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Why China is losing interest in English
- Qem 2y agoI wonder how long would Mandarin take to replace English as default second language worldwide, if they adopted a phonetic alphabet as standard to ease people onboarding.
- rawgabbit 2y agoThey already have one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
- dtgm92 2y agoLearning Danish, I can't be bothered to write the extra non-latin letters. It is like 2 or 3 extra characters, not even technically difficult. I just accept that people can be confused about far-get and far-dad for example. With pinyin though, if you don't use special letters to represent the tones(?) it seems like it will be constant confusion.
- dtgm92 2y agoAll this to say... if they just standardized the existing romanization system as some default new learner experience, I cannot imagine people actually bothering to type the extra latin characters with accents and so on.
- yorwba 2y ago> According to one ranking, by EF Education First, an international language-training firm, China ranks 91st among 116 countries and regions in terms of English proficiency. Just four years ago it ranked 38th out of 100. Over that time its rating has slipped from “moderate” to “low” proficiency. Some in China question the accuracy of the EF index. Yeah, people don't suddenly lose their English skills in the span of four years. Either EF changed their methodology or the ranking is so non-robust that it's essentially random.
- jfengel 2y agoI'm losing interest in English, and I was born here in the US. I don't want to leave. I hope the country can be salvaged. But I sometimes dream of going to a place where they don't speak English, so that I don't have to hear about what's going on in this country.