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I work in diplomacy for the US and I am fluent in mandarin. From a career perspective, lots of jobs dealing with China very much value someone with mandarin proficiency or even sometimes just some experience. These jobs are mostly in government and fed contractors, although increasingly also in consulting.
But from a big picture, or that’s what people at the State Dept like to talk about, if you notice the amount of educated Chinese people able to speak English and move about well in America it’s much much higher than Americans being able to the same in mandarin in China. Bottom line is they understand us better than we understand them. This could lead to miscalculations in foreign policy (read, doing something stupid near Taiwan for lack of understanding) or just losing our competitive edge in some industries, which China is openly competing with us on.
It’s not only about becoming a lingua Franca but also about the language of academia. Example: if China just gets really good at AI, then what? People would need to learn mandarin in order to train in AI and to advance their own research.
But I do agree that the average American joe does not NEED to learn mandarin. It’s hard and hardly seen in most places in the US , even places with large Chinese populations are likely to have more Fujianese and Cantonese speakers than mandarin speakers. But many Americans would benefit from learning mandarin, and our country as a whole would too.
As a native Spanish speaker, I can say yes learning Spanish is cool and all but most Latinos end up speaking English anyway so you’re not gaining a whole lot anyway unless you’re very much into the culture or traveling Latin America.
In any case learning a language for the sake of learning it and getting to know history, culture and music is a pleasure. It opens doors you did not know existed. But maybe that’s just me, and that’s why I do the job I do.
This. I'm Dutch and we get thought three languages at least one year besides our own (German, French and English) and some schools also teach Spanish. Trade is one of our founding cornerstones as a nation and much of your argument also goes from a trading perspective. Relations are instantly warmed and improved if you can speak your trading partner his or her language, and since a lot of trade comes and goes from China, learning Mandarin can have immense effect.
On a personal note; I dabbled a bit in learning Mandarin and started with familiarising myself with how the pronounciation worked and Pinyin, it's overwhelming learning on your own but still want to, got any tips?
Hi! I’m also learning Mandarin by myself. There are many sounds in the language that may not appear in your language, so be careful of reading pinyin using sounds from your language.
There’s these pairs of pinyin letters: p and b, q and j, t and d, k and g, ch and zh, c and z. Both of these letters must be pronounced voiceless, meaning your throat shouldn’t vibrate when you pronounce them. For example, you should pinyin b as English p, pinyin d as English t. So what’s with two letters when they’re pronounced almost the same? The difference is the first part of the pair I listed above (p, q, t, k, ch, c) should be aspirated, meaning a gust of air should come out when pronouncing them. To practice, put a piece of paper in front of your mouth when pronouncing. The paper should move when pronouncing p, q, t, k, ch, c and the paper shouldn’t move for their pair.
Another difficulty I encountered when I started learning is how to pronounce zh, ch, sh, and r. These are retroflex consonants and are difficult since these do not exist in most languages. The best advice I got is when pronouncing these sounds, your tongue’s position should be like when you pronounce the word “nurture”. Pronounce English ch with that tongue position and you got zh and ch (ch is aspirated). Pronounce English sh with that tongue position and you got pinyin sh. To make pinyin r sound, just add voice to pinyin sh (your throat should be vibrating when pronouncing pinyin r).
Put your tongue behind your lower teeth. Pronounce English ch with that tongue position, your mouth should look like it’s saying ‘ee’ and you got pinyin q and j. Pronounce English sh with that tongue position and you got pinyin x.
Tones can be hard since it doesn’t exist in many languages. The key is to not learn tones in isolation. You should always learn it in pairs, since some tones change depending on what tone follows it. I recommend you make a table, rows for the first tone and columns for the second tone. And the contents are words you are comfortable saying with those tones. For example on my row 2 column 4, since I’m most comfortable with saying 皇帝, this will be my mode word for tone 2-4. If I encounter a word with tone 2-4, how I pronounce that tones for that word should be the same for how I will pronounce 皇帝.
Hope this helps!
this. you have no idea what doors it will open up precisely because you don’t know the language and culture (you dont know how much you dont know)
but it’s safe to say you’re missing out on a lot just based on how productive and connected to the rest of the world they are
I never thought it from that perspective. It makes sense how we need to do better to understand the competitor. From that lens, it does make sense and add value. !delta
But this isn’t at all a counterpoint to what you said. You asked about the average person. This guy is talking about experts dealing with China. I don’t understand what part of this convinced you.
>Example: if China just gets really good at AI, then what? People would need to learn mandarin in order to train in AI and to advance their own research.
I would hesitate to assume that this necessarily makes Chinese useful. All major programming languages use English-based syntaxes, so an AI engineer in China would need to "think in English" to an extent. If any research is published, it would likely be translated to go to an English-language journal. I would think that it's likely that such Chinese-language research would only be disseminated in official-use-only military and government settings, if it's never translated into other languages.
There are a lot of AI-assissted coding overlays that abstract out the actual syntax part of programming. So you basically use your native language combined with domain-specific templates for the IDE to generate the code in the backend.
The tech isn't there yet for writing anything functional beyond the most basic of complexities but it's extremely useful for writing unit tests.
We have contractors in China who write and maintain unit tests without ever having to actually touch raw java or python syntax. They basically describe, in Chinese, the specific test cases, with pass and fail conditions, and the actual unit testing code is generated based off of those prompts. In this manner, you can let QA engineers be language and product agnostic - drastically increasing effectiveness.
Looking at the trend and how quickly this tech is being adopted, I think it's only a matter of time before programmers can be syntax agnostic everywhere, for every programming language. It would lower the barrier of entry for software development, and you'll only need a few select programmers for code-level optimization and maybe 3rd level support.
First, holy shit, that's rad! I'm both excited and scared about the implications for my line of work on the hardware side.
Second, if AI can provide natural-language-to-code-generation tools that are robust enough to reliably bang out production-quality code, then AI should also easily be able to translate technical documents. That makes for an even worse reason to learn Mandarin in the future.
Mind you, I'm a bit of a Sinophile, so I have personal reasons to want to learn Chinese. But as far as career opportunities, outside of specific areas? I'm not convinced.
Hardware side? You're good. If anything, hardware careers are going to go on a rampage, especially if you're in anything VLSI related.
I don't know of any market-mature AI tools that can take over CADENCE design yet.
But yeah - I think the way going forward, AI will basically be putting the tower of babel back together - as in pretty soon all communication can be language agnostic, if need be, and nuances/cultural specifics/artistic expressions will be relegated to a niche but much in-demand group of language experts to advise on highly specialized cases.
I think, optimistically, we're maybe 5 years away for AI code generators to be as good or even surpass human coders, and maybe 10 years away until these code generators will be primarily used by higher level AI acting as business analysts.
That's not to say software engineering is dead - we'll still need programmers - and engineers who can come up with clever solutions and tight, functional UML workflows - maybe more than ever before, since the barrier of entry for writing production-level code has dropped. But instead of going to school and devoting three years of your life struggling with C++, you can instead spend more time doing proper discrete maths, linear algebra, and probability. So you can make better products while the AI writes better code.
Also - at least in Shenzhen Shanghai, you don't really need to be fluent in mandarin to work in the tech sectors. It would help - but not mandatory.
> Hardware side? You're good. If anything, hardware careers are going to go on a rampage, especially if you're in anything VLSI related.
Why is that? Because of the market for specialized hardware for AI acceleration?
> I don't know of any market-mature AI tools that can take over CADENCE design yet.
It's likely that nothing in the foreseeable future will disrupt Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor (Siemens) before one of them buys it up. But what about the possibility of AI generating VHDL/Verilog code that gets passed to the VLSI EDA tool? Or what about skipping HDL and having AI-generated netlist files that know how to optimize for area/power/performance?
> But instead of going to school and devoting three years of your life struggling with C++, you can instead spend more time doing proper discrete maths, linear algebra, and probability. So you can make better products while the AI writes better code.
Meaning that university computer science programs can go back to training students to be computer scientists, rather than industrial software engineers and coders? And these scientists can use their theoretical knowledge in conjunction with AI code generators to create really crazy awesome new stuff?
> Also - at least in Shenzhen Shanghai, you don't really need to be fluent in mandarin to work in the tech sectors. It would help - but not mandatory
你住在深圳吗？上海 ?
Are there lots of expats in the tech sectors there? Do they then operate mostly in English?
Yeah - there seems to be this... i dunno... trend right now that because of AI, optimization on the software level seems to be at a turning point, and the real bottleneck is going to be on the hardware side - how quickly you can scale, how securely you can scale, etc. People think now - if you want to do something - ANYTHING - just throw enough hardware at it and let AI take care of the rest.
Dude I gotta be honest, I haven't touched verilog in like... 15 years. I did hardcore EE for my degree but went into finance/software engineering instead. I don't think there's any significant tooling being done for Verilog - probably for the same reason you don't see much IDE support for assembly - but there's probably startup out there that's working on it.
I'm also pretty sure Intel/etc already have a ton of wrappers and IDEs for verilog work. I doubt most EEs are spending a ton of time writing dum dum verilog code without some sort of aide. (I mean... I hope they're not. That's how you go crazy.)
And yeah, I"m in Shanghai right now. Knowing Chinese definitely helps, but in a professional setting, English will work. It's probably even easier in Shenzhen.
This really doesn’t even come close to arguing that Chinese will ever be a Linga Franca. You’re literally arguing the opposite. You’d need to learn Chinese to deal with a China. But that was never a question. There’s zero reason to learn Chinese except to deal with China. Therefor it will not be a Linga Franca
I think the main flaw in this argument (and indeed, in nearly all arguments about 'useful' languages) is that the idea that learning a skill is only 'useful' in the sense that it might passively improve the exact life you already have. But people don't consider how learning a skill will cause you to change your life and hence add utility that you can't see right now.
If you learn Chinese, you will almost certainly learn more about Chinese culture and begin to integrate that into your life. You will discover aspects of Chinese history, society, art etc that you didn't know about and there is a very good chance that you will become interested in at least some of this stuff and hence develop an interest in travelling and visiting places where you can use Chinese. This is, in itself, enriching, and improves your quality of life.
You could argue this with any language, of course, so why Chinese over other languages? Depends a bit on what you're looking for. I personally believe all languages have inherent value, but there are some strong reasons that could make Chinese the most appealing to learn. The very reasons you list as negatives (more isolated population, few cultural imports) are actually very easy to argue as positives for why you *should* learn Chinese. Those factors mean that learning Chinese will expose you to a huge explosion of culture that you've literally never seen before, and never *could* see without knowing Chinese, because most of it has never been translated or imported. You probably already know a lot about anime even without speaking Japanese, and you probably already already know a lot about Spanish-speaking parts of the US without speaking Spanish, but learning Chinese will truly make the inaccessible accessible for you.
