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This is actually not wrong. China is already very important, and its influence is going to grow. Speaking and understanding Chinese well is a competitive advant
by luplex 6y ago
This is actually not wrong. China is already very important, and its influence is going to grow. Speaking and understanding Chinese well is a competitive advantage.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoI agree. I was applying logic consistently. With 918 million native speakers, Mandarin is the most natively spoken language in the world by at least 2x the runner up.
- gurkendoktor 6y agoI've learned Chinese for fun. It's great that I can now read a few more Go/C++ READMEs on GitHub, but other than that, I can't imagine what advantage it has? Maybe there'd be one if I came from a poorer manufacturing country? even China commentators in Western media are often completely clueless about the language. If these jobs don't require Chinese fluency, then which ones do? And even then, it'd be much easier to employ the many, many native speakers who emigrate from the PRC.
- em-bee 6y agoas more people learn chinese, the available labor pool grows and these jobs may well require chinese skills in the future
- FooBarWidget 6y agoActually, many Chinese people mock western commentators for how bad their takes are. Those commentators often have a superficial or highly western-centric understanding of things in China, resulting in wrong or incomplete interpretations. Lack of Chinese language understanding is a contributing factor. That doesn't stop those commentators from getting lucrative jobs. Apparently, western audiences don't care to verify whether what commentators say are accurate, or audiences just don't care whether it's accurate. There are no consequences to even years of inaccurate commenting. So I guess if you have no professional pride, then yes you can get away with not learning Chinese.