[hamihaha]

Tey cannot have a verbal conversation can communicate with written communication.

Well this is a myth...
All Chinese able to read and write know the basic of Mandarin. That's the language used in school.

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by hamihaha

Well this is a myth...
All Chinese able to read and write know the basic of Mandarin. That's the language used in school.

A show rcently aired on National Geographic channel, Kung Fu Monk, detailed the events of Shi Yan Ming defecting to the U.S. in 1992. It was reported that they had to drive him to chinese restaurant in order to find someone that could communicate with him. Even then they could find no one person that spoke Mandarin, only Cantonese so all of the communication had to be written. This is as claimed by Shi Yan Ming himself.

It is my claim again that chinese is not chinese in all cases and I've supported my claim. Cantonese speakers that do not know Mandarin cannot communicate verbally via Mandarin but they can comminicate via written communication. Can you support your claim that ALL chinese know Mandarin? Can you show that my support, that the history National Geographic has reported behind Shi Yan Ming is false or that Shi Yan Ming misrepresented the facts of his experience on the night he defected?

[hamihaha]

Even then they could find no one person that spoke Mandarin, only Cantonese so all of the communication had to be written.

I'm in China now, I only speak mandarin, and even if communication is hard sometime, I've been able to speak to people in every City, from a luggage carrier in Canton (Guangzhou) to a teacher in Shanghai...

Maybe the monk was old, never watched TV, from a small village in the mountain...

[alexander]

lol, National Geographic always has ways of finding people that stand out from the bunch, the one person who got bit by a black mamba and survived, one person who was attacked by a hippo and lived, the one person who does not speak Mandarin in China... Its NGEO that is what they do, and when i made the poll, i did mean Mandarin, i think i even said that before, so please don't get offended, I'm just generalizing (and i did post on other dialects of Chinese) Besides, any dialect spoken in China will do, they are all hard to learn, maybe not equally, but hard nonetheless!

[Jet2]

Originally Posted by alexander

What do you think is the hardest language to learn, spealk (fluently), understand, pronounce and all that fun stuff

Martian language of course. So far I think nobody knows it on Earth...

[alexander]

All right, Mr. Smarty Pants, two can play this one..., so *Pong* back at you


Where's Martia? And how did you confirm that there is macroscopic life capable of vocal or other form of lingual communication on Martia? You could not have meant Mars, because there is no evidence that supports any amount macroscopic life forms able to communicate through a tongue-like organ or even any form of communication with a defined set of rules and patterning language-like verbal structure on Mars...? Remember this is science forum, and you have to present solid evidence if you are asked for it, otherwise your point is void. :P

[Jet2]

Sorry Alexander, but we don't have evidence to support that there is no

amount macroscopic life forms able to communicate through a tongue-like organ or even any form of communication with a defined set of rules and patterning language-like verbal structure on Mars

neither...

[alexander]

oh sure we do, we've had rov's on the surface for years now, and have yet to see any sign of even a microscopic life forms on there. Mars is a planet with a thin atmosphere with an atmospheric pressure less then 1% of that on earth, it is 95% CO2, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, there are only traces of oxygen and water in the atmosphere making it kind of hard for any oxygen-dependent life-form to survive. Most macroscopic life forms to our current knowledge, need oxygen to survive, or at least they need to be able to get oxygen out of other bonds (and CO2 is not an impossibility). it gets so cold in the martian winter that 25-30% of the atmosphere condenses into Dry Ice. Temperature reports anywhere from -140 C in the winter to almost 20 in the summer, it makes it less then comfortable for human-like life forms to survive there, but not completely impossible. Traces of water have been found on the planet, indicating that the majority of the planet was once under water, and more current eruptions of geysers have been confirmed. But the planet will fail to sustain water in a liquid state, this is a problem with life, due to our current understanding of life the planet needs to have a noticeable magnetosphere, and liquid water as well as sun light to sustain life. Mars however is much too cold to sustain water in its liquid state, it's thin atmosphere and lack of magnetoshpere make the effects of solar wind that much more felt (worse). Also mars is volnurable to meteorites, and not to say Earth is not, but due to the thickness of the atmosphere, most meteorites that enter earth's atmosphere burn up, not the case with mars though, there is evidence of comets impacting or at least entering Mars atmosphere in the pretty near past. Traces of methane in the atmosphere show that such an impact did happen, and gathering that methane gets broken up by the UV radiation, it had to be within the past 340 or so years.

So in short, no there is no 100% proof that there is no life on mars, but i can give you a good 99.98% probability that there is no life on Mars capable of lingual communication, at least not on today's Mars, perhaps not the case some few hundreds of thousands of years ago...

[jab2]

I was Stumbling Through Google this morning and happened on the entry of Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant.

He is an important link in understanding savantism as he can describe his mental processes to some extent, something which is not normally possible. One of his achievements was to recite the first 22 514 digits of Pi for a charity event; this is currently the world record.

What does this have to do with this thread on Hypography? Well, he has an exceptional flare for languages and was challenged to learn Islandic in ONE WEEK, a feat he achieved and was conversing on Channel 5, 7 days later. It is mentioned in the Goggle article that Islandic has a reputation as one of the most difficult languages to learn. This statement is backed by 2 references of which one is this thread I'm posting in here.

[Jet2]

Here I would like to site another answer that isn't included in the poll above:

Body Language.