Reading news from "half Chinese do not speak Mandarin"

Sina's news is really mixed. From the time the Olympic Games broke out the "preemptive Report" of the women's volleyball team in advance, all the fragmented junk news were scolded, but they still don't have to think about it, today, I posted a Report on the homepage titled "the first language usage survey for half of Chinese people do not speak Mandarin:

Only half of Chinese can speak Mandarin, and four adults cannot understand traditional Chinese characters, but 0.92% still insist on traditional Chinese characters. This is the result of the "Chinese language and text usage survey" announced at the Great Hall of the People yesterday.

According to the survey, about 53% of the people in China can communicate in Mandarin, and 8% of them speak Mandarin from birth. The more formal the occasion is, the more frequently the Mandarin is used. The least spoken at home is the most commonly used unit. Currently, dialects are the most important communication language for family members. The main difficulty for most people to learn Mandarin is that "people around them do not speak and there are few opportunities to speak" and "the accent cannot be changed ". In addition, 95.25% of the people in China usually write Simplified characters, and 3.84% of the simplified characters and traditional Chinese characters are used at the same time.

According to reports, the investigation was approved by the State Council and organized by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission, with the assistance of the nine ministries and commissions. It took five years to carry out the investigation nationwide. (Xiao Feng)

Although there are 1.3 billion people in China and most people in rural areas, I don't believe that half of them can speak Mandarin for so many years. Many provinces and cities such as Shuyu are regarded as official zones. It is not a problem to speak Mandarin. This is not a coincidence. I saw another piece of news on shuimu's BBS:

Beijing, December 26 (Xinhua)-the State Language Commission today announced the results of the first Chinese Language Survey. According to the survey, the population of Chinese users who use Mandarin for communication accounts for 53% of the total population.

According to the survey, the proportion of people using Chinese dialects in China is 86%, and that using minority languages is 5%. There is still a gap between urban and rural areas in China when Mandarin is used for communication. The urban population uses 66% of Mandarin and 45% of rural areas.

The survey found that the lower the age, the higher the proportion of Mandarin users. The higher the educational level, the higher the percentage of Mandarin users.

Currently, Chinese languages are used in the format of "coexistence of Mandarin and dialects and separate use of different occasions". The highest proportion of Mandarin used on official occasions is 42%.

At present, the main reasons for influencing people to speak Mandarin are: people around them don't speak and there are few opportunities to speak. They are not easy to change their accents due to the influence of dialects or local languages; they are afraid of other people's jokes when speaking Mandarin.

Note that there is only one word difference between the two news: "yes", but it is a thousand miles away. I believe the latter's report should be more accurate. Although people who are usually used to or in most cases communicate in Mandarin cannot account for 53% of the total population, there are definitely less than 47% people who do not speak Mandarin.

Of course, the shock and click rate of the previous news is obviously much higher, which is also the usual method to attract the attention of news. It seems that journalists should be more cautious and objective when reporting such formal news, and our readers should also be cautious when reading the news, so that they should do their best to believe in books rather than have no books.