[MagnumOpus]

> at least 90% of them were immersed in it since birth at home

Bullshit... Maybe at best half of Chinese have Mandarin as a home language - of which half again speak Xinan Mandarin at home which is barely intelligible to a Standard Mandarin (Beifanghua) speaker. So the majority of Chinese learned Mandarin as a second language.

And obviously the writing and ideograms is something that every one of them had to painstakingly memorise over 15 years of schooling...

> Btw. you won't be fluent in Chinese without living in China

I know plenty of people in Singapore and Taiwan who wouldn't even bother to make fun of your ignorance...

[petodo]

Mandarin is language taught in Chinese kindergartens/schools regardless of province, so yes while their parents may speak different dialect at home, they learn it from very early age.

And you know very well I meant that 90% of those Chinese language speakers are ethnic Chinese and not foreigners. So congrats you won Nitpicker of the month prize!

> I know plenty of people in Singapore and Taiwan who wouldn't even bother to make fun of your ignorance...

1. Maybe you should check on official name of "Taiwan". 2. I am talking to non-native Chinese speaker (not you), not sure how does that apply to ethnical Chinese wherever they live, whether it's Singapore, Taiwan or US. Even the person I addressed my message to agrees with me, so congrats once again on completely pointless nitpicking.

[djtango]

> And obviously the writing and ideograms is something that every one of them had to painstakingly memorise over 15 years of schooling...

Yeah I've always wondered what the implications of growing up learning an ideogram based language has on your development.