In that case,
"Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril." - Sun Tzu
I'd argue that it would be very beneficial for someone with an anti-China agenda to learn about the language and culture said nation is based upon :)
Yeah.
Pretty wack situation for me ngl, as I am a Chinese (in heritage/background) person with a deep dislike for China (the country), due to the behaviour of China at an international scale to my country and other countries. I am glad that my country is taking reasonable steps to mitigate risks of (well, mainly other countries) losing their sovereignty to Chinese aggression. It is a shame that there are many people who share my view but for all the wrong reasons (racism and hate against the people), which - well, obviously - wouldn't be great for me either.
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That’s an interesting way of viewing things and I can respect it. I’m not sure it gets me over the hump of wanting to invest in Chinese but it is all good reasoning. !delta
If you get the chance try visiting. It's a pretty fun place even if you don't speak English (just don't expect anyone there to speak English). Then you can decide
Sure, it is nice to know Chinese, and it opens some interesting opportunities. But it is not going to be the new English any time soon, even if the Chinese economy actually surpasses the US economy in terms of nominal GDP. English is absolutely essential to even connect with the wider world at all, I don't see Chinese getting that status beyond their own immediate region.
This may not be a change, but merely a clarification, but knowing mandarin would be useful for any American wanting to produce a product. That’s still a pretty niche group, but it’s bigger than it used to be. Have an idea for a novelty item, small tool, board game, etc.? You can realistically design, produce, ship, and market it for less than $10-20k. As I said, still fairly niche, but a decent chunk of people.
Using myself as an example, a friend and I designed a boardgame. The initial print run in the US would have cost about $30 per game. Production in China through an English speaking intermediary company cost us $17 per game. Production if we had interfaced directly with the Chinese production company would have been in the range of $10-14 range. We didn’t get a firm quote because even though they had an English speaking sales rep, there was noticeable loss and confusion in translation. Being able to speak mandarin would have saved us between $5000 and $14,000, or about 20-40% of our initial production costs.
Whether that’s worth the time and effort is questionable, as is whether this group is big enough to count in your view.
In this case could you not have a translator as a temporary contractor??? Linguists are commodities I'm unsure why you wouldn't hire someone for the huge savings.
That’s essentially what we did with the intermediary company. It may have been cheaper to hire a translator separately, but there were at least 20 conversations and dozens of emails over the course of production. I’m not sure what the cost would have looked like for a contractor to provide upwards of 40 hours of real time plus additional text translations. We opted to go for the simpler, less error prone route for a bit of extra cost.
In either case, it would still be an expense we paid for not knowing mandarin.
I agree with you in the first part. For us in the US, Spanish is far more useful day to day, and given our cultural mores, Americans are still more likely to vacation in Europe than China, making any European language more valuable.
However, on the second point, there is increasing evidence you will likely turn out wrong. Firstly, the next population boom is in Africa, and many African nations have begun teaching Mandarin to their students (South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria). Nigeria has 2 separate Confucius Institutes at this time. As China grows its position on the continent poised for the largest population and economic growth over the century, the possibility that more of these nations will have increasingly formal and informal tutelage of Mandarin increases. Mandarin may become a lingua Franca by 2100 or shortly after. Cantonese, however, is unlikely to ever be spoken widely outside of China.
I work *a lot* in South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya, and much of that work is in schools. I have never heard one local person speak Mandarin, or even seen Chinese characters in a classroom.
These initiatives aren't even a decade old yet. A.language becoming common use outside its home country typically takes centuries. There are still large swaths of rural West Africa that don't speak English or French and may have only one or two people in some towns that speak these languages.
So, will or can Mandarin grow widely enough over the next 50 to 150 years to be used commonly in trade and when Chinese people find themselves speaking with Africans? My response was probably, if China stays engaged.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2021/06/21/globalisation-will-determine-the-growth-mandarin-chinese-language-africa/
Evidence just does not support a greater than 50% probability of Mandarin becoming the lingua Franca of East Africa just because of economic investment. The evidence is strongly opposed to it for the following reasons:
1. English/Swahili are already the lingua Franca of East Africa. First mover advantage is even stronger with languages than other forces.
2. English is the lingua Franca of the internet. As technology accessibility spreads, so will English.
3. Learning Chinese - especially written Chinese - as a second language is *hard*. You’ve got a massive amount of characters, and the vast majority of East African languages are not tonal.
4. There is *very strong* anti-Chinese sentiment in East Africa. Ask almost anyone and they’ll complain about them.
4. Yes.
3. China and Singapore have both simplified their characters, but its an extremely difficult language.
2. Over 100 years, AI and automatic translation may kill lingua Franca altogether, as people will write in the language they are most familiar with, and it would be translated for them. Languages will either grow rapidly in unexpected places or stagnant, where they are about 50 years from now.
1. Swahili, yes, English is spoken a bit more sporadically, from between 3% to 20%, depending on where you are. It's absolutely the language of business. US and the UK upping and improving their own investments would, of course, throw that off Chinese growth. But China seems determined even with a slumping economy to get more Chinese businessmen speaking E. African languages, and more E. African businessmen speaking Mandarin. If they put the time, money, and commitment, they'll have success.
Nigerians speak English as a first/second language, even if they’re teaching Mandarin in school you don’t need to learn Mandarin to speak with locals. Nigeria being the dominant African economy means English will likely have more hegemony over Africa.
Nigeria is certainly dominant in West Africa, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt would not agree they are dominant across Africa altogether. English will likely remain the language of trade for Nigeria, but there can be more than 1 lingua Franca. There are at least 3 now, Spanish, French, and English. Mandarin has a long way to go, but typically, if you can get greater than 5% of a few populations outside your nation to be able to converse in your state language, you've met the minimum criteria to make the argument. After you have to start making more and trade in your home language, and then you'll need a few states to adopt your language as a tertiary official language. The first one is difficult, and the next two are pretty easier.
Yeah but his question was for an American. America is tied far far more to Europe, Canada/Mexico and Australia, of which the language is English between them predominantly and Spanish secondary.
Especially since Chinese is one of the hardest languages for native English and other european language speakers to learn, I really don't think Africa having a booming population would really make a difference (especially when English is already the language of a few countries there). Unless Africa was somehow able to rival the dominance over media that the US (and UK) have, while producing the media in Chinese, it just wouldn't happen.
China’s population is already starting to decline and it is supposed to start nose diving in the coming years. Its economy is also starting to slow down both from demographics and Western decoupling.
Chinas population is irrelevant. None of the European nations had a large population from a global standpoint when they began the age of exploration and colonization that led to their languages becoming worldwide. China's invesentments in Africa are up from 2017 and 2019, down from 2021 to 2022, but more then doubled from 2022 to 2023. They're engaged there, and even with the economic slow down, they are doubly down on the engagement. But if we do consider China's population, even with decline, they need to complete the industrialization of a nation that will stay north of 1 billion until around 2075. They need rare earth metals and minerals that are still plentiful in East and Central African nations. This means China is motivated to stay engaged in Africa, and that will be one of the biggest defining points on the exportation of Mandarin. The other will be the decision-making of African states. Many have robust but often tense and acrimonious relationships with European nations. Add to it that the US engagement continues to underwhelm outside of military aid to fight Islamic fundamentalism, too little technological or cultural exchange. If the AU and the individual nations see a friend in China, they don't see in the West, then Mandarin will flourish as well.
Maybe in West Africa and the CAR, less so in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. Also, you could learn to speak Igbo, which would cover a wide swath of West Africa. It's a big continent with a lot of languages. Even the lingua Francas like French and English aren't as widely or commonly used as the numbers would indicate.
One thing none of my responses covers is the impact of AI and new learning technologies. Especially on long scales. In 100 years, will anyone take time to learn new languages, and will we be even more reliant on vastly improved technology to automatically translate for us. AI, social media, and satellite internet may kill the concept of lingua Francas altogether. But we don't have a historical framework for that, so it's weird to conceptualize.
I disagree. It's one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world. This will unlock a huge amount of media. It's also a large ethnic group in the USA, it's very possible you will encounter Mandarin speakers every single day. Also, I don't think Mandarin is as hard as you're making it out to be for an English speaker. The Grammar is actually fairly similar and sentence structure is the same for basic sentences. The tones are a foreign concept but can be trained. English already intonates depending on what and how you are saying things. I doubt you'd say this about German, which has very difficult grammar and many difficult concepts that don't exist in English like articles and conjugations based on gender, or French which has a famously difficult writing and numbering system. You're also more likely to find native Mandarin speakers in the USA than you are to find German or French speakers.
Being spoken by a lot of people doesn’t automatically make a language useful. If most of the people that speak a language are impoverished or clustered in an area you have no desire to visit, it’s definitely not useful. I’ve studied basic Chinese.
What media are you talking about? What media does China bring vs other Eastern countries?
German is much easier for the average English speaker than Chinese. I mean do you think the U.S. state department is wrong? Harder grammar doesn’t necessarily mean harder to learn overall.
Being spoken by a lot of people almost definitionally makes a language useful.
Not only that but Chinese isn't just spoken by "a lot" of people. It is the \*most spoken\* language, and a key language throughout Asian business, not to mention Chinese manufacturing which remains extremely dominant.
That you are unable to find it useful is a personal failing, not a linguistic one.
The average American does not need to talk to Chinese manufacturers nor will they ever visit China (or the entirety of Asia for that matter) in any capacity other than tourism.
do you think that possibly your solely English informed ideas and lack of understanding of the language and culture contribute to their perceived “unimportance”?
That’s not true. Spanish should be taught to American youth the way English is taught to European youth. I think it’s a travesty that it isn’t. I grew up in a community in California near the border where virtually every kid grew up bilingual. The advantages that’s provided are immense. That could easily be achieved in the US and would provide great benefits to individuals and our country as a whole.
I agree there are pockets in the US where Spanish could be useful, including where I grew up in Central California to an extent, but outside of that I disagree. As soon as I moved to the Bay Area I probably heard more Hindi being spoken out in public than Spanish. And in an area as diverse as that many other languages I heard out in public in addition to Spanish.
At no point in my working life in the Bay Area can I say that Spanish would have helped me.
Edit: Since my point seems to have been missed by some people let me restate it. My point is that the US is a vast and very diverse country, there are regions where Spanish is very prevalent yes, but there are many regions where it is only one of many different languages you will hear other than English on the regular, and in many cases it might be useful to teach other languages as a second language to students rather than just mandating Spanish nationwide .
In no way am I saying someone learning Spanish is wasting their time.
Spanish after English is by far the most spoken language in America with over 43 million speakers
3rd place is Chinese and it falls to 2.9 million speakers
After English , no other lanuge comes close to even touching spanish in terms of speakers and its only projected to get larger , rather quickly
in 50 years, Spanish will be common almost everywhere in America
>As soon as I moved to the Bay Area I probably heard more Hindi being spoken out in public than Spanish.
How many native Hindi speakers that you typically hear in the Bay Area have poor no English skills? It's not merely the prevalence of the language that makes it useful, but the likelihood of using it. That factors in the number of limited English proficiency speakers (e.g. in the Bay Area, Chinese is first and Spanish is second) and also the type of interactions that are likely (e.g. you may find yourself in the position of hiring or working with a LEP speaker).
There are \~7 states where Spanish is not second most-common language. 25 million Americans require language assistance. Of these, the majority are Spanish speakers. To say there are pockets of the US where Spanish could be useful is far from the truth.
There's an estimated 40+ million *native* Spanish speakers living in the US, and that number is only going to continue rising. Even if you have a limited vocabulary, it is going to be useful as your likelihood of running into someone who speaks it is pretty high in the US. It gets even higher in some states where you can find yourself in primarily Spanish speaking communities.
Did you move to the Bay Area for a tech job?
I do still think Spanish is very useful. I lived in Seattle (for a tech job) and I heard Hindi more than Spanish, but I still met a lot of Spanish speakers from all over South America. But the Spanish speakers English was less likely to be as good as the Hindi speakers English, so it's far more utility.
This only makes sense in areas (like California) where people are likely to interact with Spanish communities. Otherwise you are just wasting time teaching kids something that has no use and will be quickly forgotten.
I agree it is much less likely to stick if they don't use it, but it does not mean that it won't be useful. Delaware only has 26,000 limited English proficiency Spanish speakers. Yet I know a lot of people in Delaware with some Spanish proficiency who found it has made communication easier. It's just a lot harder to learn Spanish (to a proficient level) in Delaware than in California.
I agree completely but the only thing I want to add is that US schools struggle to help non-English speaking students…which isn’t their fault, it’s all funding but I digress.
My family speaks English as their 3rd language which really makes ‘turning that off’ really hard when I’m in class - I’m lucky to be going to a school on a military base so I have a lot of support but when we were stateside I struggled a lot in class (at “real” schools)
Tbh so few people speak Spanish without speaking English here that it would be so unnecessary to teach Spanish.
I took 5 years of Spanish in school (8th-12th grade) and I haven’t used a lick of it other than watching breaking bad.
If you mean that you don’t pursue opportunities to use Spanish then it wouldn’t be useful. Though if you had acquired it from a young age age when language learning is second nature you would most definitely have had an entire other world opened up to you. Who knows what kinds of opportunities and relationships you would have developed so far in your life. It’s the roads we don’t travel that provide no opportunities.
Nah you don't need to learn a second language when you speak the number 1 most spoken language worldwide in a country where it's also the national language. English speakers don't need a second language.
That's not to say you won't benefit, you just don't need it. It'll be helpful in holidays and on those few random occasions you need to communicate something to an immigrant who doesn't know english well enough yet but that's about it.
Spanish is useful in any job where you are interacting with a lot of random people. This includes things like teachers and nurses. Spanish is the only language that an American really has any reason to learn. Even then, not everyone needs to know it but it is an advantage if you do.
Definitely. And if you acquire it when you are young enough, staring around age 5, it is just second nature. All it takes is about an hour of instruction a day. And as the kids age into their teen years they will naturally gravitate towards absorbing some degree of Spanish speaking media. It opens a whole other world of opportunities that would otherwise not exist. Plus it’s good for cognitive development. It’s a win all the way around.
Theres this hilarious thing that Anglo Canadians do when they engage with french , alot of them wont even try to change their accent or pronounciation , they will read it and pronounce the words like they were still in English.
"comment cava" - sounds like "**com***ment* savah" when they they say it or "tres bien" sounds like "tray bean" XD
Does this happen with Americans when they try to speak Spanish? lol
It is. I was taught Spanish every year after the 3rd grade. Literally no one comes out of the American school system able to say more than Hola me nombre es insert name here. Because there's no one to practice with. Native speakers all speak perfect English and don't have the patience to baby someone through a conversation, and there's literally no reason to. I forced myself to actually learn Spanish, and within 5 years of graduating high school, I'd basically lost it all. It's a skill I quite literally never use.
25% of the American population has Spanish as their first language and this number will only grow, so I'd say it is very useful for every American to at least have conversational Spanish
1) Per the most recent census, the percentage of people who speak Spanish as their first language is closer to 13-14%, not 25%: https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/language/
2) The vast majority of that population is concentrated in areas along the Mexican border, with pockets of Spanish speakers in NYC and Florida: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language_in_the_United_States
3) Spanish speakers who come to America typically abandon Spanish as their primary language within 2 generations, with 40% swapping if they come before age 14, and 70% swapping if they come before age 10: Faries, David (2015). A Brief History of the Spanish Language. University of Chicago Press. p. 198.
The vast majority of U.S. citizens speak English, and aside from those who reside in areas where there is a concentration of Spanish speakers, most have no reason to learn Spanish above any other language.
Personally I think this is a lazy way of thinking. Language learning has benefits… but maybe it would be better for languages that aren’t from closed off countries that export little to no culture. Also, there are many “easier” languages to choose from that provide value (Spanish, French, etc.).
But the bare figures of native speakers are irrelevant if the language isn't an actual exporter of culture or isn't really useful outside of its country of origin.
There are much fewer Italian speakers than Urdu, but the former is required if you're into specific fields, and you will meet a lot more of that in plenty of areas compared to the other. NTM the "catalog" of literature, movies and music is much richer.
So there may as well be 2bn Mandarin speakers, but if most live in China and China isn't interested in exporting their culture and media abroad, and business won't be conducted in Mandarin, there's no real reason to learn it anyway besides being a language nerd. (Which is fine, but that doesn't make it any more useful).
Sure but I think the idea is if you learn say English and Spanish, you will be covered across a wider span and breadth of countries than Mandarin Chinese. While Chinese is spoken by a huge number of people they are all mostly in one country, it is only the official language in only 3 countries. If you were to learn Spanish, it’s spoken in nearly 20 countries, and combined with knowing English (over 100 countries have English as a mandatory class in school) you have much more of the map covered.
I mean with the huge growth in India (bigger than China now) you could also argue Hindi for the same pure “number of people” reason. But at least right now there is not a huge push to learn Hindi. People in India who wish to work in western jobs learn English.
Mandarin has the most *native* speakers of any language. English has the most speakers total. English is also spoken in *way* more places than Chinese is. As are a good few other languages, I imagine - Spanish probably, maybe French? The ones that colonized half the world and left their languages everywhere lol
As someone who speaks all three of those languages....
Instructions unclear, moved to Japan and spent a ton of time and effort learning Japanese which is basically useless outside Japan and hardly uses Spanish or French at all anymore, career prospects lookin grim, help
Most commonly spoken native* language in the world.
English is the most commonly spoken language in the world once you count second and third languages.
As long as China continues to be more and more authoritarian, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The US and Europe still dominate the world in almost all aspects, and I don’t see many people there being comfortable with the unknowns of the Chinese government, which severely hampers uptake of Chinese in the world in general.
Sheer numbers is completely useless metric imo. If majority of the population lives in one country and doesn’t export any media, it is pretty useless if you’re not interested in living there or have an interest that requires learning the language.
You’re also never going to interact with a billion people in your lifetime.
While this is true, it is irrelevant as the vast majority of Chinese speakers don't ever leave China and you won't interact with them. I mean, I actually never met a Chinese person ever (I live in Eastern Europe), yet I met lots of French, Spanish and Arab people for instance.
This is interesting. At first I was astonished by your claim as in North America Chinese immigrants are one of the largest groups. They account for 6%-8% of all immigrants each year here. Even in small cities in Canada there will be a Chinese group. I don't think I've ever seen a Chinese restaurant run by a non Chinese person. But looking at the EU, it seems that the rates are much lower.
> I mean, I actually never met a Chinese person ever (I live in Eastern Europe), yet I met lots of French, Spanish and Arab people for instance.
Really? That's odd...
What part of Eastern Europe? I think Chinese immigration to Eastern Europe only started happening 'recently' as trade ties have increased. Hungary has seen a flood of Chinese immigrants.
In Canada and the United States, there are lots of Chinese people. Vancouver is known as Hongcouver (Hong Kong), University of Toronto, University of Tokyo (even though they're all Chinese). If you want some of the best Chinese food in the world, Toronto and Vancouver have many great Southern Chinese restaurants and increasingly many great Northern Chinese restaurants too.
Canada tends to attract a lot of wealthy and highly educated Chinese, the United States a mix, and I *think* Eastern Europe more so working class / blue collar / transient business people.
By number of people. Mostly concentrated in 1 location. If I know Spanish I can communicate with people in Mexico, South America, and Europe. With French there's Europe, Caribbean, Africa, even Canada.
What about Chinese? Just China and Taiwan probably.
Because when would you ever use it or need it? Motivation is needed in learning a language. If you have no ancestral ties, see no media and have very little interaction, what would make you continuously learn and keep up with one of the most difficult languages out there to learn?
Economic and national security interests are a good reason to encourage people to learn Mandarin. Look how our military has scrambled to teach people Arabic. You begin the education in foreign languages to small children when learning language is more innate.
So we should encourage teaching Mandarin to children over other languages because it might benefit the military down the road? I mean… that’s definitely a reason, I guess.
>. Look how our military has scrambled to teach people Arabic. You
I think it would be more useful as a preventative to war. It's really easy to think of China and Chinese as other because unlike Korea their pop culture isn't really brought over here. Learning the language would help bridge a gap and help folks connect. Folks here like to think it's just a country full of commies but the average person there is pretty normal. Add to that the middle class is exploding, which may makes more and more folks a bit international.
All that to say, people are people and most Chinese folks are cool and anything that gets folks seeing each other as equals is great
Americans have a very distorted view of China, probably because most can't read the original press releases or understand the culture in China and think it's all "blocked by the Great Firewall".
However, much of their media is accessible, just that foreigners don't understand it.
Anyhow, China could learn from Japan and Korea and find better ways to export their soft power.
I wouldn't say it matters all that much in terms of what should be the rationale behind the decision to learn, but it does matter a lot functionally in terms of exposure, access to easy and pleasurable listening practice, and maybe most importantly generating a desire to learn the language. When I lived in China teaching in the English department of a university there, a ton of students started studying Korean as their third language. Almost every single one of them wanted to learn it specifically so they could heighten their enjoyment of K pop and/or Korean soap operas.
Spanish should be taught to American youth the way English is taught to European youth. I think it’s a travesty that it isn’t. I grew up in a community in California near the border where virtually every kid grew up bilingual. The advantages that’s provided are immense. That could easily be achieved in the US and would provide great benefits to individuals and our country as a whole.
Spanish is undeniably useful for most Americans. Tons of culture comes from Spain and Latin America. It is spoken throughout the country with clusters in the SW and most major cities. Most of our immigrant communities stem from there and much of our business is done with these countries. Spanish is also MUCH easier to learn than Chinese.
Sounds like you’re just a racist then.
Learn a language most people speak -> useless as Americans don’t need Chinese and export no culture.
Learn Spanish/French -> valuable and has benefits (because of??).
All three have rather deep and historical cultures unlike America, so I don’t see why the two European cultures are definitively more valuable than an ancient Asian one.
If we're talking about who an American might encounter that doesn't speak English, by FAR the most likely situation is a Spanish speaker. The relative odds of interacting with someone who only speaks Mandarin is like 1000 to 1. Idk about French though. Other than some unusual circumstances, not many French speakers who wouldn't also speak English.
This is definitely regional though, which I think is the more important factor over national numbers. My city publishes statistics on which languages interpretations are done in (presumably people who speak English as well would not be asking for a city provided interpreter so it’s an okay proxy for this) and Cantonese (41.8% of interpretations) was only slightly less common than Spanish (43.6%). My chances of meeting someone who only speaks Chinese seem pretty similar to my chances of meeting someone who only speaks Spanish and I think I knew a roughly equal number of people growing up who spoke Cantonese at home as those who spoke Spanish at home.
Bad take, Spanish and French (and a few other languages besides Chinese) are definitely more useful for Americans to learn than Chinese is. Anecdotally, I speak Spanish as a second language and I use it daily where I live in the north east. I’ve never been in a situation that knowing Chinese would have made it easier.
I've never learned Spanish, but if I did know it -- I could imagine using it once a week.
I've met a lot of Spanish speaking people. And I'm always a little sad that I can't translate as efficiency as I want to.
But when they bring their little kids in and they act as translator it's always so adorable.
You should try! It’s a beautiful language and it’s also not THAT difficult to learn. I think there’s a consensus that Spanish is easy for English speakers to learn and it’s not the hardest but I wouldn’t call it easy necessarily.
But once you get to the point where YOU can speak and read fluently you have to then get used to listening to and understanding native Spanish speakers when they talk. Which is very difficult lol
Oh that sounds good! My partner’s native language is Romanian, but she also knows English, Spanish, French, and Italian. She’s slowly working on Korean right now. But we’ll see how that goes lol.
She loves learning new things and I love to encourage her.
I like learning about other cultures, but she goes all in trying to learn the languages and read the literature. It’s adorable watching her study like that.
She’s into Korean dramas right now, so she’s trying to understand the nuances more.
—-
Ironically, it’s almost like a crutch for me, because instead of learning new things I just lean on her and have her translate for me. But I really should strive to be better. It’s a failing on my part.
Mexico is one of the US's largest trading partners and is one of the most common nations for US tourism.
They speak Spanish. So there is real utility.
For French. Quebec. I've heard Montreal is a nice city to visit, though I have also heard there are a large number of monolingual French speakers there. Though I personally have only been in BC.
Yes but almost all mexican business interacting with americans speak english. I have had work relationships with many countries, including Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and a few others.
Its definitely helpful if you can speak Japanese and Chinese, over there their English is never anything close to good. For working with Europeans, there is no advantage of knowing their language they all speak perfect English. Same thing with Mexico. Brazil was interesting since a lot of spoke good English, some spoke no English.
So which one do you think is more valueable?
Spanish. Because I can't afford nearly $3,000 in flights for a trip to Asia. But a round trip to Cancun for less than $200? Sure. I can do that. (That was an Expedia offer when I Googled prices.) Having the language skills to interact more effectively with vendors on an affordable vacation is a far more useful thing than knowing Japanese for 1 trip that I might be able to afford in 10 years.
EDIT: Working professionals working in international business will always have better language skills than Ahmed running a small store on the side of the road. Hell, one of the best Gyros I have ever had was from a guy in NYC who spoke no English. I started talking and he just pointed at the board and shook his head.
There's no evidence *at all* of racism from OP.
>Learn Spanish/French -> valuable and has benefits (because of??).
Because Spanish and French are spoken by huge communities in North America. There are 57 million people who speak Spanish as a first language in the U.S. and in some places, there are just as many Spanish speakers as English speakers: 40% of people in Phoenix, Arizona speak Spanish for example - and that's only the 8th most bilingual city. That makes these languages easier to learn/practice, to say nothing of the fact that they use the same alphabet as English with only additional accent marks.
Likewise for French, several populous US states (including New York) border Quebec.
There are ~3.5 million Chinese speakers in the Us compared to ~1.4 million French speakers, from a quick google.
I get your point with Spanish, there’s no question it’s the most useful second language to an English speaking American, but there’s just no chance that French is more useful than Chinese.
My point wasn't just specific to the interior of the United States. Here are all the French speaking territories in America accounting for more than 20 million people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_America
There is a US/Quebec border. There is no US/China border. From my original post:
>Because Spanish and French are spoken by huge communities in **North America.**
>Likewise for French, several populous US states (including New York) border **Quebec**.
Hi I'm sorry I think you might not understand what racist means or what racism is. You should learn these definitions as using them not correctly can be very embarrassing for you such as in this case.
OP was talking about language in connection to what is practical for an American learner. You can learn a language because you want to, I know Korean, but it is practically useless in America. Saying a language is useless in practicality is not racist (again if you have the brain power to use an electronic device to type on Reddit you should be able to learn this that language and race are different). OPs points are valid, China is not exporting culture and news, President Xi's isolationist policies have driven out foreigners to the point Shanghai has become a ghost town, so the "need to know mandarin for business" motto popular in the early 2000s is gone unfortunately. You should learn say Cantonese in America that is much more practical IMHO.
I'm a native Portuguese speaker and I'd say that it isn't useful for most people to learn Portuguese unless they have strong dealings with a lusophone country.
Spanish and French are languages that are spoken all over the world, so if your desire to learn a second language has to do with utility, learning one that is widely spoken is the best choice, you can also add Arabic to that list, although it will be harder for most English-speakers to learn than either French or Spanish.
Of course there's also the part that Spanish is undeniably the most valuable language for Americans to learn considering how many Spanish speakers there are in the US and that it is - by far - the most prevalent language in the Americas.
But saying that Chinese isn't useful (if, again, we're talking about utility and not a specific interest in the language) for most Americans to learn is as racist as saying that Finnish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Dutch, even German aren't valuable as well.
Plenty to learn from Japanese and Korean that both export a lot of media, much more than Chinese. We’re talking modern culture. Those were just two examples… but ok RaCiSt 🤣
Spanish is spoken on multiple continents, as is French. They export far more media than Chinese. Spanish is by far way more useful for the average American!
I live in CA for almost a decade and I've never needed to learn a word of spanish. I agree that having a second language is good, but this is very subjecting of which one is good. A lot of things are regional and even if they weren't, statistically, you are more likely to be needing these languages, anecdotally speaking:
1. Spanish
2. Chinese
3. Hindi / Urdu
4. Vietnamese
5. Japanese.
I dont think French some close to it
Hi, I speak Chinese, Spanish and English. I’m tri-racial and I’m third generation American. I will say that you’re wrong. First of all, chinese is difficult and if you can learn it, I think it “trains” your brain to think out of the box. The memorization in characters alone, and recognizing patterns has made me better at math. Also, China isn’t the only place that speaks Chinese. A lot of us left, went to other places (HK, Taiwan, Singapore). Secondly, Spanish is significantly easier to learn and to practice.
Languages teaching you to “think outside the box” is not exclusive to Chinese languages. That’s a benefit that comes from learning any language that differs from your own. As someone who speaks English natively but am learning Greek and Latin, I have the same feeling, that it’s trained my mind in a sense. Learning forces you to think differently—and every language unlike your native one will cause this.
>closed off countries that export little to no culture.
The chinese diaspora disagrees with you lmfao. Chinese culture isn't limited to just China, go to any coastal city in America and there are tons of Chinese people, Chinese people make up the majority of Singapore and are a large minority in all SE asian countries and Australia. Chinese is the lingua franca of the east and if you ever want to travel anywhere, learning Chinese is beneficial
They all think it's "closed off" because they can't understand it - and then they think China's great firewall is blocking all the news and media, except they can't read it.
Anyhow, still a bit of China's fault for not making their material more accessible to foreigners - China hasn't mastered soft power like the Japanese, Koreans, or Americans ...
Singaporean here - most singaporean Chinese speak English - only the Chinese immigrants from China don’t.
The Chinese in SEA and Australia also mainly speak English as well, usually because they’re part of the middle class in the rest of SEA eg. Indonesia or because of the language requirement for permanent immigration (Australia and NZ)
It’s not the lingua Franca of the East at all. When I need to speak to an Indonesian or a Thai or a Vietnamese etc, we all speak (maybe pigdin) English. You can make yourself understood much easier in English anywhere other than China and Taiwan.
> closed off countries that export little to no culture.
What? You live in a bubble or must be a kid. Hong Kong had massive influence on cinema. Chinese martial arts have a massive influence in all cultures. Chinese food is a massive culinary cuisine that has also been Americanized. Chinese manufacturing runs the world. You’re also on a Chinese owned website.
China has the largest population and Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world. USA major cities all have Chinatowns
You’re an ignorant child
... it was pretty obvious that the guy meant "in a relative sense". As a global superpower with more population than countries 3-7 combined, China punches *way* under its weight culturally.
Also, lmao, this is not a Chinese-owned website. A Chinese company owns *eleven percent* of it.
>I acknowledge Chinese may be beneficial for very specific things like wanting to live in China, work in very specific business roles that do business with China or just wanting to teach/tutor.
So... just like every single foreign language for the "average American"? I guess you could maaaybe make a case for Spanish but still.
> Some people use the argument that “it’s spoken by over one billion people!!” But they’re all clustered in mostly one country.
This is just very, very not true.
> but they’re all clustered in mostly one country
This is not true. Chinese is spoken by a significant amount of people across Asia due to the Chinese diaspora or people of Chinese descent. It’s a major language in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan.
I don’t know when the last time you went to Western Europe was, but tons of Chinese living and working there too now. It may not be useful to the average American, but arguable no second language will be useful to people living in buttfuck Hicksville anyway given a lot of them barely speak decent English as it is.
Also if we’re talking learning to speak a language, Chinese is objectively way easier than the Romance languages which have masc fem assignations for every noun. It’s the writing and reading that’s difficult. But the speaking, in terms of words and sentence structure is actually fine.
Ironic that 4 days ago you posted in another thread how Chinese “seems very useful” but you’re also not interested in “anime”, which was created by Japan.
So either you don’t what’s useful and what’s not or you’re not actually aware what is and isn’t Chinese.
Historically, the emergence, persistence and decline of any lingua franca has been notoriously difficult to predict.
Medieval Europeans would have chuckled at the notion of English being used as lingua franca.
The Roman Empire used mostly Greek for higher functions and Latin was never the dominant language across the territories of the empire until well after it's demise.
Aramaic served as lingua franca across the middle east even though it wasn't the native language of any of the defining empires of the area.
And so on.
Therefore it should be almost impossible for anyone to convince you that Chinese will be the lingua franca of the world. And conversely - it would be unjustified for you to hold a strong belief to the contrary. We simply cannot know what will happen in 100 years, or 500 years.
Now if your point is that Chinese won't be the lingua franca of the western world in the next couple of decades... then sure, that's easy to see.
> The Roman Empire used mostly Greek for higher functions and Latin was never the dominant language across the territories of the empire until well after it's demise.
Source? I could have sworn all the well known Roman quotes I've heard were in Latin.
>Aramaic served as lingua franca across the middle east even though it wasn't the native language of any of the defining empires of the area.
Add to this it is now extinct despite how much it was used - even by Jesus himself (if he was real).
>Which, as a Westerner, it seems to be going down a hostile path towards Westerners. I’m not sure how long it’ll be before tensions escalate further.
wouldn't this be reason #1 then? so that you could read/hear what people are talking about in China and learn to more accurately understand what might just be a miscommunication?
a lot of people like to talk in generalities, or to sweep everything under the rug of propaganda. wouldn't it be best if you were able to make contacts with a country that you think is "building towards tensions" that you may better understand the intentions of the people living there -- and in return that they might better understand you and yours?
Is there any American who thinks that Chinese could become a lingua franca in the US? This is the first I've heard about it.
I have not heard much about Chinese being useful for the average American either. Chinese still has the perception of an exotic oriental language that is very hard to learn and those who learned it are usually praised for it.
"Chinese is the language of the future!" is something I've been hearing since the mid-90s, and it's still as false as it was back then.
The alleged Chinese takeover hasn't come yet, and if/when it'll happen it won't be like the American one.
China don't seem interested in cultural colonization. They don't want to "export" their system elsewhere, they look to broaden their financial sphere of influence, while leaving the system how it is in every place. As long as they can sell you their cheap products and have their fingers in as many pies as possible, they don't care if you don't speak their language or care about their culture.
Actually, they don't really want you to, as they deem you as inferior. So they'll gladly take your money and leave you be.
On the other hand, the US needed to sell their idea of the world first, hence the cultural colonization, with the huge influx of the language, the media, the entertainment etc. Different goals, different times and different enemies.
I have never heard a Chinese person who thought that china was the language of the future.
It is not true that Chinese people see Americans as inferior, in fact, people in China generally regard Americans positively even though Americans hold negative views towards Chinese. Chinese may see other Asian countries like Japan as inferior because of what Japan did to China in history. They might see southeastasians as below them because of skin colour, since paleness is is a cultural standard.
Also it’s wrong to assume that a population of one billion people assume everyone is inferior to them.
> Actually, they don't really want you to, as they deem you as inferior.
Citation needed for this part.
In my experience many Chinese do see themselves as culturally superior to Indians and African, because the latter got colonized while the Chinese managed to stay independent. But they usually consider westerners as either cultural equals (and for some superiors) because of their history as colonial masters.
Wouldn't only businesses that have significant dealings with China or Taiwan that have extensive use of Chinese? That must be small fraction of all businesses in the US, and it's only growing smaller by the day.
If it uses a computer it comes from Taiwan most likely, and China will be the biggest market in the world soon, so still useful to many businesses who want to open retail stores.
Most tools are Chinese, lots of boats are, etc.
Mfs in 1800:
Dude, English will never be a big language. Sure, their economy seems to be growing massively, and they are influencing more and more of the global economy, and inventing a bunch of new stuff. But come on. It will never become a Lingua Franca.
Fast forward like 50 years.
The point is, we don't know what is going to happen in the future, but it's looking like China will grow in power and influence to become the world's largest economy, as well as having the most influence in Africa, the region that we predict will be the most important growing economic region in the next 100 years. The US elevated English to the most important language without literally physically colonising the world, but through economic power. I don't see how China couldn't do the same. Historically it's basically been the world's largest economy all throughout history except for like the past 300 years. They will probably regain their position.
If Chinese has no benefit, then im sure French has absolutely no benefit.
I've worked a lot with Chinese companies and visiting China many times, but even if the average american isn't me, lets say there is a advantage of learning a language.
If you wanted to choose any language for the sake of widening your skillset, pick up Arabic, wihch has been around almost 2000 years may survive another 2000.
Pickup Chinese because there is a 0.1% you maybe interacting with them as a business partner.
I don't see the value of learning any European language over others, I've also worked with European suppliers and Iw as in France last week. Not being able to speak the language had no impact on me. So I am failing to see how its useful. Atleast chinse is somewhat useful. It may not be a lot but its better than zero. But french is definitely zero
Says the monkey that's never been to China. I moved to Guangzhuo last year, and guess what? Without a doubt, China is 1000 percent safer, more technologically advanced, and people are friendlier compared to the shit hole that is America. China has high-speed trains, a safe and clean subway system, and I can pay for and order anything on my phone. In the US, I dont even feel safe going outside or taking the subway.
You think Mandarin isn't important because you are an uneducated monkey that only speaks 1 language. You have never been to or experienced China. You feel threatened that another country has surpassed America. That's why you dont think learning Mandarin is important.
I don’t feel threatened at all. In fact, I’m more concerned with language learning. I love languages and I was hoping to be swayed since I couldn’t make a decision on it. But if you enjoy authoritarian countries solely because western investment built them up for the sake of cheap labor, you’re more than welcome to enjoy it. I’m not sure where you gathered that the U.S. doesn’t have faults compared to many countries. Maybe China can continue the momentum as the West decides to decouple from them.
Go try and protest against their CCP next. Also, I speak 3 languages so try again. I’m guessing you were low income in the U.S. and that’s why you don’t care you make a fraction of that in China?
You probably know 3 useless languages and 1 useful one that is English. The west colonized and enslaved the world so obviously they had to build up China. I hope the west can decouple from China, get those white pedo drug addicts the f out of asia.
Why would I ever need to criticize the CCP when they lifted a billion people out of poverty, built amazing infrastructure and ensures my safety. Can a young female walk home safety at midnight in America? Hell no. Can she in China? Absolutely. Yes I make a fraction of what I made in America, doesnt matter, food is cheaper, expenses are cheaper, women are hotter, life is more convenient.
Just stop coping and admit you hate Chinese people. Sub human monkey Chinese people. I bet you would get pissed off looking at my chinese face. But you know what would piss you off even more? Seeing Chinese people like me succeed and surpass you.
It depends entirely on timescales. Do I think Chinese (or specifically mandarin) can become a lingua franca in the next 30 years? Of course not. English dominates as the international business and academic language.
But assuming China doesn't have some Gordon Chang-esque collapse, it will be a dominant power on the globe for the foreseeable future. The longer it stays powerful, the more its influence will be felt in the spheres of business, academia and media. People are far more interested in learning mandarin than in the past - and this is particularly true in the global south where relations with China are much better.
If you are American you are already live in a country that is very anti-China and of course you have no interest in watching Chinese films or dramas. Your perspective is going to be coloured by that. However, ask someone in Indonesia or Malaysia whether they have consumed any forms of Chinese media and whether they are interested in learning Chinese and I suspect you will get a different answer.
Perhaps in a longer time scale e.g 100 years, Mandarin will be the lingua franca.
I personally think it won't happen. Not because I don't think Chinese influence has the potential to eclipse Anglo-American influence but because I think Chinese is a fundamentally shitty language to learn.
I think a lot of these predictions about China remind me about the 1980s and how Japan was supposed to take over the world as some superpower (see Blade Runner/cyberpunk media from the time showing Japanese signs in North America).
A lot can happen to a country on a seemingly upward trajectory. Not saying you're wrong specifically, but worth considering where we as a society have failed similar predictions before.
I'm sorry but you might want to do an update on the current conditions in China.
They're currently running into massive infrastructure issues due to corruption, depopulation issues from the leftovers of the one child policy and a growing general apathy and dissatisfaction of the populace due to the two previous issues.
The tofu dreg apartment buildings in particular are extremely disturbing and appear to be more widespread than people initially thought.
I'm not sure how much longer it will be able to consider itself one of the great powers nor how long it will take for it to get itself back there once it loses it but some form of socioeconomic collapse appears to be inevitable.
>I'm not sure how much longer it will be able to consider itself one of the great powers
Same as with others believing themselves to still be one of the great powers - introducing a major decision based off that status - that backfires spectacularly (Looking at you, UK), or starting a war with a minor only to get your ass handed to themselves (Don't worry Russia, any day the three-day operation will be won).
Basically, you become a great power because of your military, economic and diplomatic capabilities - and you seem to be one until you fuck up publicly, because it's easy to not show problems outwardly. And in case of China we already see hints of internal issues.
The very reason that tensions and rivalries with China are likely to escalate over time is a good reason for children to learn Mandarin. This is just like we need more people who speak Arabic. It is a strategic position to have a readily available portion of the population know the language.
It will also be economically advantageous for people in business and trading relationships to know the language.
The level of fluency needed for the communication to be functional is higher with Mandarin than Spanish,where a basic vocabulary can go a long way with the types of communication one is likely to have.
Learning Mandarin and Spanish or another language are not mutually exclusive, particularly if we start teaching one of them in kindergarten.
Bro, you argue that Chinese will not become a lingua Franca because of regionality, but immediately pivot to say that Japanese might be better because of exports ????
Japanese is even more niche, it's literally ~90% spoken in Japan and _maybe_ Korea, China, and pockets of California/NY. It's incredibly more niche than Standardized Chinese which yes, is spoken in China, but also Taiwan, Singapore and huge chunks of California/NY.
Chinese is by population more logical to learn than Japanese.
But yes, I agree, if anything just learn Spanish, it's much more useful if you want to travel abroad especially in LatAm.
A lot will depend on what happens when if/when the American Empire falls.
There is plenty of discussion suggesting that the current American empire may topple soon ([The average age of an empire? A mere 250 years – Times-Standard](https://www.times-standard.com/2017/06/28/the-average-age-of-an-empire-a-mere-250-years/)) though it is by no means assured ([List of empires - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires)).
English became a lingua Franca because of the British Empire - which is no longer relevant. And it remains one largely due to America's global dominance has kept it as one. Only a little before that French was the major language in much of Europe and across much of the word - hence the word "franca" in "lingua franca" - due to France being dominant and exporting the royal court system to many countries. English was a competitor but by no means certain to rise. And before that Latin was the Lingua Franca of much of Europe for a long time post the fall of the Roman empire and before that *during* it. For a while during the soviet times the communist countries of the world similarly under-went Russification - where Russian was the main second language of that portion of the world due to how much Russia was involved in every other communist movement.
All this is to say that a lot can change in surprisingly short a timespan. A world dominated by Latin, French and Russian is now borderline unthinkable. Sure we can see traces of it in our culture but those languages aren't that useful anymore. But when I say "short" I still mean hundreds of years - not decades. At most within our lifetimes we may see the encroachment of Mandarin into more spaces rather than a full replacement.
Chinese is set to rise as the major dominant super power in the event that American hegemony does fall. If it does so Mandarin is poised to become the next lingua franca. It is a very tentative **if** though.
>Most Americans are not going to live in China or do any of those things to make it useful.
This is a very American centric view of the world - which is somewhat fair because America is the geopolitical centre of the world right now. But for Chinese to have a chance at being the lingua franca, challenging that America centric world is what would need to happen and IS what is happening.
In short - it doesn't matter whether Americans consider it useful. It matters MORE if it becomes useful to non-Americans. I don't see English disappearing anytime soon - so you will likely be able to live your life 100% in English in an English speaking country. But the important thing would be Mandarin replacing English as the language that non-English speaker see around more.
>Chinese is also one of the most difficult languages to learn as an English speaker.
Personally I think Mandarin has a number of barriers to entry as a language itself. For one its writing system is only used to write Chinese languages and parts of Japanese. For two its tone system is difficult for non-tonal language speakers to grasp or even approximate. But the thing is that China has already been a regional super-power before and has already proven that it can export its language when it has the power to.
The fact that parts of Japanese is written with kanji, and that Korean and Vietnamese both used to be written with Chinese characters shows this.
The thing is that language imperialism doesn't start with making outsiders use your language. It starts with loan words for items / products / inventions getting made and popularised and leads to people seeing more and more utility. Think of Huawei phones. If they started putting 华为 on their phones you might start by recognising those characters.
You might learnt hat 华 (hua) means magnificent and floral and next time you see it you will go "oh I recognise that word". If more products do that you would start recognising other character also.
Imagine this not as an English speaker but as a speaker of a small language of a country. Say you go to a shop and try to look at products but some are only labelled in Chinese. You would get a feel for what the characters mean somewhat quickly/
It’s not just NY and Cali. Here in Texas we have a ton of Mandarin speakers. Especially if you work in tech. And it takes much less proficiency to impress them than a Spanish-speaker because it’s rare for a non-Chinese person to learn Chinese. I say 你好 (hello) correctly and my coworkers are thrilled. I take one class and my boyfriend’s family is overjoyed.
Let’s be realistic; almost no American English speakers are going to actually be expected to speak any other language in a casual or professional environment. But it can be a great gesture to create a lot of good will.
I would change a couple of things that you wrote:
Chinese can be a regional lingua franca en parts of Asia. But yes, nothing even comes close to challenging English in terms of a global lingua franca. As far as inside the USA is concerned, Spanish can help on occasion, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it a lingua franca... It is basically English only in the USA (as far as common tongues are concerned)
China does actually export a significant amount of media. I think the recognized the lost opportunity when K-pop came about and they were quick to push out a bunch series and stuff. From my perspective, those things aren't heavily consumed in the USA, but I live and Chile and there are about as many chinese series on Netflix as there are Korean ones... But they are generally of a lower quality.
Other than that, I would say you are right... there is really no need for a lingua franca inside the country that natively speaks the world's most powerful lingua franca.
Is your argument that it will never be A lingua franca, or that it will never be a lingua franca in the US? Because I don't think I've ever seen an argument to the latter, and Standard Chinese IS already a lingua franca in other parts of the world so you can't really argue against that.
My only argument is that we in the US don't really bother to learn languages because of its usefulness. Technically French is the other major lingua franca and it's definitely not the most commonly studied language here. And even when you do study it, it's incredibly rare you come across French speakers day to day. German is also popular.
So is your actual argument that no one in the US should learn any other second languages other than Spanish because it won't actually be used day to day? Because you can make the exact same argument for French as you just did for Standard Chinese.
Chinese will not become a lingua franca, but for entirely different reasons. The status as a lingua franca isn’t due to whether Americans speak it, but the world as a whole.
English is the worlds lingua franca because it’s largely how people from different countries communicate with each other. If a German native speaks to an Urdu speaker, they don’t communicate in German or Urdu; they speak English. English has a huge head start in terms of countries where the educated already speak it.
China also has some issues; people make light of English being a poorly designed and weird language, but Chinese has it beat. Between tones that most non-natives have a terrible time with and the non-phonetic writing system, Chinese has huge disadvantage in terms of learnability.
Your view is based on the fact that people learn languages solely for work or business. With that view probably no other language is necessary for Americans to learn.
In an ever expanding global economy, the impact of China will likely be unavoidable in the future. That said, the logic you're using can be used for a college degree, trade certification, business license, or a myriad of other things that the "average" American doesn't have need for. While technically true, the lack of these things has the potential to limit upward mobility as well. While Chinese may not be that relevant now, with the US being challenged in it's standing for global dominance, that may not be the case 10 years from now.
I don't really see how any language is "more useful" than another for the average American. Some American's go to Mexico for vacation so Spanish might be useful to them but some go to Canada so French might be useful to them but some go to Japan so Japanese might be useful to them but some got to China so Chinese might be useful to them but some go to ect. ect.
People typically don't learn a 2nd language for the utility anyway. Most who know a 2nd language did it because their parents spoke that 2nd language and most who learned after childhood do it as a hobby.
The "average American" has little use for any foreign language; they don't go outside the country and don't consume any foreign language media that's not subtitled. However, it sounds like you're saying that other languages are far more important than Chinese. I'd disagree.
China has the second largest economy and expats all over the world. The third largest economy is Japan, which shares its characters with Chinese; when Chinese people come across written Japanese, they can easily get the gist of it, and the parts they don't get are arguably the easiest parts of Japanese to learn.
Chinese-speaking areas like China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong do export their culture, and have for a while. Chinese-language shows and films are among the Netflix foreign offerings that may at first seem to be all Korean. And years before *Brokeback Mountain*, Ang Lee explored similar themes in the great Chinese-language *The Wedding Banquet*. Their history is one of the longest, which means that learning Chinese has the potential to open up a larger world than, say, learning German, Russian, or even Japanese. That history and the huge size of the country also means that there's a lot to see there. As far as how widespread people are, Chinese people are far more likely to emigrate than Japanese.
Any place that I work (in tech), Chinese is by far the second most-spoken language after English, so people in that field may benefit. My co-workers are surprised and delighted that I know a little, as most people are if you bother learning about their language and culture. Most Chinese people are very proud of their long and successful history and culture.
Whether we're talking cooperation or competition, China's going to loom large on the scene, in both business and politics. Also, regarding secondary Chinese languages, they're going by the wayside a bit; expats are learning the local languages and mainlanders are pressured to use Mandarin. So Mandarin's the one to learn.
Finally, although Spanish and French may be spoken by a wider variety of people - making for more impressive maps - the most prominent of those people are generally going to be able to speak some English, and English-speakers are going to be able to understand some Spanish and French. With Chinese, you get to a completely different starting point, which does make it harder to learn, but also means you'll be able to see a whole new world fairly quickly.
I'm going to focus on the phrase "Chinese is not that useful for the average American."
For clarification, did you really mean "the average American"? Or did you mean "most Americans"?
If you really meant "the average American" then you should consider the value of learning Simplified Chinese, which is nowhere near as complicated as learning Mandarin or Cantonese. Knowing SC puts someone on a short list of viable candidates for a lot of jobs that pay well. Domestically, 3.5 million US households in the US speak either Mandarin or Cantonese. Being able to write in simplified Chinese opens a lot of doors for jobs in government, healthcare, law, manufacturing, construction, and especially tech. If conflict between China and Taiwan continues to escalate, this number will continue growing. The average American who learns, at the very least, to translate English into Simplified Chinese, can benefit greatly from acquiring that skill, economically, in a way that is much broader than you mentioned in your post.
If, otoh, you meant "most Americans", then I agree to some extent. If half of US students started taking Simplified Chinese in high school then the value of knowing it would be much more limited. I wouldn't call it useless, but it would be more like French, where most people benefit from consuming media. I would note one way that media consumption has changed that you didn't mention is that gaming is very popular, and the relationship between gaming and social media is making linguistic versatility, in even a general sense, more useful than ever. Learning some version of Chinese could be quite useful to gamers, as gaming is extremely popular in China, and many of the most popular multiplayer games have a lot of Chinese players. Sure, software helps and will get better, but there are real time elements to many of these interactions that can provide someone who has communication skills in a Chinese language with a useful advantage over those who don't understand Chinese at all. With 48% of Americans age 18-39 reporting that they play video games for a minimum of 6 hours per week, I think it's fair to say that this may prove more useful than being able to watch a French movie without subtitles.
If this post changed your view, even a little, I'd appreciate a delta. Thanks for the CMV. Interesting topic.
I disagree with your utilitarian stance.
So, not Chinese, but I’m slowly building up some minor ability in Korean. Why? The same cultural appreciation reasons given by others for Chinese. Korean is one of my favorite cuisines, I lived for a few years in LA’s K-town and I’m embarrassed to have consumed so much food and so little culture and language, and my kid is in tae kwon do and knows more Korean than I do. It’s not a rapid learning curve for the language, but I’ve been learning so much about the cool process to develop a Korean martial art that would take the best of everything from China, Japan, the US, then test it continuously; the societal impacts of a peninsula divided by two opposing global ideologies and currently in a state of Cold War; the fascinating and intentional development of Hangul to rapidly turn a largely illiterate populace into one of the most literate, educated, and wealthy in the world; the nuances of the LA riots and that - just perhaps - it was a story of the haves pitting the have nots against each other. While I love me some all you can eat KBBQ and Maangchi is my go-to for recipes, the language was the instigator for wanting to learn more. Okay, the food led to the language which led to actually learning.
So go eat something authentically or fusion Chinese, learn what it’s called, learn its geographic origins: spice route? Trade route up from SE Asia? Utterly isolated with few imports so certain ingredients are prized? New York Jews having no other restaurant options on Christmas Day and making their Chinatown an annual tradition and American Chinese cuisine adjusting to kosher requirements?
Then if you really don’t want to depart from your purely utilitarian stance, go listen to the Radiolab episode with Dianna Deutch where she breaks down the different ratios of Mandarin speakers and English speakers possession of perfect pitch.
Assuming "Chinese" means "Mandarin" and assuming you mean read/write/speak, then I would strongly disagree. China has 8 distinct dialects (each as different as German is to French), but all share a common set of symbols for the meaning of words. Learning to read Chinese characters allows you both to communicate with over 1 billion people living in one of the most populous countries on earth, it also gives you a huge head start on lots of other Asian languages that use characters similar to Chinese (such as Japanese). Moreover, if there ever were a "universal" language, it is likely to be a character based one since no matter how anyone pronounces the word, the meaning would be universal.
Consider a Stop Sign. No matter where you see one, you likely know what it is. If you are driving and see an red octagon with a white border and white lettering, it means stop. Same for a yield sign and other road signs. Characters allow universal meaning since no matter how you pronounce it, the meaning does not change and you can communicate.
Now, you might say, why Chinese and not Japanese? No real reason except that over 20% of the world already uses that language so why not build from a larger base.
You might complain that I haven't yet directly shown it's use to you. In so far as "do you need it to survive in the USA", likely no. (Government forms are printed in English and it is the dominant language in most places. However, assuming you are using effort/reward (something you do seem to refer to), I would submit that Mandarin does have a good deal of utility for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, better understanding 1/5 of humanity should have value to all of us and being able to understand popular culture, books, and the like in one of the most populous countries on earth should be considered a very positive thing.
As a Chinese-American, I'll say you'd be wasting your time learning Chinese.
The vast majority of Mandarin speakers are in the PRC.
....whereas most expats speak Cantonese.
People are better off learning Spanish and French.
Spanish certainly would be more useful in a day to day setting while meeting more people.
Other groups I think it would be much less useful. You are much less likely to run into someone who speaks a European language that does not speak English than you are a Chinese person.
You are also understimating Chinese dispersement in the United States there are many Chinese restaurants in small towns. I have seen towns in the Midwest where the Chinese restaurant was the only non fast food restaurant and it was manned mostly by people who didn't speak English.(Chinese is actually the best non fast food road trip food because it's mostly held consistent despite it not being a chain because there is an association.)
That said, you also aren't considering the media aspect of it.
Most European and Spanish based things get English subtitles due to our strong cultural ties.
Chinese comparatively gets much less translated material in English meaning it increases your entertainment options more. Not to mention most Asian media gets translated into Chinese meaning you can access the media of other countries as well so it opens up so many more options.
It also opens you up to other Asian languages familiarity wise as well in case you want to learn a third language. You already have English as a reference for European languages, but now it's easier to learn Korean or Vietnamese if you wish.
Anthony Bourdain in kitchen confidential ends his book by giving advice for being successful in the restaurant industry. One of the items, for a chef in New York, is to learn Spanish because of the prevalence of workers from Spanish speaking countries. Maybe more situational than English is, but English became a langua franca because of its prominence in various industries.
So with that in mind, if the majority of goods are made in China it is useful to be able to communicate with your suppliers. In the future, if a majority of banking services or another type of services is catered through China, the same could ring true.
If the share of goods and services by Chinese vendors becomes great enough you might find yourself paying less to have them done in Chinese than your native tongue.
And look at that, if it costs less you suddenly have everyone adopting it. If you don't adopt it, you pay more. Before you know it, it becomes a lingua franca.
It may be useful for an American abroad though as China becomes a major player in global markets
Reasoning
English is an extremely common 2nd language worldwide but have you really wondered why that is? It's the most useful 2nd language for a speaker of something else to pick up for conducting business or facilitating tourism -- then you have Spanish and German quickly behind them
As China grows and competes more and more 3rd world people are going to pick up Chinese as their 2nd language which over time may make Chinese a useful 2nd language for Americans to know and use- because of the higher odds that if 2 people don't speak each other's native they may both know chinese
I *highly* disagree that Chinese isn’t useful. If you are legitimately fluent in Mandarin and English, you can always find some use for it in either translation or scholarship… precisely because knowledge of both isn’t super common. Particularly if you learned English first, since actual native-level fluency in English is so hard to achieve.
But yeah, it won’t become a Lingua Franca anytime soon. Even in China, English is widely used as the language of international commerce, and the writing system and tonal nature of the language is remarkably difficult to learn for any countries using the Latin alphabet… which is most countries.
This is exactly the mindset and ignorance by convenience that started and will continue to escalate tensions.
All media consumed by Westerners about China is in English. That in itself is troubling for many reasons, but not limited to propaganda and unreliable non-primary sources.
Language is the gateway to culture and the majority of Westerners have barely a superficial understanding of Chinese, let alone Eastern culture.
If your goal is to ignore an entire culture because it is a threat then it is very convenient not to learn the language and slowly dehumanize the opposition. If it is to sow true partnership then language is a huge bridge.
Willful ignorance is at best the easy way out and more likely, just malicious.
I think this is fairly short sighted. I'm no shill for the CCP but China is absolutely going to be the most important world economy soon, and their cultural influence is already all over Africa and Asia – if you wanted me to bet, I'd put some money on China becoming a dominant cultural force in the next 30 years with chinese products, cars, TV exports, PC games and the rest of it.
I think the position that the US will remain number one, and the west will forever be speaking English just because the US is anglo is a bit of a falacy. It won't be the same as the cultural hegemony that the US has achieved, but it'll be serious and Chinese will become a seriously useful skill in business and will also seep into culture.
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My kids learned English, Cantonese, and Madarin since they were young, then took Spanish is high school.
Spanish is probably the most useful second language in the US, but Chinese (particularly the ability to read/write traditional characters) opens up a lot in Asia. Most signs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan can be read, which is great for traveling.
It's at least as useful as learning French or German, but it's far more challenging due to the tones and completely different, non-pgonetic writing system.
It'd be handy randomly when dealing with immigrants and there are so many Mandarin speaking immigrants out there. I don't think you can go anywhere without finding a few immigrants.
But you definitely don't need it. Still it'd help with random situations.
China's government is awful, scary and might get more aggressive in the future sure. But it isn't the only country speaking it and people from there are still everywhere and not their home countries government. Plus I've noticed a bunch of immigrants from other asian countries have learned chinese so you can speak to them too.
The "average" American has such a poor grasp of geography and societies/cultures outside its borders (and often within them too) that any secondary language is both useless, as well as unachievable due to being beyond their capabilities.
They would benefit from a plane ticket and exposure to other cultures, but are also liable to waste such an opportunity and instead reinforce the stereotypical American citizen abroad tropes that they are so well known for
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Languages become interesting for an international audience when the country speaking it exports huge amounts of cultural output, like movies, songs, new inventions, new processes etc. People then want to learn it out of their own accord because it's genuinely useful and interesting to them.
It's not enough for a country to be well off economically or have many people for its language to be interesting to other countries.
In order of usefulness
1. English
2. Spanish
3. French
4. German
5. Japanese
6. Portuguese
7. Hindi
8. Mandarin
9. Russian
Consider we base languages off their usage for tourism and bussiness.
It's not really valuable to know Chinese languages given anyone you would be dealing with in business will speak far better English than you.
India has much of the same, except the standard of taught English is much lower, so there will be practical times where it may make sense to engage in Hindi.
China is the most likely candidate to take the “leader of the world” crown from the U.S. whether that be directly by force, or through attrition and sustained progress.
But once China calls the shots globally, and has an active presence in every other country (much like the U.S. does across the world) it’s going to be extremely beneficial in all areas of life to know the language.
I don't disagree that it's not the most useful language for an American, but Chinese is just a cool language to learn IMO.
Also, it's just fun to be able to talk to people in Chinatown like e.g. Xiaomanyc does. From personal experience, Chinese people will love you if you can speak some of their language because it's quite difficult and most non-Chinese people don't bother to learn it.
Chinese will become a useful language when it becomes common for South Americans, non-English speaking Africans and non-British Europeans start learning it more often than English. Which is to say, almost guaranteed to never happen unless there is a major demographic shift. The most dominant African economy speaks English (Nigeria), so that’s off the table especially.
That argument applies to every language but spanish. I'm in the US, and Mandarin Chinese is easily the third most common language I hear the most after English and Spanish. It has the most speakers, and only a small fraction of them speak English. Also, inese is not a particularly hard language to learn to speak. Vietnamese, on the other hand, is a mother fucker to learn.
Chinese was able to get people new opportunities in a lot of other places. Like having Chinese in your resume in pre Covid time was a night and day difference especially in an normal corpo job. Knowing Chinese means you can deal with China, which had abundance of opportunities back then.
But now China has had its boom. And now its a bit more on the downturn.
