Mandarin with a German accent

Christian Lindner opened his speech in Chinese at the 70th Federal Party Congress of the FDP:

None of the native speakers of Chinese to whom I showed this could understand any of it, not one word (so they said).  I understood the middle part (from 在 to 要) upon first hearing.

Here's what Lindner said:

Shèhuì yǔ jīngjì zài bùduàn biànhuà, wǒmen yào jìxù qiánjìn.

"Society and economy are constantly changing. We should continue to move ahead."

In case you're curious, the huge Chinese characters in the background are:

jīngjì zhèngcè

经济政策

"economic policy"

It's interesting to compare what Christian Lindner says here with what Bill Gates says in the video embedded in this post:

"Bill Gates speaks Mandarin" (5/3/17)

And compare the experiments of Li-ching Chang described in this paragraph of the latter post:

What all of this demonstrates is the value of Romanization in teaching people how to speak Mandarin (or other Sinitic topolects).  My wife, who was an ardent advocate of Romanization, used to write out short passages of text in Hanyu Pinyin (Mandarin) on a piece of paper and then walk up to people (utter strangers) on the street and ask them to read off what they saw.  Of course, there would be much giggling and coaxing, but most people would relent and give it a try.  When they were finished, Li-ching would exclaim triumphantly, "See, you can read Mandarin and be understood, and you don't need Chinese characters to do it!"  She performed this experiment many times in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago, and other cities.  Doing so was one of the greatest pleasures of her life.

Only with widespread use of Romanization is there a chance for Mandarin to become a world language.  Even President Xi relies on Romanization to read the characters!

Readings

"Ruby phonetic annotation for Cantonese" (5/6/19)

"Phonetic annotations as a welcome aid for learning how to read and write Sinographs" (4/26/19) — with dozens of additional posts on the value of phonetic annotation listed in the "Readings" section at the end

"Cantonese as a Second Language" (4/22/19) — with more than two dozen additional items on the importance of Cantonese language listed in the "Readings" and "Books" sections at the end

"More misreadings by Xi Jinping" (5/2/19) — with many other relevant posts listed in the "Readings"

[Thanks to Xinchang Li]