30% still can’t speak Mandarin

As westerners hire Mandarin Chinese-speaking nannies and Irish education officials discuss ways to get Chinese onto the curriculum, China’s State Language Commission, has similar concerns about how the language is taught.

About 30 per cent of China’s 1.3 billion population, 400 million people, can’t communicate in Mandarin, according to Li Weihong, director of the commission.

“About 70 per cent of the total population can speak Putonghua, and 95 per cent of the literate population knows how to use standard Chinese characters. However, only 10 per cent [of that 70 per cent] can speak standard Putonghua fluently,” Li told an event promoting “linguistic unity” in Shijiazhuang, Hebei.

China has seven major dialects, including Cantonese, which is also spoken in Hong Kong and large swathes of southern China, and Shanghaiese, and each is difficult for people outside their cachement areas to understand.

Mandarin is a northern dialect, based on the Chinese spoken in Beijing, and has been named the official lingua franca, Putonghua, a kind of “hochdeutsch” for this country of 1.3 billion people. Imagine if everyone in Ireland had to speak in the south county Dublin drawl and you can understand the irritation at this imposition.

While everyone in mainland China can technically communicate by writing characters, Mandarin is a tough language for many to learn.

Many linguistic scholars believe that Chinese is too difficult to learn to ever unseat English as an international language, and Japanese, which the go-getter parents of the 1980s encouraged their children to learn to give them an advantage in Japan’s economic rise, never really took off as a global language.