Foreign Languages Fade in Class — Except Chinese
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why? Ask yourself what you will do with the language once you have learned it. Unless you have a strong interest in classical literature or contemporary politics, both of which would essentially making the transition to an academic career, it is hard to justify the time invested in learning such a language, esp. when the best and brightest speakers of that language also speak yours and have more hours (cumulative over more than a decade) to become proficient in yours than you do for theirs.
Now, you might say, what if I go to China and attempt to make something of myself among the economic maelstrom?
Well, what exactly will you do? Have you thought that far ahead? I was there, in several cities, with part-time work as a translator among other things. My experience and the experience of close associates is that, despite frantic generation of infrastructure and cheap consumer products for sale in the United States, there simply isn't a lot going on that would qualify as "interesting," and "interesting" and "challenging" work is what I personally thrive on. Also, since you cannot be a Chinese factory worker, you will be limited to making dubious investments with generally disreputable business partners (see the China Law Blog, an excellent resource on this topic and the enforced opacity of the Chinese Legal system), or serving as a middleman for cheap consumer products. You could also try to promote human rights or green tech but, frankly, why do you need to go overseas to do that? There are lots of opportunities in the US to promote environmental consciousness or reduce sex slavery.
Moreover, from what folks who invest at a much higher level than I have access to, corruption is rampant and infects virtually every aspect of public life and the necessary shift to transparency which should accompany liberalization (e.g. open media) has not happened, meaning that corruption often increases instead of being exposed (reporters are routinely dismissed who do not tow the party line).
So learn Mandarin, sure, if you are really interested in it. I spent approximately four years of my life on it, worked as a translator, co-founded for a non-profit dedicated to China-related issues, worked in a think tank on economic policy and China. I learned a lot about how the world works and, ultimately, how poorly it all works.
Of course, it might also be an eye-opening experience as to what is happening in the United States. Another commentator on this thread remarked how trade will optimally decrease wars. Yes, it is possible to subject virtually everything to an economic motive and many policy makers in the United States seem to see complete integration of Chinese and American systems as an ideal. Decide for yourself what that means.
But seriously, from the tech angle, China is becoming a dominant force in the global technology supply chain, whether it be services or products. Trying to depend on English only as the sole form of communication is not efficient in long term. It will indeed become much more useful in commerce. At the very least some immersion in the language will allow you to understand a little bit about the culture and country, which is actually much more important....
Please also explain which global tech sectors China is becoming a dominant force in.
As for immersion and understanding the culture, I completely agree.
But knowing Chinese is not much of an ecomomic advantage, it's better than knowing nothing but it's not worth the effort. I'm learning out of nessisty, osmossis if you will. Living here and my wife being Chinese(although that made no difference, she speaks English to me all the time and hasn't got the patience to help me learn) I kind of have to.
When I leave (and for most people that's a certainty) I'll be able to appear a little snobbish, "oh you can speak Chinese, how wonderful".
To me, the "English is enough", is totally akin to fanboy mentalities surrounding technology. I supposed you've only bothered to learn C or Java and are completely indifferent to even bothering with any other language. Obviously, this is an extremely limited view.
Additionally, exposure to another language provides exposure to other cultures. In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety of cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.
I know a lot of HNers are dismissive of formal education in general, and maybe knowing Chinese isn't directly applicable to most, but come on. We need to teach our kids early on that it's OK to learn for the sake of learning
> In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety of cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.
My first languages were English and Korean, and I had no difficulty whatsoever in a couple semesters' worth of Mandarin classes, and I'd like to think I can hold some kind of basic conversation in Mandarin and understand basic written Chinese text. The downside of trying to use my knowledge though, is realizing just how little i18n/L10n support there is in applications out there (for starters...TextMate completely fails because it assumes fixed-width - see http://img.skitch.com/20100724-kcjdt411djee6u59p4pc9x5qe6.jp...). If for that reason only, hackers should care :)
For what it is worth, I've taken a bunch of language courses just for the hell of it. Languages intrigue me, even if I never end up speaking it ever again (ask me how often I speak Spanish in Los Angeles....never...). I never did it for any economic advantage, I'm probably never going to spend more than a week of my life in China as a tourist, but it's interesting. I can walk around in Chinatown and understand what signs say, I know how to address people correctly, et cetera. That's all.
That said, this is only true in certain circumstances and among the younger generation. Among bureaucrats, for example, you will be hard pressed to find good English spakers.
