Those re very complicated dictionaries – and as soon as you go phonetic you go into one of the 500 different languages and dialects that use the same script.

Read “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryason. He explains it better than I can.

Dictionary lookups are harder for Chinese and Japanese. Chinese have however had dictionaries for almost 2000 years. see e.g. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/kanjindx.html

That is why the Chinese are learning English.

Lazola

The violence in the townships this week – do we blame the parents?

The other, far more important advantage of the pictoral language, is that it is understood by all 55 Chinese minorities (who possibly speak more than 55 different languages, and even the Han speak several languages).
90% of Chinese are literate. If two Chinese with mutually unintelligible home languages cannot speak the common Mandarin language (possibly some old, rural Chinese) they can communicate via the written Chinese language. So it fosters unity, in a country of diverse people and cultures.
This of course also fostered trade in ancient China (after the language was unified around 200BC) and the spread of ideas.

What a fascinating link about Chinese education. The advantage of a pictoral, non alphabetical language, is that they can read writings which are 2000 years old. No-one who speaks English, or any alphabetical language, can do so. I studied English at university – Old English and Middle English are like studying Latin – and further back is impossible.

Someone Else
If I remember correctly the Great Depression in America was because of 10% unemployment! We should be so lucky.

It’s fine to speak about your own experiences, but it shows the shallowness of your character to repeat the same old thing that is said in the media every single week.
How about you do something different and ask the question: why are all races racist?
Where does it come from?
Why does it exist in nature?
How were certain races also subjected to this before they subjected other races to this (Afrikaners, Jews, Hutus?

How about allowing yourself to be objective as I used to think journalists to be.

Let’s now have an article about why your black brothers are killing and punishing their other black brothers form Zim and Malawi.

Or are people getting picked on and embarassed at schools and universities more serious.

Let’s have it

Good points my friend.

Thank you for reading the info.

I am not justifying deliberately keeping people in poverty, that is clearly not just.

People were also held back in the Uk, it was called the class system, but it was not along racial lines, and it probably was not as calculated and comprehensive. In those days England had 2 changing rooms for the cricket team, and the working class players were not allowed in the same dressing room as the upper class ones.

However, what difference does it make how your ancestors were put/kept in poverty? That is my point. The fundamentals for getting out of poverty are the same.

My point still stands. You have to take responsibility for your own destiny, you cannot sit and demand that everything be made right for you on account of your past, and Africans are not the only ones who have suffered. Most everyone else has already managed to save themselves. Most African countries are still less developed than at the end of colonialism, and still have their begging bowls out, sometimes 30, 40 or even 50 years later. Apparently we still owe them.

That is there fault, not ‘ours’, and they need to take responsibility for us. In 100 years are our great grand children still going to be arguing about what black people are owed because of apartheid?

Allowing this victim mentality rather than promoting self development, and the ability to ‘save oneself’ is incredibly destructive.

Nothing can lesson the injustices of the past, but we can create a brighter future, and taking control of ones own destiny is not a weakness, it is a strength.

“Education (the gradual process of acquiring knowledge) was not a white man’s phenomenon or invention, but western education was. And in a world that is so westernized, one needs western education…”

You are partly correct – agrarian and/or pre industrial societies including in Southern Africa had ways of teaching/educating youth, and this informal education goes back, for some societies, thousands of years.

Western education got ideas from other (non Western) areas too. And the subjects taught came from around the world – algebra and chemistry come from the Arabs in the middle ages.

India had a “university” 2400 years ago with some 10 000 attended by students from India as well as students from various countries in Europe, the Middle East, Persia and China.

First Universities in the world: If one refers to an institution of higher education and research which issues academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master and doctorate) like in the modern sense of the word, then the medieval Madrasahs known as Jami’ah (”university” in Arabic) founded in the 9th century would be the first examples of such an institution.”
(source: wikipedia)

Western Education depends upon examinations. Both the examination system and the reason for such a system (to allow meritocracy) are from the Chinese. Some have claimed that the examination system+meritocracy constitutes the 5th gift of the Chinese to the world (the other 4 great inventions/”gifts” being paper, printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass).
The Chinese Imperial examination system evolved over hundreds of years, and the system used during the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618) remained unchanged until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
Each candidate was issued with an examination number (to eliminate favouritism, or class/ethnic group discrminination), and to avoid recognising candidates by their handwriting, each candidate’s exam scripts were rewritten by a scribe. See http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/English/e2008/e200802/p54.htm for more details (it also has a picture of an ancient miniature “crib note” book used by a cheat, with Chinese characters one eighth of the size of a grain of rice!)

China also had outstanding books for educating primary school children since ancient times, especially ones to teach morals and ethics. Three of the most famous primers date to the 6th, 7th and 13th centuries, and were used unchanged until the latter half of the 19th century, when modern education systems were put in place.

The most famous of this trio, San Zi Jing, was written by Wang Yinglin, the great 13th-century Confucian scholar and educator, for children in his clan. It is composed of three-character rhyming stanzas, four stanzas forming one sentence. San Zi Jing’s 1,415 characters capture succinctly the essence of the Chinese value system and code of ethics. This masterpiece has always been generally regarded as a humanities encyclopedia for children, a systematic pedagogical aide for teachers and an indispensable reader for parents.
It was introduced to Japan and Korea centuries ago, translated into Russian in 1727 and later became available in English and French. UNESCO listed the book in its series on moral education for children in the autumn of 1990. It has since been promoted and published throughout the world.
http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/English/e2007/e200712/p64.htm