Why can't Chinese just be simple like English?
I mean, everywhere I go people are speaking English. If I need help, I can always ask questions about English. English is taught in schools, and most of the bookstores stock books in English.
Chinese just isn't ready for ordinary people. Maybe linguists can use Chinese as a hobby language, but I mean--come on--Chinese doesn't even have an alphabet. How is Joe Sixpack going to learn Chinese? Ordinary people don't want to learn a language; they just want to use it. They want a language that "just works" out of the box.
In the past thirty years, I've had only a few small problems with English. It's almost always done what I wanted it to do. The few times I've tried to speak Chinese, though, I've just had people laugh at me. I don't want to have to take classes just to try to fix my broken Chinese.
People just need to give up already. English is here to stay and gets lots of third-party support. In fact, when I travel to other countries, they usually speak English there, too. You can't really survive traveling to other countries if you speak Chinese.
Also, Chinese just overwhelms you with the options. Do you really want to have to decide between Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and all the other local dialects? Sure, English has a few phrases that aren't shared between the British and the Americans, but at least they can understand each other. People don't like choice. They like a single language.
Chinese is just not ready for the desktop, folks. It doesn't matter if 1/6 of the world's population speaks it...
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Originally Posted by majikstreet
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