8 ms·

Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

58 points by NN88 3y ago

version_five 3y ago
It's sad, I think people wanting to learn a language represents some kind of hope, and 10 years ago we were overall bullish on increased international collaboration. Now things have become way more insular, a future of international collaboration between superpowers seems way less likely. It's really sad.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kragen 3y ago
  10 years ago was still the sole-superpower epoch
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  We are absolutely moving towards a more fractured world with regional centers of power. Frankly it's hard to imagine what would re-consolidate power. Probably something terrible. Last time that was the widespread destruction of the industrialized world (save the USA) and a long, protracted nuclear standoff that the United States won through economic diplomacy and security guarantees.
- soligern 3y ago
  I would be interested in seeing the numbers around Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Spanish etc. in my opinion, this may specifically be an avoid China phenomenon.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    It's certainly more of a China focused phenomenon than say, Hindi and Spanish at least. With Spanish learning rate would be high because it's just in general a very popular second language to learn, especially for Americans, regardless of any anticipated economic benefit. With Hindi, English is also commonly spoken in India and a large portion of official business is done in English due to it being an option external from the many different languages spoken in the country. So there wouldn't be much benefit to learning Hindi specifically unless as a hobby. Japan and Korea might be seeing an uptick in foreigners learning the language due to their cultural exports, which are increasingly popular in the West.
NN88 3y ago
Soft power matters. "Cool" matters. China will always struggle against freer and more open societies that bring people into their culture, music, art, and other forms of expression. The comparison to what Japan and South Korea have done should be a wake up call for these places. Even Russia doesn't have the cultural cachet it did during the Cold War.
- version_five 3y ago
  I don't think framing it as unilaterally China's fault is helpful. Obviously they have their issues, though it seems like ~40 years of increasing trade with them has improved their standard of living and backed them off of a lot of ideology, even of they still have a long way to go. The issue now is the regression back to isolationism - according to the article it's over the past 10 years that interest has eroded.
  - code_biologist 3y ago
    Would it be helpful to frame it as unilaterally the fault of Xi Jinping and the rise of wolf warrior diplomacy?
  - laserdancepony 3y ago
    Of course it is their fault. They remain in a communist dictatorship with no regard for human rights whatsoever.
- jmoak3 3y ago
  Yup. From a youth spent watching anime I can read katakana and hiragana, despite Japan’s economic and demographic woes their culture is very impactful
- dehrmann 3y ago
  TFA backs this up with Korean becoming much more popular.
- ninjin 3y ago
  Something which I think I in my "western ignorance" underestimated is the massive amount of soft power Japan wields through its economy and culture in East/South Asia. Possibly because Japanese culture mainly reached geeks such as myself in Europe. All the way down to Oceania and even the most nationalistic PRC national, every single one of them that I know have experienced Japanese manga and anime since childhood in the same way that Disney had a reach across "The West". Heck, look at today's "geek culture" in the PRC and tell me that you do not see the obvious parallels to Japan.
diego_moita 3y ago
Easy: 10 years ago Western companies though they could and should make businesses in China. Today, even many Chinese companies believe that China is not a good place for making business (e.g: AliBaba, Ever Grande, Country Garden, Tencent, etc). Slightly off-topic: about 15 years ago Golman Sachs would say that the BRICS were the next countries to become rich. Guess what... Brazil and South Africa reverted back to its historical kleptocracy, Russia to autocracy, China to communism and India stuck in its economic protectionism.
- rcme 3y ago
  China did become rich though.
  - MekaiGS 3y ago
    China is not rich but a middle income country. China's GDP per capita is lower than Bulgaria and Romania. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
    - rcme 3y ago
      All that means is that Chinese people, individually and on average, did not be come rich. China, as a country, did become rich.
  - diego_moita 3y ago
    No, it didn't. Look at the concept of "Middle Income Trap"[0]. It describes China very well. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    Parts of China did, parts did not. The income inequality is really quite striking for what's notionally a communist worker's paradise. A few years back I was in Xining, an obscure third-tier provincial capital. The main shopping street could have been Tokyo.or Seoul, full of neon, fancy brands and expensive restaurants. But you walk one single block out and you're in a street market with flies buzzing around sheep heads and slabs of meat hanging off hooks.
fn-mote 3y ago
