9 ms·

In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1]

In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1]. China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2]. It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework. In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R... [2] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

koboll 8y ago
This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures. Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.
- bartread 8y ago
  > Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian. Quite. As I have observed before, The Guardian is all too often The Daily Mail for leftie intellectuals. These days, even as something of a leftie intellectual, I find myself often unable to tolerate it at all. And in general I have less and less patience with overly polemic or political points of view - it honestly just gets boring and doesn't make the world any better for anyone.
craftyguy 8y ago
It's mildly interesting how you (and the article) use 'Lingua franca' (Latin) and not it's English meaning of 'common language'. Edit: s/Italian/Latin/
- dogprez 8y ago
  'Lingua franca' is a Latin borrow phrase that literally mean "Frankish Tongue". It has a specific meaning and nuance in English, it doesn't mean Italian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    I never said it meant 'Italian', only that I (wrongly) thought it was Italian..
- danieltillett 8y ago
  The English would actually be 'common speech' - the word language is Latin.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    But 'common' is derived from Latin, too! :P
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      Yes true (although it is from Old French) - let's go for 'shared speech' instead :)
      - dorchadas 8y ago
        And, I'm sure people have heard of it before, there's a semi-conlang that proposes to remove all Romance borrowings from English called Anglish [1]. There's also "Uncleftish Beholding" which tries to explain basic atomic theory using only native words [2]. [1] http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf [2]https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...
- pertymcpert 8y ago
Symmetry 8y ago
Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese. That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.
- pertymcpert 8y ago
  There are some things easier in Mandarin, but I still think it's far more difficult than English. The number of homophones is much higher than English.
  - nneonneo 8y ago
    IMHO spoken Chinese is not so bad. The grammar is simpler than English (no verb conjugation is a big one), and with the exception of tones, the phonetic inventory is fairly straightforward to learn. Although individual characters are frequently homophonic, treating groups of them as words (as you do in English) reduces the number of homophones significantly. If you're only going to learn Mandarin without the written language, it's very much doable, and possibly even easy depending on how quickly you pick up on the tones. Written Chinese is, of course, a totally different matter.
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    On the bright side (and I am saying this genuinely) if you enjoy wordplay, puns, and double-meanings, Mandarin is hilariously awesome at it, even compared to English, which is no slouch itself.
WalterBright 8y ago
I once visited a customer in Finland. In the office, they spoke english around me. Curious, I asked if they were just being polite by speaking english instead of Finnish when I was present. They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.
toufka 8y ago
Both Chinese and English are interesting and relatively unique in how lossy they can be and still convey information. And I think that's a significant benefit in being a lingua franca. And chinese can be learned - see any trader in a nation on the Chinese border. Tonality isn't that bad, actually - especially when the language isn't unintelligible when the tones are wrong - same as how English isn't unintelligable when vowels are wrong (unlike Japanese for example). Written Chinese is, however, a big stumbling block to its universality. Though, given how rarely I even write English without a computer aiding me, that distinction is becoming less meaningful. I've come to see most everyone knows three languages: that of their parents, that of their state, and English. The advantages of having those three be the same are significant.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  You're calling English and Chinese 'lossy' in terms of their (comparative) lack of morphology? (Natural language is pretty 'lossy' overall.)
  - zerb 8y ago
    They were saying each is tolerant of loss.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      I don't know what that means.
      - zerb 8y ago
        The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example. I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
devit 8y ago
Yeah, it feels like gradually transitioning to English as the primary language would be the one of the best ways to improve the economy in most EU countries (as well as non-EU countries to some extent) since it would dramatically boost skilled immigration, and also make their citizens more educated and make communication with foreigner easier.
- bdamm 8y ago
  Boosting immigration isn't necessarily a desired outcome. Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated? Compared to, say, German or Chinese? I agree with the benefit of English as the contemporary lingua franca, but these two reasons given don't make sense to me as a driver for "transitioning to English".
  - zokier 8y ago
    > Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated? Because there is huge amount of content in English compared to any other language, starting from the majority of academic papers.
- briandear 8y ago
  The French would lose their mind if they read your comment. It seems like France has a very strong linguistic inferiority complex compared to all other EU countries. English proficiency in France is among the lowest in the EU. I blame mandatory dubbing. I found it very difficult to find English movies in English, while in countries where subtitling is standard, English proficiency is higher.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    I've noticed this in Germany as well. Most people over the age of 40-50 have quite poor English skills, at least outside of the largest cities. Even young people in their 20s are markedly worse at English compared to young people in Denmark or Sweden, where dubbing is only used for cartoons and movies aimed at kids. Maybe dubbing is the reason, or maybe it's simply due to living in a country of ~85 million people with one language. When you have so much content and research in your native language, you can get quite far without having to learn any foreign languages.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English While I agree it's unlikely that Chinese will usurp English's place as the global lingua franca (and the orthographic system is actually the main issue, but people could adopt Pinyin instead), it did function in this sort of role once in East Asia (look at the history of Japan, Korea, for instance).
