Valid rant about the mistaken idea that Chinese is somehow behind other (Western) languages. I got affected by a lot of these memes before I moved here.
Even in the age of China’s social media boom, with billion-dollar valuations for Beijing-based IT start-ups, prejudice against the Chinese language is alive and well.
Source: Chinese Is Not a Backward Language
How curious. I know it is a very difficult language but it never occurred to me to think of it as ‘backward’. This urge to rank *everything* is just foolishness.
In some ways, Chinese is inherently a richer language, because the form of its characters may indicate meaning directly through its semblance to objects or even abstract ideas, and through the combination of stems (often carrying meaning) and changeable adjuncts (often carrying sound information) it is a more efficient language, capable of expressing a corresponding thought in a Western language with fewer bytes.