I can't understand this impulse. It seems blindingly clear to me that the international influence of China is rising and will continue to rise, and the need for Mandarin-English bilingual work will continue to skyrocket. If you do not believe that China is going to be an even more massive world power in the coming decades, then I guess I understand the drop in interest. I just cannot fathom how that could happen, though. The article puts some import on "soft power"... but is the economic rise of China really going to be soft power? The manufacturing capacity in China is amazing. We're not talking about exporting cultural goods. It's real goods and real power. The money quote for me: > The market may have also got more competitive. Bilingual Chinese graduates now fill many of the jobs that require Mandarin. In terms of language skills, they are often more qualified than their Western counterparts. All Chinese children start learning English by age eight, some even earlier. University-entrance exams in China require a high level of proficiency. So basically, the US students are being out-competed by the Chinese students. Learning Mandarin is not incentivized in the US. I do not look forward to a time when all the important jobs require Mandarin proficiency, and none of the US graduates have the skills to occupy those positions. I look forward to deeper comments or at least substantiated refutations.
- maybelsyrup 3y ago
  What’s to understand? This is The Economist.
- rcme 3y ago
  “All the important jobs” seriously?
- zem 3y ago
  this, from tfa, seems like perfectly adequate reasoning to me: 8<-------------------------------------------- Students in the West may have also soured on the idea of doing business with China. Mandarin teachers point to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 as a seminal moment, when excitement for learning the language took off. Since then, though, China has grown more oppressive under Xi Jinping. Its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been widely reported. In most rich countries negative views of China are at or near all-time highs. 8<-------------------------------------------- i know that if i were a student in an american university right now, the thought of doing business in or with china would not cross my mind - kind of similar to how, when i was growing up in the 80s, there was very good money indians could make working in saudi arabia, but neither me nor any of my friends would have been remotely interested in going there.
jamesaurichs 3y ago
There is 0 reason to learn mandarin if you're doing it for travel/business reasons In Taiwan street signs do mostly have English translations. A lot of citizens speak English, especially night market vendors. You'll also have a lot of native English speakers in Taipei due to expatriation from US and Canada. In Singapore signs officially are in English. And it's one of the four official languages, which means most people speaks English. In Malaysia people usually speak at least 4 languages. Because it was ruled by Britain before, people speak English fairly well. Lastly, in China, well, nobody is traveling there now. International travel is down 97% this year, even after reopening. And if you're doing business there, well, there's no point understanding the contract in Mandarin because most likely it won't be enforced, and will favor local business anyways by the courts. What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound. So even if your read the English part of the sign you cannot understand it.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  Do you have an explanation for China’s low tourism? Is it just latent fears of COVID?
  - jamesaurichs 3y ago
    Here are some conjectures: 1.) There is a very high dislike of China across the world. Large majorities in most of the 19 countries surveyed have negative views of China https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/29/negative-views-of-china-tied-to-critical-views-of-its-policies-on-human-rights/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/29/negative-views... 2.) No business need to travel there. Foreign investment is down 90% this year. Literally no US/europe presence in the trade fairs in China the summer. 3.) Flights are super expensive, because of low demand, upwards of $5k-10k. travel out of China is down hugely due to the economy, you can search on youTube for videos from Shanghai airport where the airport is devoid of travelers, and filled with empty shops. 4.) It is very hard for travelers to navigate through China. No English translations in street signs. One needs Alipay to pay for anything in China, which is complicated to setup. Ethnocentrism from rising nationalism means there could be racism/violence against travelers.
nonethewiser 3y ago
It's just not that useful. It's only useful in China and foreigners can't really conduct business there. It's basically only useful if you move to China which is just a handful of people and shrinking at this point.
- shaneoh 3y ago
  Can't the same argument be made of almost any language unless you live in a bilingual neighborhood?
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    No because English is the de-facto language for trade.
    - shaneoh 3y ago
      Fair point, but I meant for English-native speakers in this context.
  - rcme 3y ago
    Yes, which is why most languages are only spoken by native speaker.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    "unless you live in a bilingual neighborhood" is key here. Many countries across the world teach English as a second language and in western trade it's the lingua franca. Mandarin is spoken in various countries, but many of the Mandarin-speaking countries also have English as a common second language. Going by [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), you can see how if you want to expand your reach, some languages make more sense to learn than others.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    Functionally bilingual neighborhoods are, in fact, quite common.
ftyers 3y ago
https://archive.ph/LX0HP https://archive.ph/LX0HP
MaxwellKahn 3y ago
