these are not frequent Mandarin users.
>>
>> Or:
>>
>> Many people who can speak Mandarin are not frequent users of
>> the language. They consititute 53 percent of the Chinese
>> population of 1.3 billion.
>>
>>
>> The simpler, the better. Less is more.
>
> And so literary licence goes out with the bath water...of course, that
> is why you are a programmer and not a journalist, hmmm?

Some journalists as a group do a good job sometimes. However not all
journalists do a good job all the time. I suspect that this is just a case
of sloppy journalism. If the total population of China is 1.3 billion, I
would not expect everyone to speak Mandarin, many people in Qinghai or Tibet
for instance. If the journalist was worth his salt, he would have said of
the total number of Mandarin speakers (.... corollary), and not introduce
the entire population into it, as only a large proportion of that 1.3
million do speak some form of Mandarin.

> I personally do not see the ambiguity that (many of) you seem to think
> exists. And I don't think that replacing "who" with "that" changes
> anything...
>
> "...many (of the 53 percent (of China's 1.3 billion people)(who can
> speak Mandarin)) are not frequent Mandarin users."
>
> This is how the sentence is properly "parsed".
>
> <my pardons if this was already presented>
>
> The question then is how would you guys have written the sentence in a
> form that would convey the meaning you *thought* it meant?
>
> Easiest way would be to get rid of "...of the 53 percent...".
>
> Austin

Not get rid of the statistic about the total number of people in China, and
just concentrate on the actual total number of speakers.

I can only guess at how the study was conducted. To me, if PTH was the
stringent standard, then most people, I suspect would fail it. At
university, I had friends from China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Angola,
France, Germany and other countries speaking English with strong accents.
They were fluent and eloquent, but none of them spoke recieved
pronunciation. If accent were a criterion in judging the effectiveness of
how they speak a language standard, then I guess they mostly fail on that.
Similarly, if those half of the Chinese population speak PTH with an accent,
they're likely to be failing that criterion as well. However, if it is down
to the fluency they have in conversation in the accents of Mandarin they
speak, I guess we all make allowances for the slight vowel and consonant
differences that regional language affects the way we speak other languages,
and in doing so, be understood fairly well. I say the study's conclusion was
taken out of context. It's been a complaint in Britain that everything is
dumbing down, so a complex issue is broken down until there's only a grain
of truth left. Perhaps sloppy journalism or tabloid journalism has much to
answer for.

Dyl.


.

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