It probably wont work anyhow.

What you will find out is that the credit cards have coded the country of issue into the number.
I once had XM radio US refuse to accept my Canadian mastercard when i was living in the US (obviously an attempt to enforce the higher prices in Canada policy).
The thing is, since i used a US address how did XM know it was a Canadian card?

Try using one and see if it works out.

All the bilingual people i klnow (Chinese, spanish, french) have told me they can tell someone used "google translate" as the resulting "translation" sucks.

English -> Chinese is especially bad.

If you want to see some funny stuff, look at the translations of the Chinese tattoos some people have.

They went to google translate, picked some characters they liked and then had them tatoo'd. Unfortunately they seldom mean what they think they do.

"Chinese is hard, but you can't tell me that saying hello in English is meaningfully different than saying hello in Chinese."

Yes, i can tell you that is how it is.

No matter what "tone" i use to say "hello" it is still "hello". You may be able to tell that i am angry, etc based on the tone but the meaning is the same.

In Chinese, the tone is critical and if it changes, the meaning of what was said changes (drastically).

Case in point, the Chinese word "ma".
It has 4 meanings depending on the tone.

They are :
Mother
Hemp
Horse
Scold

So if you miss the tone, instead of taking about your mother you could be talking about scolding someone (or one of the other choices).

There are "cultural" reasons for this which you may not grasp.

In China, speaking English implies you are "rich" as you have the time and money to learn it.

The nation is concerned with "social status" and speaking English is a sure way to boost your status.

Kids in Hong Kong speak it because of the British influence while kids in China are just eager to soak it up and hopefully move to "gold mountain".

Try using a non-ex-pat city internal to the nation and see if the same holds true?

The city i frequently visit in China doesn't speak English (unless you go to the "tourist" sections) and the main shopping mall is actually Japanese (Niko niko do)
http://www.chinatravel.com/gui...

My wife is also Chinese, and i would give a "second opinion" on what he they wrote (it is accurate).

~2,000 characters and you are considered illiterate
~10,000 characters and you are considered reasonably well educated.

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"?