From: bill.sloman@ieee.org   
      
   On 30/11/2025 12:47 pm, Don Y wrote:   
   > On 11/29/2025 6:11 AM, albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl wrote:   
   >> Compare to Chinese education. The untalented are brutally weeded out,   
   >> before they enter the university. OTOH a talent in rural areas seldomly   
   >> gets unnoticed.   
   >   
   > I think this goes to the cultural aspect.   
   >   
   > I recall a power outage during my first year of school.  I took   
   > the opportunity to wander across camps with an oversized balloon   
   > full of N2O thinking it the perfect excuse for a party -- to share   
   > with friends who lived on the other side of the main campus.   
   >   
   > Halfway there, I passed through one of the main lobbies and   
   > found the adjoining stairwells lined with oriental students   
   > sitting under emergency lights working on homework!  Really?   
   > How long do you think the outage will be that you need to   
   > hoard every possible "study opportunity"?   
   >   
   > Do their governments/sponsors hold them to some particular   
   > standard for the "privilege" of studying abroad?  Or, is this   
   > just a normal behavior, regardless of circumstance?   
      
   Asian students do work harder.   
      
   I suspect that this is embedded in the culture, and probably comes from   
   the defects of ideographic writing systems.   
      
   Alphabetic writing systems are simply more user friendly - they mesh   
   better with the spoken language, are easier to learn and easier to retain.   
      
   Learning to write chinese characters takes a long time, and retaining   
   them in memory seems to call for daily practice.   
      
   The chinese civil service was originally only drawn from families who   
   had enough money to let their kids devote their time to learning to read   
   and write, and to let the adults devote an hour so a day to reading to   
   retain the skill.   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese   
      
   Korean character look as weird to westerners as Chinese characters, but   
   they are actually phonetic and specific structures within the characters   
   explicitly link to specific speech sounds   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul   
      
   It wasn't invented until 1446AD and Indian phonetician contributed to   
   it's construction. It took a couple of hundred years to get popular.   
      
   Computers are now making life easier for chinese readers, but it's still   
   a vile system.   
      
   --   
   Bill Sloman, Sydney   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)