California Church shooting: Chinese Immigrant shoots Taiwanese folks

That was strange on the lang part, but Taiwanese speak a slightly different dialect than mainland Chinese. Their writing was also slightly different. At least that's what I remember. Maybe it's similar to a southern vs northern accent here @rocketsjudoka?

Current good economic ties are why I think China isn't just going Putin-craze anytime soon.

 

While nearly all Taiwanese and Mainlanders speak Mandarin prior to 1949 most Taiwanese spoke Hokkein and Fujian dialect. Also during the long occupation by Japan many Taiwanese also spoke Japanese. There are still some tensions over this but I don't think this is much of an issue now.

One other thing about Chinese is that there are two written forms of the language still in use. There is a traditional / complex form (Fanti) and a modern / simplified form (Jianti). In the PRC and in Singapore they use the Jianti form while in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau they use the Fanti. In HK and Macau the Fanti form is slowly being phased out but in Taiwan they continue to use those characters as a political point. I know some Taiwanese even here in the US that refuse to use or have their children taught Jianti characters and many Chinese language schools run by Taiwanese will only teach the Fanti characters.

 

The Mandarin spoken in Taiwan has a Southern accent and there is even regional Taiwan accents. This is very noticeable compared to a Beijing accent which is the official PRC accent. This would be comparable in English to the difference from someone who grew up in AL to someone who grew up in NY.

A personal story. I used to date a girl who was white and grew up in suburban Minnesota. She studied Chinese in college and even lived in Beijing for a few years. When we would speak in Chinese she would often try to correct me on my pronunciation. It would be like someone who studied English as a second language telling someone from TX not to say "Y'all".

 

To get back on topic, yes I can accept that Chou was nursing a longstanding grievance against Taiwanese people and he saw himself as a mainlander. I don't think this is a serious problem especially among Chinese living overseas. Given tensions over Taiwan, HK and Xi's regime getting more authoritarian I would expect it more likely between people who have grown up in the PRC and other Chinese than with people who grew up in Taiwan.

 

to this Cantonese speaker, there is no difference.

FWIW, IIRC,

when the Rox were interviewing translators for YaoMing; Yao selected Colin Pine, who learned his Mandarin in Taiwan

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the users of traditional form can understand the simplified form, and vise versa, no?

it is analogous to American folks who use lol, iirc, yolo, fwiw, etc. in their writing and those who don't

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china can be many things, stupid it is not.
economics will run its course; the inter-dependency is just too strong

 

That's the room of a dogecoin fanatic.

 

Again, if I remember this correctly … spent some time decade ago learning some Chinese…

The strokes are different (less strokes or simplified) so I think no. I would guess that those that know the traditional form likely understand the simplified form but not the other way around.