As an American born person with some Chinese heritage, it's interesting to see this trend play out in myself alongside wider society. When I was growing up, my parents and relatives would constantly try to convince me to learn my ethnic language, half to know my roots and half to catch the "China train". In university, I took it upon myself to take Mandarin courses for several years, but only got to middling competency. Now, as the years go on, I find that once innate desire to "one day learn Mandarin" gradually fade away. In terms of usefulness: - it seems less and less likely that I'll ever live in China for a significant length of time due to all the common reasons others in the thread are mentioning - I have many international Chinese friends, but our friendships are based on cultural affinity rather than linguistic affinity, so they're perfectly fine switching to English whenever we need to talk about something complex. It's interesting, but many of my American peers of Chinese heritage are actually learning Korean or Japanese, which would have been extremely rare 10 years ago.
- talloaktrees 3y ago
  I'm not ethnically Chinese but I studied Mandarin in college in the early 2000s then moved to Taiwan for almost a decade. I don't regret doing it, but it didn't provide me any sort of business or career advantage like everyone thought it would in the early 2000s
  - porknubbins 3y ago
    People never looked at the need for foreign language with enough granularity. For example there was never and real large demand for Westerners to communicate with mainland China. We send specs, they manufacture them. China doesn’t really do FDI here. Now there was a time language skills were a major plus in law or finance in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure about that anymore. The new US TSMC plants might have some needs but probably won’t have trouble filling them.
Proven 3y ago
[dead]
Bjemslev 3y ago
I am going to climb onto the reasonal branch of "mfs still got multiple concentration camps in 2023" as a intuition for peeps not learning their language
- tenpies 3y ago
  Doesn't the US either? Or at least they were frequently called that and compared with Nazi concentration camps when Trump was president: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-concentration-camps-migrants-detention/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-co... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac... Of course now that Biden took over, continued their operation, and quickly allowed them to overfill to the point that there's now a full blown border crisis, no one in mainstream media would dare call them that.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
Archived at https://archive.is/LX0HP https://archive.is/LX0HP
marc_abonce 3y ago
The article mentions that "the study of modern languages is falling across the board in many rich countries" so this phenomenon is not exclusive to Chinese. I think it's part of a larger trend of people choosing not to learn any language besides English because they think that everything else is "useless". The article also mentions Korean as an exception, but it only shows the increase as a percentage. I wonder how many people are actually learning Korean though, because otherwise this could be like that xkcd joke about the fastest growing religion.
nmfisher 3y ago
I can probably provide some perspective on this given I: - studied Chinese at university in both Australia and China - worked there for about 5 years - have a mobile app for learning Chinese [0] I think the biggest difference between when I started learning (20+ years ago) and now is that China is no longer seen as a positive, growing force in the world economy. I started learning because I thought it would be useful for business in future, and I was probably right - up until around 2012. Since then, the country became increasingly hostile to foreigners, foreign companies decided to cut their losses and pull out, the internet ecosystem has become worse and worse and visas are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. China doesn't have much in the way of soft power (unlike, say, Korea), so it's just not a top destination for anyone coming from overseas. That being said, there's also been a huge outflow of Mandarin speakers to other countries (like Australia), and Mandarin is becoming the default second language at junior/primary schools. Mandarin is always going to be relevant (I mean, there's more than a billion speakers - it's not like they're going to vanish overnight). But I do agree that the language is becoming less "useful", because there are fewer and fewer prospects for working in China. Even international tourism is becoming less and leas attractive. [0] https://polyvox.app https://polyvox.app
MJsGlove 3y ago
China has peaked. Anyone studying mandarin will be like those studying Japanese at the peak of Japan Inc. in the 80s. Globalization was a great time for some while it lasted though, hope some of you of age have made money during the zenith.
- majikaja 3y ago
  Japanese is still a great language for business. Obviously if one learns it then joins an industry that doesn't benefit from it that's one's own fault.
pphysch 3y ago
Surely just a coincidence that Saudi Arabia announced this week that every secondary school will have Mandarin lessons. The Economist being The Economist: owned by old rich European families in a rapidly changing world.
someguy7250 3y ago
That's good. And I am biased. I personally liked American and Japanese culture better anyways. Growing up in China, everyone I knew keeps telling me our culture is fake, reconstructed from a pile of burning books and detached from both history and modern life, at least ever since Cultural Revolution. But frankly every country is having a cultural crisis today. I just want to preserve some things more. And yes I know that is biased.