- elgenie 8y ago
  It seems like it would be more accurate to say that the orthographic system was the lingua franca. The characters were used to communicate across vast distances between people that would not be able to talk at all to one another if sitting in the same room with their hands tied.
  - jonathanyc 8y ago
    This is true these days but incredibly ahistorical; not sure where you got this impression.
627467 8y ago
EU has/is failing? I guess - in a glass-half-empty way - like everyone around the world is dying. EU deliberately promotes multilingualism and, I'd argue, successfully[1]. English is (deservingly and also ironically) the most common language spoken in EU. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/26/europeans-multiple-languages-uk-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/26/europe...
- iosDrone 8y ago
  No, the EU is failing. Merkel has spearheaded the importation of millions of people who (along with their descendants) will NEVER thrive in the information economy, and who will accelerate their fiscal demise as their native population ages.
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    I mean that’s pretty much straight-up, no-ambiguity racism my friend. Kindly take it elsewhere.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      While i disagree with OP, I fail to see any mention of race or inferiority/superiority of any culture in his or her comment. Stating that social integration will fail is definitly not racism. It's forecast, and it has in the past. It's important to take into account integration if you want the new comers to be happy as well.
autocorr 8y ago
> It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework. The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer. I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.
- eftychis 8y ago
  I find your analysis and argument to the point!
- j9461701 8y ago
  It's not directly pertinent, but the slow triumph of Greek culture over Roman culture after the conquest of Greece is one of the most fascinating parts of ancient history. The Roman elites not only spoke Greek, they sent their kids to learn in Greek schools, they regarded Greece as the center of drama, philosophy, medicine..it's really quite amazing how deeply enamored with Greece the upper echelons of Roman society became. And not just as a passing fad, but consistently over a period of centuries. Latin was the language of the day-to-day humdrum masses, as you say it's what a patrician would use to order a soldier or guard or lawyer around before going back to discussing fine cheeses or what have you in Greek. >Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror, and introduced her arts into rude Latium. Thus flowed off the rough Saturnian numbers, and delicacy expelled the rank venom: but for a long time there remained, and at this day remain traces of rusticity. Book of the Epistles, Horace
  - deleted 8y ago
matz1 8y ago
>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2]. Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn. Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?
- nneonneo 8y ago
  In China, everyone takes compulsory English courses from a fairly young age. Due to the importance of it as a school subject, preschool children are regularly placed into English classes to help them get an early leg up on the language. In the US of A and most other English speaking countries, nobody bothers learning anything but English; the minority of people who do learn a second language tend to go for something relatively easy like French or Spanish. While this says nothing about the inherent difficulty of learning these languages, it does speak to the differing language learning priorities at a national level.
- chillacy 8y ago
  > I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn. I've always wanted to know if this is true or not, but I've never found a good answer. I know the FSI rates Chinese at roughly 2000 hours of instruction to their definition of fluency (compared to 500 for other european languages like french or german), but I haven't found a similar comparison for chinese speakers. Link: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
  - Zarel 8y ago
    The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, because of how kanji/hanzi work. http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160603-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160... (English is, in turn, harder than languages such as Spanish because of its spelling weirdnesses.) The early weirdnesses stop mattering pretty quickly. Stuff like irregular verbs, you just get used to. The things that make languages hard are things that still trip you up years into learning the language. In English, that'd be spelling. We have spelling bees! For a lot of languages, the idea of a spelling bee is unthinkable, because spelling is just not a problem. But in English, we have spellcheck on computers, we have native speakers constantly correcting each others' spelling. In Chinese, that'd be reading/writing characters. At least in English, if you forget how to spell a word, you can just spell it out phonetically. In Chinese, there are thousands of characters, and if you forget how to write one, you're screwed. In a famous essay, someone forgot how to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and asked his friends at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, and none of his friends could remember, either (we're talking native Chinese speakers in the PhD program for Chinese). http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
enriquto 8y ago
> China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese? On the other hand, I have known lots of Spanish and Chinese people who are utterly incapable of saying just a single English sentence which is somewhat comprehensible.
- ThinkingGuy 8y ago
  >Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese? I think they are referring to the Chinese writing system being very loosely coupled to the pronunciation (in contrast to languages like Spanish or Korean).
  - wallflower 8y ago
    Yes, I was referring to the writing system. It appears that the correct term to be used is "logosyllabic", not "symbolic". > Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

koboll 8y ago

This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures. Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.

