David Moser Full Episode – Why Chinese is So Damn Hard
Sep 23, 2025•1 hr 39 min
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Episode description
David Moser is a scholar of linguistics at Capital Normal University in Beijing and the author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language.
0:00 - Introduction
5:28 - The Challenge of Translating Gödel, Escher, Bach
21:14 - Cultural and Economic Changes in China in the 1980s
31:37 - Why Chinese is So Damn Hard
38:56 - The Core of Language is not the Writing System
44:04 - The Political Fiction of a Unified Chinese Language
54:20 - Can We Just Get Rid of the Chinese Characters?
1:02:27 - "Character Amnesia" and the Future of Language Input
1:07:25 - Comparing the Educational Systems of China vs. America
1:16:07 - How David Learned Mandarin
1:28:32 - Reflections
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