58 points by NN88 3y ago

It's sad, I think people wanting to learn a language represents some kind of hope, and 10 years ago we were overall bullish on increased international collaboration. Now things have become way more insular, a future of international collaboration between superpowers seems way less likely. It's really sad.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kragen 3y ago
10 years ago was still the sole-superpower epoch
nonethewiser 3y ago
We are absolutely moving towards a more fractured world with regional centers of power. Frankly it's hard to imagine what would re-consolidate power. Probably something terrible. Last time that was the widespread destruction of the industrialized world (save the USA) and a long, protracted nuclear standoff that the United States won through economic diplomacy and security guarantees.
soligern 3y ago
I would be interested in seeing the numbers around Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Spanish etc. in my opinion, this may specifically be an avoid China phenomenon.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  It's certainly more of a China focused phenomenon than say, Hindi and Spanish at least. With Spanish learning rate would be high because it's just in general a very popular second language to learn, especially for Americans, regardless of any anticipated economic benefit. With Hindi, English is also commonly spoken in India and a large portion of official business is done in English due to it being an option external from the many different languages spoken in the country. So there wouldn't be much benefit to learning Hindi specifically unless as a hobby. Japan and Korea might be seeing an uptick in foreigners learning the language due to their cultural exports, which are increasingly popular in the West.

NN88 3y ago

Soft power matters. "Cool" matters. China will always struggle against freer and more open societies that bring people into their culture, music, art, and other forms of expression. The comparison to what Japan and South Korea have done should be a wake up call for these places. Even Russia doesn't have the cultural cachet it did during the Cold War.

version_five 3y ago
I don't think framing it as unilaterally China's fault is helpful. Obviously they have their issues, though it seems like ~40 years of increasing trade with them has improved their standard of living and backed them off of a lot of ideology, even of they still have a long way to go. The issue now is the regression back to isolationism - according to the article it's over the past 10 years that interest has eroded.
- code_biologist 3y ago
  Would it be helpful to frame it as unilaterally the fault of Xi Jinping and the rise of wolf warrior diplomacy?
- laserdancepony 3y ago
  Of course it is their fault. They remain in a communist dictatorship with no regard for human rights whatsoever.
jmoak3 3y ago
Yup. From a youth spent watching anime I can read katakana and hiragana, despite Japan’s economic and demographic woes their culture is very impactful
dehrmann 3y ago
TFA backs this up with Korean becoming much more popular.
ninjin 3y ago
Something which I think I in my "western ignorance" underestimated is the massive amount of soft power Japan wields through its economy and culture in East/South Asia. Possibly because Japanese culture mainly reached geeks such as myself in Europe. All the way down to Oceania and even the most nationalistic PRC national, every single one of them that I know have experienced Japanese manga and anime since childhood in the same way that Disney had a reach across "The West". Heck, look at today's "geek culture" in the PRC and tell me that you do not see the obvious parallels to Japan.

diego_moita 3y ago

Easy: 10 years ago Western companies though they could and should make businesses in China. Today, even many Chinese companies believe that China is not a good place for making business (e.g: AliBaba, Ever Grande, Country Garden, Tencent, etc). Slightly off-topic: about 15 years ago Golman Sachs would say that the BRICS were the next countries to become rich. Guess what... Brazil and South Africa reverted back to its historical kleptocracy, Russia to autocracy, China to communism and India stuck in its economic protectionism.

rcme 3y ago
China did become rich though.
- MekaiGS 3y ago
  China is not rich but a middle income country. China's GDP per capita is lower than Bulgaria and Romania. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
  - rcme 3y ago
    All that means is that Chinese people, individually and on average, did not be come rich. China, as a country, did become rich.
- diego_moita 3y ago
  No, it didn't. Look at the concept of "Middle Income Trap"[0]. It describes China very well. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Parts of China did, parts did not. The income inequality is really quite striking for what's notionally a communist worker's paradise. A few years back I was in Xining, an obscure third-tier provincial capital. The main shopping street could have been Tokyo.or Seoul, full of neon, fancy brands and expensive restaurants. But you walk one single block out and you're in a street market with flies buzzing around sheep heads and slabs of meat hanging off hooks.