bartread 8y ago
> Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian. Quite. As I have observed before, The Guardian is all too often The Daily Mail for leftie intellectuals. These days, even as something of a leftie intellectual, I find myself often unable to tolerate it at all. And in general I have less and less patience with overly polemic or political points of view - it honestly just gets boring and doesn't make the world any better for anyone.

craftyguy 8y ago

It's mildly interesting how you (and the article) use 'Lingua franca' (Latin) and not it's English meaning of 'common language'. Edit: s/Italian/Latin/

dogprez 8y ago
'Lingua franca' is a Latin borrow phrase that literally mean "Frankish Tongue". It has a specific meaning and nuance in English, it doesn't mean Italian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
- craftyguy 8y ago
  I never said it meant 'Italian', only that I (wrongly) thought it was Italian..
danieltillett 8y ago
The English would actually be 'common speech' - the word language is Latin.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  But 'common' is derived from Latin, too! :P
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    Yes true (although it is from Old French) - let's go for 'shared speech' instead :)
    - dorchadas 8y ago
      And, I'm sure people have heard of it before, there's a semi-conlang that proposes to remove all Romance borrowings from English called Anglish [1]. There's also "Uncleftish Beholding" which tries to explain basic atomic theory using only native words [2]. [1] http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf [2]https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...
pertymcpert 8y ago

Symmetry 8y ago

Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese. That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.

pertymcpert 8y ago
There are some things easier in Mandarin, but I still think it's far more difficult than English. The number of homophones is much higher than English.
- nneonneo 8y ago
  IMHO spoken Chinese is not so bad. The grammar is simpler than English (no verb conjugation is a big one), and with the exception of tones, the phonetic inventory is fairly straightforward to learn. Although individual characters are frequently homophonic, treating groups of them as words (as you do in English) reduces the number of homophones significantly. If you're only going to learn Mandarin without the written language, it's very much doable, and possibly even easy depending on how quickly you pick up on the tones. Written Chinese is, of course, a totally different matter.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  On the bright side (and I am saying this genuinely) if you enjoy wordplay, puns, and double-meanings, Mandarin is hilariously awesome at it, even compared to English, which is no slouch itself.

WalterBright 8y ago

I once visited a customer in Finland. In the office, they spoke english around me. Curious, I asked if they were just being polite by speaking english instead of Finnish when I was present. They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.

toufka 8y ago

Both Chinese and English are interesting and relatively unique in how lossy they can be and still convey information. And I think that's a significant benefit in being a lingua franca. And chinese can be learned - see any trader in a nation on the Chinese border. Tonality isn't that bad, actually - especially when the language isn't unintelligible when the tones are wrong - same as how English isn't unintelligable when vowels are wrong (unlike Japanese for example). Written Chinese is, however, a big stumbling block to its universality. Though, given how rarely I even write English without a computer aiding me, that distinction is becoming less meaningful. I've come to see most everyone knows three languages: that of their parents, that of their state, and English. The advantages of having those three be the same are significant.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
You're calling English and Chinese 'lossy' in terms of their (comparative) lack of morphology? (Natural language is pretty 'lossy' overall.)
- zerb 8y ago
  They were saying each is tolerant of loss.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    I don't know what that means.
    - zerb 8y ago
      The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example. I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.

devit 8y ago

Yeah, it feels like gradually transitioning to English as the primary language would be the one of the best ways to improve the economy in most EU countries (as well as non-EU countries to some extent) since it would dramatically boost skilled immigration, and also make their citizens more educated and make communication with foreigner easier.

bdamm 8y ago
Boosting immigration isn't necessarily a desired outcome. Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated? Compared to, say, German or Chinese? I agree with the benefit of English as the contemporary lingua franca, but these two reasons given don't make sense to me as a driver for "transitioning to English".
- zokier 8y ago
  > Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated? Because there is huge amount of content in English compared to any other language, starting from the majority of academic papers.
briandear 8y ago
The French would lose their mind if they read your comment. It seems like France has a very strong linguistic inferiority complex compared to all other EU countries. English proficiency in France is among the lowest in the EU. I blame mandatory dubbing. I found it very difficult to find English movies in English, while in countries where subtitling is standard, English proficiency is higher.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  I've noticed this in Germany as well. Most people over the age of 40-50 have quite poor English skills, at least outside of the largest cities. Even young people in their 20s are markedly worse at English compared to young people in Denmark or Sweden, where dubbing is only used for cartoons and movies aimed at kids. Maybe dubbing is the reason, or maybe it's simply due to living in a country of ~85 million people with one language. When you have so much content and research in your native language, you can get quite far without having to learn any foreign languages.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

> there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English While I agree it's unlikely that Chinese will usurp English's place as the global lingua franca (and the orthographic system is actually the main issue, but people could adopt Pinyin instead), it did function in this sort of role once in East Asia (look at the history of Japan, Korea, for instance).

elgenie 8y ago
It seems like it would be more accurate to say that the orthographic system was the lingua franca. The characters were used to communicate across vast distances between people that would not be able to talk at all to one another if sitting in the same room with their hands tied.
- jonathanyc 8y ago
  This is true these days but incredibly ahistorical; not sure where you got this impression.

