Complaints to BBC News online

I think it should be understood that this is not the view of the BBC, the people of China and not the view of the ruling Communist Party. What has been expressed is quite extreme - which in part is testament to the fact that extremism is not only present in the Islamic world, where it is also a minority view - but that is another matter entirely!

I am surprised this was published online, the staff at bbcchinese.com will have the same editorial policies and regulations as the rest of BBC News, and you would not expect to find this sort of material elsewhere. But what I found more alarming was a comment at the end of the third post, which is in english and does not include the asterixes shown

Just had a look at that Chinese-language page, and goodness me, how you even begin to learn and comprehend a language like that, Lord alone knows! Is learning Chinese as hard as it looks?

Character-based languages (like Chinese, Japanese and Korean, for instance) are based on a similar phonics system to the one we use. Each character, though, represents a consonant-vowel pair. So, pairs like "ro", "ku", "ma", "ji" and the like have a character. Characters can also represent a basic concept, like "female" or "cold" or "red". Consequently, there are a great many characters (something like 3000, if I recall). By combining characters, they form words and sentences, just like with Roman characters.

As far as learning, language is best learned at an early age, as many people know. I imagine that languages that use non-Roman characters (Anything from Chinese to Russian to Hebrew) are harder -- but not impossible -- to learn as someone who was introduced first to a Roman language (English, French, German, Spanish, etc).

http://homepage.mac.com/robertpalmer/tvforum/sig.gif

I think I'd definitely fail any Chinese language exam....... 3000 characters.... brain is boggling.....

Actually there are over 40,000 characters, although the average educated Chinese only knows about 6000.

The main difficulty with learning the language is that is is tonal. A word spoken with a rising inflection means something completely different to the same word spoken with a falling inflection. And then there are rising-failing inflections and failing-rising inflections. Not easy for the western ear to pick up.

It is however the most common language on the planet.

Tsk ... I was only off by a factor of 13 ... give a guy a break!

http://homepage.mac.com/robertpalmer/tvforum/sig.gif

I would like to question some people:

will you tolerate if the BBC post a comment like applauding mass murders Nazis or the violent KKK, although it doesn't represent BBC's views?

The principle remains constant. Freedom of speech does not extend only as far as is palletable, or as far as we think it should go. Of course if somebody applauded the annihilation of all Jews on the UK Talking Point for example many (myself included) would be appalled. And there would be many more like you who wrote to the BBC condemning it for publishing the opinion; arguably, a much greater fuss would be made over it here, largely down to the likes of the Daily Mail smelling blood and taking advantage of the opportunity to launch yet another 'boycott the BBC' campaign.

But when you enter a debate based around a hot topic, such as the KKK or Nazis, you must surely be aware that not everybody will be as shocked and outraged as the vast majority of people will be. However difficult it will be for you to comprehend, there will always be people who hold contradictory opinions to yours, and even very extreme opinions such as the one you isolated in your complaint. But it is simply wrong to silence these voices - however distasteful they may be to the majority, however much offence they may cause - because that is the very nature of debate and discussion; without the equilibrium provided by the alternative view to the status quo, the 'debate' becomes little more than propaganda, a sermon with lots of nodding heads.

The idea of debate is that everybody proffers their viewpoints, discusses and considers them, and finally evaluates where they now stand having taken into consideration all of the points made. Arguably, in the debate in question, few minds would be changed, but that is not the point - the point is to allow all voices to be heard. When we start silencing voices because we don't like what they have to say, we may as well pack it all in, and join the Communist Party.