fn-mote 3y ago

I can't understand this impulse. It seems blindingly clear to me that the international influence of China is rising and will continue to rise, and the need for Mandarin-English bilingual work will continue to skyrocket. If you do not believe that China is going to be an even more massive world power in the coming decades, then I guess I understand the drop in interest. I just cannot fathom how that could happen, though. The article puts some import on "soft power"... but is the economic rise of China really going to be soft power? The manufacturing capacity in China is amazing. We're not talking about exporting cultural goods. It's real goods and real power. The money quote for me: > The market may have also got more competitive. Bilingual Chinese graduates now fill many of the jobs that require Mandarin. In terms of language skills, they are often more qualified than their Western counterparts. All Chinese children start learning English by age eight, some even earlier. University-entrance exams in China require a high level of proficiency. So basically, the US students are being out-competed by the Chinese students. Learning Mandarin is not incentivized in the US. I do not look forward to a time when all the important jobs require Mandarin proficiency, and none of the US graduates have the skills to occupy those positions. I look forward to deeper comments or at least substantiated refutations.

maybelsyrup 3y ago
What’s to understand? This is The Economist.
rcme 3y ago
“All the important jobs” seriously?
zem 3y ago
this, from tfa, seems like perfectly adequate reasoning to me: 8<-------------------------------------------- Students in the West may have also soured on the idea of doing business with China. Mandarin teachers point to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 as a seminal moment, when excitement for learning the language took off. Since then, though, China has grown more oppressive under Xi Jinping. Its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been widely reported. In most rich countries negative views of China are at or near all-time highs. 8<-------------------------------------------- i know that if i were a student in an american university right now, the thought of doing business in or with china would not cross my mind - kind of similar to how, when i was growing up in the 80s, there was very good money indians could make working in saudi arabia, but neither me nor any of my friends would have been remotely interested in going there.

jamesaurichs 3y ago

There is 0 reason to learn mandarin if you're doing it for travel/business reasons In Taiwan street signs do mostly have English translations. A lot of citizens speak English, especially night market vendors. You'll also have a lot of native English speakers in Taipei due to expatriation from US and Canada. In Singapore signs officially are in English. And it's one of the four official languages, which means most people speaks English. In Malaysia people usually speak at least 4 languages. Because it was ruled by Britain before, people speak English fairly well. Lastly, in China, well, nobody is traveling there now. International travel is down 97% this year, even after reopening. And if you're doing business there, well, there's no point understanding the contract in Mandarin because most likely it won't be enforced, and will favor local business anyways by the courts. What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound. So even if your read the English part of the sign you cannot understand it.

jimbob45 3y ago
Do you have an explanation for China’s low tourism? Is it just latent fears of COVID?
- jamesaurichs 3y ago
  Here are some conjectures: 1.) There is a very high dislike of China across the world. Large majorities in most of the 19 countries surveyed have negative views of China https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/29/negative-views-of-china-tied-to-critical-views-of-its-policies-on-human-rights/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/29/negative-views... 2.) No business need to travel there. Foreign investment is down 90% this year. Literally no US/europe presence in the trade fairs in China the summer. 3.) Flights are super expensive, because of low demand, upwards of $5k-10k. travel out of China is down hugely due to the economy, you can search on youTube for videos from Shanghai airport where the airport is devoid of travelers, and filled with empty shops. 4.) It is very hard for travelers to navigate through China. No English translations in street signs. One needs Alipay to pay for anything in China, which is complicated to setup. Ethnocentrism from rising nationalism means there could be racism/violence against travelers.

nonethewiser 3y ago

It's just not that useful. It's only useful in China and foreigners can't really conduct business there. It's basically only useful if you move to China which is just a handful of people and shrinking at this point.

shaneoh 3y ago
Can't the same argument be made of almost any language unless you live in a bilingual neighborhood?
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  No because English is the de-facto language for trade.
  - shaneoh 3y ago
    Fair point, but I meant for English-native speakers in this context.
- rcme 3y ago
  Yes, which is why most languages are only spoken by native speaker.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  "unless you live in a bilingual neighborhood" is key here. Many countries across the world teach English as a second language and in western trade it's the lingua franca. Mandarin is spoken in various countries, but many of the Mandarin-speaking countries also have English as a common second language. Going by [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), you can see how if you want to expand your reach, some languages make more sense to learn than others.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  Functionally bilingual neighborhoods are, in fact, quite common.