627467 8y ago

EU has/is failing? I guess - in a glass-half-empty way - like everyone around the world is dying. EU deliberately promotes multilingualism and, I'd argue, successfully[1]. English is (deservingly and also ironically) the most common language spoken in EU. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/26/europeans-multiple-languages-uk-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/26/europe...

iosDrone 8y ago
No, the EU is failing. Merkel has spearheaded the importation of millions of people who (along with their descendants) will NEVER thrive in the information economy, and who will accelerate their fiscal demise as their native population ages.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  I mean that’s pretty much straight-up, no-ambiguity racism my friend. Kindly take it elsewhere.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    While i disagree with OP, I fail to see any mention of race or inferiority/superiority of any culture in his or her comment. Stating that social integration will fail is definitly not racism. It's forecast, and it has in the past. It's important to take into account integration if you want the new comers to be happy as well.

autocorr 8y ago

> It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework. The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer. I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.

eftychis 8y ago
I find your analysis and argument to the point!
j9461701 8y ago
It's not directly pertinent, but the slow triumph of Greek culture over Roman culture after the conquest of Greece is one of the most fascinating parts of ancient history. The Roman elites not only spoke Greek, they sent their kids to learn in Greek schools, they regarded Greece as the center of drama, philosophy, medicine..it's really quite amazing how deeply enamored with Greece the upper echelons of Roman society became. And not just as a passing fad, but consistently over a period of centuries. Latin was the language of the day-to-day humdrum masses, as you say it's what a patrician would use to order a soldier or guard or lawyer around before going back to discussing fine cheeses or what have you in Greek. >Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror, and introduced her arts into rude Latium. Thus flowed off the rough Saturnian numbers, and delicacy expelled the rank venom: but for a long time there remained, and at this day remain traces of rusticity. Book of the Epistles, Horace
- deleted 8y ago

matz1 8y ago

>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2]. Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn. Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?

nneonneo 8y ago
In China, everyone takes compulsory English courses from a fairly young age. Due to the importance of it as a school subject, preschool children are regularly placed into English classes to help them get an early leg up on the language. In the US of A and most other English speaking countries, nobody bothers learning anything but English; the minority of people who do learn a second language tend to go for something relatively easy like French or Spanish. While this says nothing about the inherent difficulty of learning these languages, it does speak to the differing language learning priorities at a national level.
chillacy 8y ago
> I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn. I've always wanted to know if this is true or not, but I've never found a good answer. I know the FSI rates Chinese at roughly 2000 hours of instruction to their definition of fluency (compared to 500 for other european languages like french or german), but I haven't found a similar comparison for chinese speakers. Link: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
- Zarel 8y ago
  The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, because of how kanji/hanzi work. http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160603-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160... (English is, in turn, harder than languages such as Spanish because of its spelling weirdnesses.) The early weirdnesses stop mattering pretty quickly. Stuff like irregular verbs, you just get used to. The things that make languages hard are things that still trip you up years into learning the language. In English, that'd be spelling. We have spelling bees! For a lot of languages, the idea of a spelling bee is unthinkable, because spelling is just not a problem. But in English, we have spellcheck on computers, we have native speakers constantly correcting each others' spelling. In Chinese, that'd be reading/writing characters. At least in English, if you forget how to spell a word, you can just spell it out phonetically. In Chinese, there are thousands of characters, and if you forget how to write one, you're screwed. In a famous essay, someone forgot how to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and asked his friends at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, and none of his friends could remember, either (we're talking native Chinese speakers in the PhD program for Chinese). http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

enriquto 8y ago

> China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese? On the other hand, I have known lots of Spanish and Chinese people who are utterly incapable of saying just a single English sentence which is somewhat comprehensible.

ThinkingGuy 8y ago
>Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese? I think they are referring to the Chinese writing system being very loosely coupled to the pronunciation (in contrast to languages like Spanish or Korean).
- wallflower 8y ago
  Yes, I was referring to the writing system. It appears that the correct term to be used is "logosyllabic", not "symbolic". > Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese