How do you look up words in a dictionary, and how do you know how to pronounce a new symbol you've never seen before.

The chinese dictionary is organized by stroke counts and the order those "strokes" are written.

When you learn the language you are shown how to write a word, and the order of the strokes is important. Once you understand these "rules" when you see an unknown character you know both the stroke count and order and you can find it in the dictionary.

Plus, there isn't exactly a "Chinese" language, there are different dialects all over the country, and people from different regions can't exactly communicate with one another in their native tongues.

What makes you inclined to post such a statement?

There is a "Chinese" language Ptnghuà (/, literally "common speech") in the People's Republic of China,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Yes, there are dialects (and yes, they are incompatible) but you are required to speak the "common speech" as well.

China did push the language across the entire land mass, back when Qin Shi Huang (260–210 BC) unified it.

"This newly standardized script was then made official throughout all the conquered regions, thus doing away with all the regional scripts to form one language, one communication system for all of China"

If you want a "classic" example of why PinYin doesnt work...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

This is readable using proper chinese characters, but utter nonsense in pinyin.

Computer in french is "Calculateur" btw.

Since this is about "Quebec" you can answer your question fairly easily.
Go to Bestbuy and choose "Canadian - French".

The first page is a laptop sale and they list it as "ordinateur" so clearly you are incorrect.

Pinyin tries to avoid that, but if I type "xi", which character am I actually writing?

That is why when you type in "xi" the software you are using presents you with a number of "chinese characters", you then type in a number corresponding to the character you need.

Try opening a U.S. bank account tied to a U.S. address as somebody who is not a U.S. resident. Good luck.

I just did it a few weeks ago. Was in and out with my account in about 15 minutes.

It is hard to get an account with "Bank of America" and the like but try another bank.

Your post seems to disagree with the world fact book which has China's Literacy rate at 95% (this is consistent with multiple sources as well)
Perhaps you should contact them and have the rates lowered to 70% as you posted?

Providing a link to a list of languages spoken in China does nothing.
I think everyone agrees English is pretty common in the US, but i can post a link showing languages spoken in the US and it includes others besides English..

Fact is there are dialects in China, and they are not compatible with one another but most speak mandarin and a dialect (some more then one dialect).

Your statement that the Chinese don't attend high school is laughable. They are education obsessed as they believe it is a way out of poverty...

If you were in a country surrounded by non-english speaking people and you tried to learn english your spoken english would probably be bad as well. You have no one to practice with and no one to correct your mistakes.

Exactly.

The written characters are complex but the language itself is very simple. To reduce the character complexity a lot of "short-cuts" were taken as you outline (no plural, no tense....).

This "simplification" does come back to bit them when you get into very specific industries (try reading a Chinese computer manual, or Chinese medical texts).

+1 to you.

Anyone who says English is spoken in China clearly has never been there.

I own a home in a Chinese city (population ~5 million) and when i go there i am an anomaly and alone, since i cant speak Mandarin and pretty much no one speaks English. (We have a family friend who does, but he only likes to spend time with us because he can learn english off us).

Once i went swimming and someone came up to me and "claimed" to speak English, but it sounded like she had a mouth full of marbles and I could not understand her. Turns out she was an English Major at university. One can only wonder how bad her teachers english was if that was the result of her education. She wanted to learn from me as she knows she cant speak well.

Outside "ex-pat" cities (Shanghai, etc) you might be able to find the odd person, but you might also be surprised to see how poorly they speak it.

Plus English has tendency to incorporate features/words from other languages into it resulting in additional complexities (you can sort of tell the words are not "English")

"vis-a-vis" being a good example.

In English, what is a "vis"?

When viewed over millenia, all languages are fads. I

Well put..

Everyone seems to believe English is dominant because the they are looking at the "period of English dominance (the last few hundred years). If you rewind history back further you will find this is not true.

Rewind history far enough and you will find the "dominant" language at that time is now extinct.

"
But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort.
"

This is relevant because?

History has shown that just because you got there "first" doesn't mean you are going to "win".
I don't see many people writing in hieroglyphics, do you?

English is also only "deeply entrenched" in English speaking countries, and those where the economy is based on tourism.

Look at the Beijing Olympics for an example of how "entrenched" English is in China. I think everyone remembers the pictures of "500 server error" restaurant.

"Mandarin" didnt become the "default" language of China overnight. It came via conquests of smaller states and then converting them to mandarin. This is why China's official language is mandarin, but you often find people who speak another dialect as well.

Case in point, my wife is a native mandarin speaker. She comes from a province that only speaks mandarin. Her cousin speaks mandarin and fuzhou, when he speaks mandarin she understands what he says and this is not true when he speaks fuzhou.

Whatever the "default" language of the future is, it will be done over time and by having a lot of people speaking two (or more) languages.

Try this.

Go to say a gas station, convenience store, etc and offer to pay by "bitcoin" and see what they do (laugh or cry).

I will do the same with "cash" which MUST be accepted at those stores and walk away with my product.
One says "legal tender" and therefore is considered a legally mandated form of payment, the other is not.

Then care to explain why it is not worth zero?

Dont forget to go to work tomorrow so you can get paid in yuor "worthless" currency... Later you an use it to get a coffee and groceries..

"Cash" is backed by the government that printed it.

Bitcoin is backed by?