China has a "Mandarin problem"

Incorrect: China isn’t looking to be the hegemony. It has demonstrated that it wants peace and doesn’t plan to police the world at the cost of its own citizens. Go travel and learn how the world really is before making half baked theories.

Chinese was a lingua franca in East and Southeast Asia for over a thousand years before the century of humiliation btw

Mandarin & Chinese culture feeling different & hard to understand makes their nation & society hard to infiltrate. It’s a strength. It makes it very hard for their culture & language to be stripped away by foreign forces. Unlike Iran where every other word is replaced by English

The Mandarin problem also applies to popular music. Standard Mandarin has only about 400 distinct syllables without tones, and roughly 1,200 to 1,300 when incorporating its four lexical tones and neutral tone. Only one tone is downwards in pitch, making it extremely hard even for native speakers to write good song lyrics in certain genres, where you typically want the melody go down in pitch in the chorus lines. One way to solve this is to use English in the chorus, but the most common solution is to write ballads as it doesn't matter that much in that genre. And indeed ballads are overwhelmingly popular in Chinese music, but those songs often lack the global appeal. They are not like K-Pop or J-pop which are listened also in the West, despite the obvious and heavy language barrier. PS. My Chinese sucks, but I am pushing myself to limits by writing song lyrics in lots of different languages. I think I have nailed to write couple of good fast rock/pop songs and rap / hip hop in Mandarin Chinese. It is far easier to achieve the same in lyrics in English, Finnish, Swedish or whatever European language comes to mind.

Sounds like Westerners just have a problem with curiosity and learning something new. Note that new means different from what you already know.

China is not trying to be the “world’s uncontested hegemony”.

This person sounds very stupid, arrogant yet mysteriously confident about what he’s bullshitting about. The Barbarians commenting on the most civilized nation and language system in human history, amusing.

Universality is a disadvantage. If I wanted to dominate the world I wouldn't want the subjects to understand my language

It happens the other way around. First you get hegemony then people learn the language. English or french didn't become world-wide languages because they were easy - otherwise africans, arabics and chinese wouldn't speak them too. Yet, CN, TW, speak ENG...

Assuming China wants hegemony is the problem

Persian is hard too. Does Iran have a Persian problem? This is a bizarre framing lots of foreigners pick up mandarins and even dialects very quickly. Why frame anything a bit challenging as a problem? Is maths a problem for kids? I fail to understand the actual issue here.

If we refer back to Chinese ideology, they don't want to be World Hegemon either. They don't want to exert their hegemony outside Sinosphere. What they want is to expand their influence into becoming Center of Civilization just as their name "Zhongguo" states.

I don't think they want to be "the worlds uncontested hegomon" Just the east asian one.

What made you think China "wants to become the world's uncontested hegemon"??? China does not have a mandarin problem. China is doing just fine with mandarin. If mandarin is a problem for you or anyone else, get over it or learn it. It's YOUR/ THEIR problem, not China's problem.

A frog in the well. 井底之蛙 😂🤣

This whole video makes no sense. First off, China doesn’t want to seek to replace the US to become the hegemon, certainly not the one the America was and is today, so there is no such thing as “a Mandarin problem”. Secondly all rankings on the internet are subjective and opinion-driven, of course, no language is innately easy or hard for others to learn universally. I do agree with you that if you speak English, Dutch or German might be easier for you and the Spaniards might find French and Italian easier; Mandarin being a non-western, non-Semitic language, of course you will find it intimidating with all the characters and tones, especially at the beginning. But for certain people like the Japanese and Koreans whose language have a ton of Chinese loan words and have a basic understanding of the Chinese characters, it could be relatively easier for them. But even for them, it is challenging because of Mandarin being in an entirely different language than the one both Japanese and Korean belong to. At the end of the day, just like all other videos out there ranking languages by ease, this video is just your opinion, to which you are entitled but that’s it.

lol it’s already happening. In Africa they’ve managed to convince schools to start teaching Mandarin from middle school

In china mandarin is the northern dialect which is called mandarin or 普通话 the official language in china And in the southern part they do speak cantonese or 广东话 Im not really sure but most of the chinese in the u.s are the cantonese ones mandarin way easier than cantonese on other hand there is many other dialects especially in the south of china

Historically most Chinese Americans spoke Cantonese but now most new arrivals speak Mandarin

Yeah might be but historically speaking In my mind mostly are cantonese

中文比英语简洁，而且仅看文字就能立即明白语义，不用在脑子里进行一个发音的过程，我可以以扫读跳读的方式直接看明白整段文字的意思。在AI时代我经常用中文，这样在同样的屏幕版面我能看到更多llm输出的信息，而且还能更快理解。虽然和外国人交流不方便，但可能和llm交流会更加方便。

Characters are shared / very similar to Japanese. Not true of the pronunciation but the characters it’s true. People will learn mandarin for business purposes. Look at all the African migrants in Guangzhou. Just as Chinese diaspora for centuries learned other languages.

Chinese has a lot of cognate words with japanese, Korean, and vietnamese, ao those speakers will find it somewhat intuitive. And if you know japanese you get the same effect as an english speaker in spain. Cam deduce the meaning of signs. Probably same for koreans to some extent.

I don't think China wants every random Iranian and Indian to learn their language. They also don't want to become a hegemon and spread the light of their civilization or the word of their religion.

翻译应用程序的功能越来越强大。我明白你的意思，但我认为，借助科技手段实现语言间的相互理解的日子指日可待。

Value of a language is measured in the volume, quality and uniqueness of information it hosts. Chinese is exceptional in this regard.

Maybe just shut up and learn Mandarin like many other people do? Or don’t, it’s up to you. This seems like a you problem, not a China problem. You’re talking like a retarded privileged baby.

Don't worry, many Chinese speak barbarian languages, you can still communicate with them.

Why is it a problem? You sound like u wanna infiltrate Chinese society

Chinese can’t even speak mandarin properly in large parts of China

Right. Culture is a huge factor in global relevance. Language is just one of the many reasons that Chinese society is closed off. Immigration, investment, language, currency are all closed off. Now they're facing slow demographic decline. They're hosed.

I read a sci-fi book the other day in which the lingua franca of the future is a Mandarin-English pidgin Not too far fetched, Singlish is already a good case study

What is this even suppose to mean? No one else speaks Hebrew either yet that hasn't stopped the Yahudi from turning powerful nations into their lapdog.

If you go to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, you'll see at the airport that all signs are in Arabic, English, and Mandarin.

Stupid take, it is always a supply and demand equation. If you want thing from me and that is the only way you can achieve it, then follow my way . There are plenty don't see this as an issue, just you...

1、中国不需要语言霸权和任何霸权。 2、中国经济的崛起，对于学习中文，会有越来越多的附带效益。 3、中国人不想，也不需要，通过让中文成为其他民族的“第二语言”来证明自己的软实力，只要能沟通就行了。 4、“普通话”只是汉语的一种。 所以，中国不存在语言传播的焦虑，没有“普通话”问题这个东西。