The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:
In the Mandarin field, how can we decide what kind of Mandarin to learn and to speak?
Sometimes that Boston accent slips out when you least expect it pic.twitter.com/urXO2xrQ6E
— Ellen Fleming (@EllenFlem) January 12, 2023
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The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:
What does the Mandarin word often mistranslated as “dialect” actually mean?
“Many of these so-called Chinese ‘dialects’ are in fact, different languages.”
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) November 4, 2020
—David Moser (@david__moser), in his book _A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language_ https://t.co/Ld20t2JQ2W
List of different Chinese languages in which publications are available on jw.org as of 2025-06-02
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China relegating _Pīnyīn_ to being just a pronunciation aid for characters is like a company hiring a talented A player executive and then making that person just get coffee for the CEO, because the established power base’s top priority is to preserve itself—B players in action. https://t.co/fNHsBWEsWO
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) May 15, 2024
Nice analogy. https://t.co/EE1mPuBcjR
— David Moser (@david__moser) May 15, 2024
“The level of denial in this regard can sometimes reach ludicrous proportions. A musician friend…who specializes in jazz music once forgot how to write the word for ‘jazz’ in Chinese, _jueshi_ 爵士. When I poked fun at him…, he became a bit defensive”
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) May 6, 2024
—David Moser @david__moser pic.twitter.com/sCUIFWQgxg
To provide a bit of background, “common things should be easy…” is often considered a good guiding principle in the world of computer software development. For example, pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay said:
“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”
This basic idea has also been declared to be a guiding principle for widely used software projects such as the Perl programming language and Apple’s SwiftUI framework.
Since writing systems like Chinese characters and Pīnyīn are really technologies, it is fair and reasonable to want common things like reading and writing Mandarin expressions (especially common ones!) to be easy, just as we want other common technological things to be easy.
“The Chinese [characters] writing system is simply not as user-friendly as other scripts, and non user-friendly devices get used less.”
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) May 3, 2024
—David Moser (@david__moser) pic.twitter.com/ZhUZp7Q6sJ
“Every day in China, perfectly intelligent language users who normally would be inclined to write down sentences in their native language for one reason or another, do *not* do so, and for no other reason than the writing system itself discourages the attempt.”
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) May 3, 2024
—David Moser pic.twitter.com/DjqqarYTJI
Thanks to David Moser (@david__moser) for reposting, and for his insightful, elegant, and occasionally whimsical writings and musings over the years.
— Troubadour WW (@troubadourww) May 4, 2024
The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:
Do you ever just clean forget how to read or write a Chinese character that you’re sure you once knew? What’s up with that?
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The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:
Why do the words “tea” and “chai” both exist when they basically refer to the same thing?
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