Late last month, French YouTuber “Ku’s dream” (酷的夢) began releasing his miniseries “Chinese Monster” (中文怪物), where 100 foreign nationals in Taiwan compete to find out who among them has the best Mandarin. With a budget of more than NT$5 million (US$162,888) and enormous popularity, commentators have hit out at Taiwan’s major TV channels for failing to invest in similarly high-quality, educational content.
Taiwanese TV channels facing criticism is nothing new, but it is rare for people to ask why commercial channels will not produce a variety show centered on traditional Chinese. Their audiences are Taiwanese who have recited Bopomofo since they were young children and had traditional characters drilled into them long ago. No TV channel boss would risk their audience or their ratings with a revival of something similar to The Daily Characters (每日一字), a Taiwanese educational TV program from the 1980s and ’90s.
Far less widespread than simplified Chinese, there are fewer than 50 million people worldwide who use traditional Chinese characters. The Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) system in particular is specific to Taiwan, and much harder to learn than the Hanyu pinyin (漢語拼音), the romanized system used in China. The first episode of “Chinese Monster,” which revolves around tones, quickly separates the pack of contestants by ability, and no doubt embarrasses a few Taiwanese audience members in the process. The final installment of the series tests listening comprehension and logic. Because traditional Chinese has numerous homophones and synonyms, not to mention the four-character idioms known as chengyu (成語), puns, Internet slang, direct translations, abbreviations and the Taiwanese Mandarin flair, the challenge is significant.
In street interviews, it is not uncommon for people to struggle to differentiate between a subject and a verb, or to speak in torrents of adjectives and onomatopoeia rather than in real sentences and with proper wording. At university, students might have no trouble posting their stories every day, but producing a coherent essay or report is another story. Faced with work riddled with mistakes, lecturers are, to their dismay, realizing that students are simply finding traditional Chinese too hard.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has normalized the outsourcing of thinking, and ChatGPT has already outstripped most people’s analytical skills. In the future, there might be less need for people to think deeply, which would have a throttling effect on people’s language skills.
TV news channels have been criticized as dumbed-down forms of media, yet Taiwanese love to use Facebook and Threads, each subject to algorithmic bias and manipulation — does this make ours a dumbed-down society?
Summed up neatly by Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s quote “the medium is the message,” the form that media take is often more important than their content. The kind of media a person consumes changes not only how they see the world, but how they think. This is why traditional Chinese proficiency is declining among Taiwanese, and, at this stage, transnational Internet giants seem to be the prime culprits.
The Taiwan Broadcasting System and TaiwanPlus already spend billions of taxpayer dollars. They should invest in producing Chinese Monster on a large scale, and consider translating A Wonderful Word (一字千金), the Taiwanese game show with language and Chinese character challenges, into foreign languages to promote traditional Chinese to the world. Why there has been a lack of motion to do so thus far is a question of politics.
Jet Yang is editor-in-chief of Knowing Media Group.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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