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Is there any danger to English as a universal language for the internet, business, education, and research? Will we need to learn Chinese in a decade or two?
by amichail 16y ago
Is there any danger to English as a universal language for the internet, business, education, and research?
Will we need to learn Chinese in a decade or two?
- patio11 16y agoThere are much more compelling reasons for Chinese people to learn English than there are for foreigners to learn Chinese, though it certainly won't hurt your job prospects. For one, if you learn to speak Chinese you get improved job prospects vis-a-vis two countries. (Yeah, I went there, PRC.) A Chinese person who learns English gets instant access to the US, Anglosphere, Japan (well, cough, theoretically speaking), Western Europe, etc etc. (Same for Japanese, too. I get "You should have studied Chinese!" all the time, as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US.)
- pvg 16y agoNot that I think we'll be all be buckling down to master Mandarin in our lifetimes but the lingua franca does sometimes change as the expression itself suggests. as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US By that measure, we should all study Canadian and Mexican as well! http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/current/balance.html http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/current/balance....
- byw 16y agoIsn't Spanish the most learned foreign language by far in the States? http://www.vistawide.com/languages/us_languages.htm http://www.vistawide.com/languages/us_languages.htm
- patio11 16y agoYes. Not a wonderful choice for career opportunities unless you enjoy competing with millions of native bilinguals, by the way.
- davidw 16y agoTrue, but one point in its favor is that you could use it with real people, which is always something of an incentive. Studying, say, German or Italian in the US pretty much means that you'll have to get on a plane if you want to practice it in anything but an 'artificial' environment. That said, Italian is pretty much one of the more useless languages in the world for anything outside of Italy, but I'm still quite happy with my choice:-)
- eru 16y agoCompeting and co-operating.
- pvg 16y agoBoth Canadian and Mexican are inexplicably missing from your reference.
- assemble 16y agoI hope you're joking. Canada speaks English and French; Mexico speaks Spanish. Sure, they're different dialects than the European version, but they're all lumped together. It's kind of how people say think Chinese is one language, but in reality it's not just different dialects--it actually is multiple languages.
- pvg 16y agoSorry, Canadian isn't my first language.
- byw 16y agoI think the classification of local Chinese tongues is a grey area. They are all based on the same writing system, but the variation in pronunciation and informal vocabularies make them unintelligible from each other. They are more like the difference between, say, American and Jamaican English, than between two languages like English and French. If you are learning Chinese as a foreign language, it almost certainly means you are learning Standard Mandarin (Beijingese?), since it's the lingua franca of the Chinese world, unless it specifically mentions Cantonese or Min Nan, etc. I speak Mandarin and some Cantonese, Shaanxi, and Sichuan dialect, btw.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- boyter 16y agoNo. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system. Consequently they are all learning English so they can work with foreign companies. You need to keep in mind, China has few natural resources so they are reliant on everyone else. Because of this they will be forced to learn English. Chinese will still be the main language of China, but it won't become the world language the way English has.
- DanielN 16y agoMore to the point, mandarine will not become the language of international business for the same reason French WAS the language of international business up to the early 1900s; the french were involved with business everywhere even though the british and germans had most of the consumer population. Furthermore, English education is already an integrated part of the chinese (and asian) education systems.
- fgf 16y agoI didn't know this, do you have a source? (because I want to read more about it not because I doubt it)
- yuan 16y agoNo. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system. As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I think you are full of shit. No native Chinese speaker I know thinks English is easier to learn than Chinese. And I prefer the Chinese writing system myself if I have a choice. It's true that many people are learning English, because today Chinese are producing and selling. When the day comes when Chinese become buyers and the rest of the world are trying to get sales from Chinese, they will start learning Chinese.
- varjag 16y agoI seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.
- philwelch 16y agoMost of us realize that network effects are generally very powerful. The English language is probably one of the single most entrenched network effects in the world. Americans know it, Europeans know it, the entire former British empire knows it, and anyone on their way up--China and Japan included--has to learn it to make their way up. How is the rest of the world going to learn Chinese? I don't expect them to be as enthusiastic about imperialism as the British were, and even if they were, it would take a century for it to matter.
- ww520 16y agoIt would be interesting to create a Chinese-based programming language. Its concise wording would help the expressive department.
- bfung 16y agoYes it would be interesting. I would not want to be the person tasked with writing the parser. ;)
- varjag 16y agoThere's APL already.
- ximeng 16y agoChinese Python http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english... Keyword translations http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/doc/doc.html http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/doc/doc.html
- bbuffone 16y agoNot unless they someone invents a way that can fit all 2000+ chinese characters easily qwerty keyboard.
- eru 16y agoChinese people do write SMS on their mobile phones?