Put it this way, can you imagine the Chinese government being receptive if the US State Department offered to send over several hundred English-language teachers and pay part of their salaries?
Although the vast VAST majority can only speak a few words, something of a failure when you think that they study English in School for hours each day from middle school, all the way through Universty and only 1%(probably less) have any level of fluency.
In my University of 20,000 students there are about 4-5 students whose English is good enough for me to have a conversation. Including the teachers, there is only one person in the Entire college who I would say has excellent English.
So in short, take this with a pinch of salt, China does quantity, not quality.
Seriously though, it's like saying that you should get a liberal art education. Most people will just goes around carrying quadratical equations, biology trivia, bad impression of Shakespeare and biased historical views and other sort of random information. Now we will remember random Chinese characters and Chinese phrases too. They are certainly useless to the average Joe because they're just a bunch of disconnected facts.
There's no emphasis on teaching people to be rational thinkers who can make use of said random information or learn to cope with imperfect information. It's hard to teach anyway. Can you imagine finding 6 million teachers who know these kind of stuff? Never mind launching a serious Chinese language program so that we don't get people who only know random amount of stuff about the Chinese language.
I'm not against learning a second language (I took 4 semesters of non-required elective language classes and then learned over 2000 kanji on my own), but if you go into it half-assed it's a waste of time.
There is no doubt in my mind that English is the superior language and we'd all be better off if the Chinese would learn English rather than the other way around.*
* We'd probably be better off still if we all learned Esperanto, oh well.
One point of interest, the Chinese government now pays to send teachers to the US to teach Chinese in US schools.
Do you have any proof of this? It's not like Chinese is inherently more difficult than English. You are underestimating the difficulty of learning English as a second language for a native Chinese speaker.
However, giardini said "It takes years longer to learn any Chinese dialect than to learn English", and I'm also referring to the spoken language. In many ways, spoken Chinese is easier to learn, especially at more advanced levels, than spoken English. One reason is that most of its word roots are native. For example, the word for computer literally means "electric brain". In English, OTOH, most advanced/scientific terms are derived from Latin/Greek roots, which makes them much more difficult to remember.
However there are more important things than vocubulary (which you can learn by rote given sufficient motivation) when applying basic foreign language skills learned in your homeland from a non-native speaker. English-speakers tend to be unusually tolerant of mispronunciations as well as misspellings; likewise with our excessively complex grammar. When you're not having to master things like tone usage, communication on a basic level (surely all that can be expected of most US high-school students) is a lot easier to master.
Which is exactly the problem. We shouldn't be using Latin roots to derive English words - we should use native vocabulary, because then we don't end up with commonly used words based on obscure roots that are rarely used.
When you're not having to master things like tone usage, communication on a basic level (surely all that can be expected of most US high-school students) is a lot easier to master.
If you think that the Chinese aren't tolerant of accents, you are sorely mistaken. In fact, a large portion of Chinese TV contains subtitles because of the various accents from different parts of China that can make it difficult for them to understand each other.
Also, do you think that English doesn't convey meaning by tone? One English sentence can have several different meanings based on things such as tone and stress, and is one of the most difficult aspects of English for ESL speakers to master.
And in all honesty, the tones aren't that difficult to master. If you take a Chinese class, you'll spend at least the first month working on them, and once you've got them down, that's that.
I'm aware of the huge differences between Chinese dialects, but lack of mutual intelligibility when listening to other Chinese is hardly a sign of receptiveness to the incoherent ramblings of foreigners.
English intonation is subtle (which might make it hard to learn). It's also a relatively advanced skill, with it being quite possible to converse in English without intentionally using tone at all. Tone in English might imply something about the context of what is said, such as whether it is intended as a question, but doesn't change the meaning of the word and make the sentence nonsensical.
1. Chinese is relatively hard to learn
2. English is relatively easy to learn
3. English is part of the standard curriculum in most of the world's schools and therefore has immense momentum.
4. Despite America's economic troubles, I believe we're still the leaders in technological innovation. It's my impression that China's economy is fundamentally based on manufacturing and exporting Western products. How many original and innovative products have come out of China in comparison to the US?
I think Chinese is a good language to learn if you're involved with manufacturing and international business, but English will remain the language of technology.
I think that depends on what your native language is. Certainly I know that Chinese people struggle with English.
I'll believe it when I see it actually happen.