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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

There are much more compelling reasons for Chinese people to learn English than there are for foreigners to learn Chinese, though it certainly won't hurt your job prospects. For one, if you learn to speak Chinese you get improved job prospects vis-a-vis two countries. (Yeah, I went there, PRC.) A Chinese person who learns English gets instant access to the US, Anglosphere, Japan (well, cough, theoretically speaking), Western Europe, etc etc.

(Same for Japanese, too. I get "You should have studied Chinese!" all the time, as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US.)

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Not that I think we'll be all be buckling down to master Mandarin in our lifetimes but the lingua franca does sometimes change as the expression itself suggests.

as if these islands had sunken into the ocean after the bubble burst and do not still outrank every European country in trade with the US

By that measure, we should all study Canadian and Mexican as well!

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/current/balance....

Isn't Spanish the most learned foreign language by far in the States?

http://www.vistawide.com/languages/us_languages.htm

Yes. Not a wonderful choice for career opportunities unless you enjoy competing with millions of native bilinguals, by the way.

True, but one point in its favor is that you could use it with real people, which is always something of an incentive. Studying, say, German or Italian in the US pretty much means that you'll have to get on a plane if you want to practice it in anything but an 'artificial' environment.

That said, Italian is pretty much one of the more useless languages in the world for anything outside of Italy, but I'm still quite happy with my choice:-)

Competing and co-operating.

Both Canadian and Mexican are inexplicably missing from your reference.

I hope you're joking. Canada speaks English and French; Mexico speaks Spanish. Sure, they're different dialects than the European version, but they're all lumped together. It's kind of how people say think Chinese is one language, but in reality it's not just different dialects--it actually is multiple languages.

Sorry, Canadian isn't my first language.

I think the classification of local Chinese tongues is a grey area. They are all based on the same writing system, but the variation in pronunciation and informal vocabularies make them unintelligible from each other.

They are more like the difference between, say, American and Jamaican English, than between two languages like English and French.

If you are learning Chinese as a foreign language, it almost certainly means you are learning Standard Mandarin (Beijingese?), since it's the lingua franca of the Chinese world, unless it specifically mentions Cantonese or Min Nan, etc.

I speak Mandarin and some Cantonese, Shaanxi, and Sichuan dialect, btw.

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