phil5's comments | WingNews

phil5 | 11 years ago | on: When Chinese children forget how to write

> No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script.

I'm not a native of Shanghai but I still get to understand written Shanghainese. Because even though I can't _read_ it, I can somehow _interpret_ it. It uses the same Chinese characters and I already knew what these characters mean.

> Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin.

There are still people native to Cantonese, Min Nan, or Hakka who don't speak Mandarin.

phil5 | 11 years ago | on: When Chinese children forget how to write

Actually there is, IMHO.

Chinese is in fact a group of spoken languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Southern Min. These are completely different languages at least in tones and pronunciations. Mandarin speakers could hardly talk to Cantonese speakers.

But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally.

Traditional Japanese (and similarly Traditional Korean and Traditional Vietnamese) uses a subset of Chinese characters which they call "Kanji". And "writing down the characters" (Bitan, 筆談) had been a very effective way of communication between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese until the last century.