1.
There are four main errors in this video clip. Firstly, the speaker mentions that “Chinese dialects are eight mutually unintelligible regional languages”. This statement is wrong, because in fact there are seven major dialects spoken within China. They are Mandarin,
Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Cantonese, and Hakka.
The second error is that the speaker said that Cantonese is spoken Southern China and
Hong Kong, which is wrong. Cantonese is mainly spoken within Guangdong province,
Guangxi province, Hong Kong, and Macao. The picture shown in the video makes wrong labels of Cantonese. In the picture, the label shows that Cantonese is spoken in
Shanghai and provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, where Wu dialect is spoken. The label also covers Jiangxi province where people speak Gan dialect, and Hunan province where people speak Xiang dialect, and Taiwan where people speak Guoyu, Southern Min dialect, and Hakka.
The third error is that the speaker gives wrong geographic information of Mandarin distribution in China. He says that Mandarin is spoken in northern and southwestern
China. He misses the northwestern part where Mandarin is also spoken.
The fourth error is that the speaker’s statement of “Mandarin has naturally become the national lingua franca, or common language”. Back to 1926, xin guoyin was set as the
“national standard pronunciation” or Guoyu by the Nationalist government. After the foundation of People’s Republic of China (PRC), Guoyu was renamed as Putonghua and was highly promoted. According to Li’s research, about 90% of people can understand
Putonghua by 1986. We can see that Putonghua became the lingua franca because of government policies, not for natural reasons.
2.
I do not agree with the speaker’s statement in this video clip. Southern dialects speakers such as Cantonese speakers can understand standard Chinese writing system. The speaker says that a Cantonese speaker needs to learn Mandarin if he or she wants to understand and read Chinese writing. This is wrong. Both Mandarin and Cantonese use
Chinese writing system. The difference between the two dialects is mainly on their pronunciation. Therefore Cantonese speakers can understand and read Chinese writing like any other dialect speakers, and produce different pronunciations. In the video clip, the speaker mentions that someone expanded the idea of “trans-dialectal” script to include Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese speakers, because these languages have borrowed Chinese characters for their own scripts. This is wrong because Japanese,
Korean, and Vietnamese are different languages from Chinese. They don’t only have different pronunciations, but different grammars as well. On the other hand, Cantonese,

together with other Chinese dialects, share the same grammars and writing system as
Mandarin.
The speaker also gives a false example. In order to make his statement clear, he gives example of English and German. He says that “English and German are close languages sharing the same written alphabet, but speakers of English cannot read German literature”. This is a false example because according to Li, English and German are alphabetic languages but Chinese is a logographic language. There is no comparability between these languages. For example, the English word, “Cat”, in German is “Katze”.
Both English and German speakers can read each other’s word but will not understand the meaning. But in Chinese, the word “猫” can be read and understood by both
Mandarin and Cantonese speakers.
3.
Chinese writing system is logographic because each Chinese character, as its basic graphic unit, owns meanings and sound.
I will explain why Chinese writing system is a “morpheme-syllable” system in two points.
Firstly, each Chinese character has its own sound. According to Chen, the basic graphic unit of scripts in a language is called a grapheme, which means that one Chinese character can be a grapheme because one character is the basic graphic unit of Chinese writing. In English, a grapheme is a Roman letter. Each letter in English represents a phoneme. For example, the letter L represents the phoneme /l/. In Chinese, each grapheme represents a syllable. For example, the grapheme 累 represents the syllable
/lei/. Therefore we can say that in Chinese writing system, one character presents one syllable. Secondly, each Chinese character has its own meaning. For example, in Chinese, the grapheme “学” means “to study”, but in English, a grapheme such as letter “L” means nothing. I will use Japanese as another example because same as Chinese, each
Japanese grapheme also presents one syllable. For example, the grapheme, “れ”, in
Japanese represents the syllable of /re/. But in Japanese, the single grapheme “れ” means nothing. It has to be with other grapheme to form meanings (for example, “かれ” means “he”).
Because Chinese characters, or more specifically, graphemes, represent both syllables and morphemes, Chinese writing system is a “morpheme-syllable” system.