Posted On: Saturday - August 26th 2017 7:31PM MST
In Topics: Humor Pundits China Race/Genetics
Under a blog post by Steve Sailer on unz.com about a push for more use of the Spanish language, there were comments about different languages in general. Regarding the Chinese written language, commenter Daniel H. wrote:
My nephew (very smart young man) spent 3 years of his youth in Shanghai. Took Mandarin classes every semester of college, spent a semester abroad in China, spent 2 summers abroad in China. He told me that it would take him a week to read/translate just the first page of the Chinese edition of the Wall Street Journal. He says that many intelligent, educated young Chinese are increasingly finding it difficult to write/read Mandarin because they rely upon PinYin [One of, and the most popular, form of writing Chinese sounds with western letters - what you see when you see Chinese "words"] for most of their written communication.and my reply comment was:
I’ve told Chinese people directly that their written language sucks and they should ditch it. They don’t always take that criticism as constructively as I intend it to be. Wankers!I will write a post on this interesting topic soon, but more here just on the Chinese language. The written language is a hell of a thing to learn, but as commenters pointed out that the spoken language (the pronunciation) is easy, I will beg to differ now.
The PinYin can make up the characters on mo-byle phone programs now, so that is a big crutch, kind of like spell-check.
I think, in fitting in with one of the concepts of this blog [Steve Sailer's iSteve blog on Unz.com], nature vs. nurture, that the Chinese in general have excellent memory skills due to both nurture and now nature too. It’s been thousands of years that those who could read and write went farther in life by far than those who couldn’t, and it takes or works the memory hard to get literate over there. A lot of the memorization-skills genes must have been passed on to where now they are tops in memorization.
A friend and I were in a taxi cab in downtown Shanghai, China, having been sent to a hotel by Shanghai Connie - no, no relation to Shanghai Lil (who never used the pill) of Rod Stewart's "Every Picture tells a Story (Don't it?)". This guy driving the taxi did not seem at all familiar with the directions our Chinese friend had told him. Oh, did I write already that the city of Shanghai is about as big as 3 New York Cities? Well, we tried to jog this guy's memory of the neighborhood and street with our best pronunciation of the address "Loo Wah Loo" (see, the 2nd "Loo" means street, so that should have been easy).
I did my best to get the address across to this taxi driver, but I am not good with languages other than FORTRAN and a little C. He was shaking his head and looking up at buildings out the window. Not good, not good at all. My friend can do a good Beavis AND Butthead and other imitations, so he was all "I've been learning some Chinese on youtube, I've got this!" He sounded a lot better: "Loo Wah! Loo?!" Oh, did I write already that there are 4 tones in Chinese pronunciation? Hey, it sounds easy, but if you are not used to using them, you will just figure you said things correctly when you have not. "Loo! Wa-ah Luooo?"
Now, the guy was shrugging, but then I finally realized that I had put a business card for the hotel in my pocket, so I handed it to him. That seemed to do it. "Ahh! Loo Wah Loo!". "That's what the fuck we've just been saying!" my friend and I said at the same time, happily. We got to the hotel, and of course, after that jinx of simultaneous expression, someone should have been buying a coke. However, both of us having heard the whole "Me Chinese, me play joke ..." cultural microaggression enough times in our youths, we both thought better of it.
I really wanted to find a good China-themed song other than that already posted on Peak Stupidity but couldn't find something really good, so how about another Steely Dan song from Aja?
"Black Cow" starts off slow, so give it a chance. It has a great jazzy sound.
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