ftyers 3y ago

https://archive.ph/LX0HP https://archive.ph/LX0HP

MaxwellKahn 3y ago

As an American born person with some Chinese heritage, it's interesting to see this trend play out in myself alongside wider society. When I was growing up, my parents and relatives would constantly try to convince me to learn my ethnic language, half to know my roots and half to catch the "China train". In university, I took it upon myself to take Mandarin courses for several years, but only got to middling competency. Now, as the years go on, I find that once innate desire to "one day learn Mandarin" gradually fade away. In terms of usefulness: - it seems less and less likely that I'll ever live in China for a significant length of time due to all the common reasons others in the thread are mentioning - I have many international Chinese friends, but our friendships are based on cultural affinity rather than linguistic affinity, so they're perfectly fine switching to English whenever we need to talk about something complex. It's interesting, but many of my American peers of Chinese heritage are actually learning Korean or Japanese, which would have been extremely rare 10 years ago.

talloaktrees 3y ago
I'm not ethnically Chinese but I studied Mandarin in college in the early 2000s then moved to Taiwan for almost a decade. I don't regret doing it, but it didn't provide me any sort of business or career advantage like everyone thought it would in the early 2000s
- porknubbins 3y ago
  People never looked at the need for foreign language with enough granularity. For example there was never and real large demand for Westerners to communicate with mainland China. We send specs, they manufacture them. China doesn’t really do FDI here. Now there was a time language skills were a major plus in law or finance in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure about that anymore. The new US TSMC plants might have some needs but probably won’t have trouble filling them.

Proven 3y ago

[dead]

Bjemslev 3y ago

I am going to climb onto the reasonal branch of "mfs still got multiple concentration camps in 2023" as a intuition for peeps not learning their language

tenpies 3y ago
Doesn't the US either? Or at least they were frequently called that and compared with Nazi concentration camps when Trump was president: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-concentration-camps-migrants-detention/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-co... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac... Of course now that Biden took over, continued their operation, and quickly allowed them to overfill to the point that there's now a full blown border crisis, no one in mainstream media would dare call them that.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

Archived at https://archive.is/LX0HP https://archive.is/LX0HP

marc_abonce 3y ago

The article mentions that "the study of modern languages is falling across the board in many rich countries" so this phenomenon is not exclusive to Chinese. I think it's part of a larger trend of people choosing not to learn any language besides English because they think that everything else is "useless". The article also mentions Korean as an exception, but it only shows the increase as a percentage. I wonder how many people are actually learning Korean though, because otherwise this could be like that xkcd joke about the fastest growing religion.

nmfisher 3y ago

I can probably provide some perspective on this given I: - studied Chinese at university in both Australia and China - worked there for about 5 years - have a mobile app for learning Chinese [0] I think the biggest difference between when I started learning (20+ years ago) and now is that China is no longer seen as a positive, growing force in the world economy. I started learning because I thought it would be useful for business in future, and I was probably right - up until around 2012. Since then, the country became increasingly hostile to foreigners, foreign companies decided to cut their losses and pull out, the internet ecosystem has become worse and worse and visas are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. China doesn't have much in the way of soft power (unlike, say, Korea), so it's just not a top destination for anyone coming from overseas. That being said, there's also been a huge outflow of Mandarin speakers to other countries (like Australia), and Mandarin is becoming the default second language at junior/primary schools. Mandarin is always going to be relevant (I mean, there's more than a billion speakers - it's not like they're going to vanish overnight). But I do agree that the language is becoming less "useful", because there are fewer and fewer prospects for working in China. Even international tourism is becoming less and leas attractive. [0] https://polyvox.app https://polyvox.app

MJsGlove 3y ago

China has peaked. Anyone studying mandarin will be like those studying Japanese at the peak of Japan Inc. in the 80s. Globalization was a great time for some while it lasted though, hope some of you of age have made money during the zenith.

majikaja 3y ago
Japanese is still a great language for business. Obviously if one learns it then joins an industry that doesn't benefit from it that's one's own fault.

pphysch 3y ago

Surely just a coincidence that Saudi Arabia announced this week that every secondary school will have Mandarin lessons. The Economist being The Economist: owned by old rich European families in a rapidly changing world.

someguy7250 3y ago

That's good. And I am biased. I personally liked American and Japanese culture better anyways. Growing up in China, everyone I knew keeps telling me our culture is fake, reconstructed from a pile of burning books and detached from both history and modern life, at least ever since Cultural Revolution. But frankly every country is having a cultural crisis today. I just want to preserve some things more. And yes I know that is biased.