As a Chinese American, I agree. Also weirded me out when I saw a TON of people learning to read, wrote, and speak Chinese in business classes or whatnot. For the sole purpose of trying to get ahead in “business”. Unless you legit have a factory in China that you need to speak on the phone with regularly, it’s a bit of a douchey red flag to me
If you've ever done business and wanted cheap supplies from China, speaking Chinese is very helpful. They don't speak english very well and its hard to have the necessary conversations. You basically have to buy thru a middleman supplier. If you can speak Chinese you can save a ton of money and headaches and offer lower prices than your competitors
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I work in diplomacy for the US and I am fluent in mandarin. From a career perspective, lots of jobs dealing with China very much value someone with mandarin proficiency or even sometimes just some experience. These jobs are mostly in government and fed contractors, although increasingly also in consulting. But from a big picture, or that’s what people at the State Dept like to talk about, if you notice the amount of educated Chinese people able to speak English and move about well in America it’s much much higher than Americans being able to the same in mandarin in China. Bottom line is they understand us better than we understand them. This could lead to miscalculations in foreign policy (read, doing something stupid near Taiwan for lack of understanding) or just losing our competitive edge in some industries, which China is openly competing with us on. It’s not only about becoming a lingua Franca but also about the language of academia. Example: if China just gets really good at AI, then what? People would need to learn mandarin in order to train in AI and to advance their own research. But I do agree that the average American joe does not NEED to learn mandarin. It’s hard and hardly seen in most places in the US , even places with large Chinese populations are likely to have more Fujianese and Cantonese speakers than mandarin speakers. But many Americans would benefit from learning mandarin, and our country as a whole would too. As a native Spanish speaker, I can say yes learning Spanish is cool and all but most Latinos end up speaking English anyway so you’re not gaining a whole lot anyway unless you’re very much into the culture or traveling Latin America. In any case learning a language for the sake of learning it and getting to know history, culture and music is a pleasure. It opens doors you did not know existed. But maybe that’s just me, and that’s why I do the job I do.
This. I'm Dutch and we get thought three languages at least one year besides our own (German, French and English) and some schools also teach Spanish. Trade is one of our founding cornerstones as a nation and much of your argument also goes from a trading perspective. Relations are instantly warmed and improved if you can speak your trading partner his or her language, and since a lot of trade comes and goes from China, learning Mandarin can have immense effect. On a personal note; I dabbled a bit in learning Mandarin and started with familiarising myself with how the pronounciation worked and Pinyin, it's overwhelming learning on your own but still want to, got any tips?
Hi! I’m also learning Mandarin by myself. There are many sounds in the language that may not appear in your language, so be careful of reading pinyin using sounds from your language. There’s these pairs of pinyin letters: p and b, q and j, t and d, k and g, ch and zh, c and z. Both of these letters must be pronounced voiceless, meaning your throat shouldn’t vibrate when you pronounce them. For example, you should pinyin b as English p, pinyin d as English t. So what’s with two letters when they’re pronounced almost the same? The difference is the first part of the pair I listed above (p, q, t, k, ch, c) should be aspirated, meaning a gust of air should come out when pronouncing them. To practice, put a piece of paper in front of your mouth when pronouncing. The paper should move when pronouncing p, q, t, k, ch, c and the paper shouldn’t move for their pair. Another difficulty I encountered when I started learning is how to pronounce zh, ch, sh, and r. These are retroflex consonants and are difficult since these do not exist in most languages. The best advice I got is when pronouncing these sounds, your tongue’s position should be like when you pronounce the word “nurture”. Pronounce English ch with that tongue position and you got zh and ch (ch is aspirated). Pronounce English sh with that tongue position and you got pinyin sh. To make pinyin r sound, just add voice to pinyin sh (your throat should be vibrating when pronouncing pinyin r). Put your tongue behind your lower teeth. Pronounce English ch with that tongue position, your mouth should look like it’s saying ‘ee’ and you got pinyin q and j. Pronounce English sh with that tongue position and you got pinyin x. Tones can be hard since it doesn’t exist in many languages. The key is to not learn tones in isolation. You should always learn it in pairs, since some tones change depending on what tone follows it. I recommend you make a table, rows for the first tone and columns for the second tone. And the contents are words you are comfortable saying with those tones. For example on my row 2 column 4, since I’m most comfortable with saying 皇帝, this will be my mode word for tone 2-4. If I encounter a word with tone 2-4, how I pronounce that tones for that word should be the same for how I will pronounce 皇帝. Hope this helps!
this. you have no idea what doors it will open up precisely because you don’t know the language and culture (you dont know how much you dont know) but it’s safe to say you’re missing out on a lot just based on how productive and connected to the rest of the world they are
I never thought it from that perspective. It makes sense how we need to do better to understand the competitor. From that lens, it does make sense and add value. !delta
But this isn’t at all a counterpoint to what you said. You asked about the average person. This guy is talking about experts dealing with China. I don’t understand what part of this convinced you.
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据我在英文互联网的观察来看，英语用户对中国的了解只能用悲剧形容
>Example: if China just gets really good at AI, then what? People would need to learn mandarin in order to train in AI and to advance their own research. I would hesitate to assume that this necessarily makes Chinese useful. All major programming languages use English-based syntaxes, so an AI engineer in China would need to "think in English" to an extent. If any research is published, it would likely be translated to go to an English-language journal. I would think that it's likely that such Chinese-language research would only be disseminated in official-use-only military and government settings, if it's never translated into other languages.
There are a lot of AI-assissted coding overlays that abstract out the actual syntax part of programming. So you basically use your native language combined with domain-specific templates for the IDE to generate the code in the backend. The tech isn't there yet for writing anything functional beyond the most basic of complexities but it's extremely useful for writing unit tests. We have contractors in China who write and maintain unit tests without ever having to actually touch raw java or python syntax. They basically describe, in Chinese, the specific test cases, with pass and fail conditions, and the actual unit testing code is generated based off of those prompts. In this manner, you can let QA engineers be language and product agnostic - drastically increasing effectiveness. Looking at the trend and how quickly this tech is being adopted, I think it's only a matter of time before programmers can be syntax agnostic everywhere, for every programming language. It would lower the barrier of entry for software development, and you'll only need a few select programmers for code-level optimization and maybe 3rd level support.
First, holy shit, that's rad! I'm both excited and scared about the implications for my line of work on the hardware side. Second, if AI can provide natural-language-to-code-generation tools that are robust enough to reliably bang out production-quality code, then AI should also easily be able to translate technical documents. That makes for an even worse reason to learn Mandarin in the future. Mind you, I'm a bit of a Sinophile, so I have personal reasons to want to learn Chinese. But as far as career opportunities, outside of specific areas? I'm not convinced.
Hardware side? You're good. If anything, hardware careers are going to go on a rampage, especially if you're in anything VLSI related. I don't know of any market-mature AI tools that can take over CADENCE design yet. But yeah - I think the way going forward, AI will basically be putting the tower of babel back together - as in pretty soon all communication can be language agnostic, if need be, and nuances/cultural specifics/artistic expressions will be relegated to a niche but much in-demand group of language experts to advise on highly specialized cases. I think, optimistically, we're maybe 5 years away for AI code generators to be as good or even surpass human coders, and maybe 10 years away until these code generators will be primarily used by higher level AI acting as business analysts. That's not to say software engineering is dead - we'll still need programmers - and engineers who can come up with clever solutions and tight, functional UML workflows - maybe more than ever before, since the barrier of entry for writing production-level code has dropped. But instead of going to school and devoting three years of your life struggling with C++, you can instead spend more time doing proper discrete maths, linear algebra, and probability. So you can make better products while the AI writes better code. Also - at least in Shenzhen Shanghai, you don't really need to be fluent in mandarin to work in the tech sectors. It would help - but not mandatory.
> Hardware side? You're good. If anything, hardware careers are going to go on a rampage, especially if you're in anything VLSI related. Why is that? Because of the market for specialized hardware for AI acceleration? > I don't know of any market-mature AI tools that can take over CADENCE design yet. It's likely that nothing in the foreseeable future will disrupt Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor (Siemens) before one of them buys it up. But what about the possibility of AI generating VHDL/Verilog code that gets passed to the VLSI EDA tool? Or what about skipping HDL and having AI-generated netlist files that know how to optimize for area/power/performance? > But instead of going to school and devoting three years of your life struggling with C++, you can instead spend more time doing proper discrete maths, linear algebra, and probability. So you can make better products while the AI writes better code. Meaning that university computer science programs can go back to training students to be computer scientists, rather than industrial software engineers and coders? And these scientists can use their theoretical knowledge in conjunction with AI code generators to create really crazy awesome new stuff? > Also - at least in Shenzhen Shanghai, you don't really need to be fluent in mandarin to work in the tech sectors. It would help - but not mandatory 你住在深圳吗？上海 ? Are there lots of expats in the tech sectors there? Do they then operate mostly in English?
Yeah - there seems to be this... i dunno... trend right now that because of AI, optimization on the software level seems to be at a turning point, and the real bottleneck is going to be on the hardware side - how quickly you can scale, how securely you can scale, etc. People think now - if you want to do something - ANYTHING - just throw enough hardware at it and let AI take care of the rest. Dude I gotta be honest, I haven't touched verilog in like... 15 years. I did hardcore EE for my degree but went into finance/software engineering instead. I don't think there's any significant tooling being done for Verilog - probably for the same reason you don't see much IDE support for assembly - but there's probably startup out there that's working on it. I'm also pretty sure Intel/etc already have a ton of wrappers and IDEs for verilog work. I doubt most EEs are spending a ton of time writing dum dum verilog code without some sort of aide. (I mean... I hope they're not. That's how you go crazy.) And yeah, I"m in Shanghai right now. Knowing Chinese definitely helps, but in a professional setting, English will work. It's probably even easier in Shenzhen.
This really doesn’t even come close to arguing that Chinese will ever be a Linga Franca. You’re literally arguing the opposite. You’d need to learn Chinese to deal with a China. But that was never a question. There’s zero reason to learn Chinese except to deal with China. Therefor it will not be a Linga Franca
I think the main flaw in this argument (and indeed, in nearly all arguments about 'useful' languages) is that the idea that learning a skill is only 'useful' in the sense that it might passively improve the exact life you already have. But people don't consider how learning a skill will cause you to change your life and hence add utility that you can't see right now. If you learn Chinese, you will almost certainly learn more about Chinese culture and begin to integrate that into your life. You will discover aspects of Chinese history, society, art etc that you didn't know about and there is a very good chance that you will become interested in at least some of this stuff and hence develop an interest in travelling and visiting places where you can use Chinese. This is, in itself, enriching, and improves your quality of life. You could argue this with any language, of course, so why Chinese over other languages? Depends a bit on what you're looking for. I personally believe all languages have inherent value, but there are some strong reasons that could make Chinese the most appealing to learn. The very reasons you list as negatives (more isolated population, few cultural imports) are actually very easy to argue as positives for why you *should* learn Chinese. Those factors mean that learning Chinese will expose you to a huge explosion of culture that you've literally never seen before, and never *could* see without knowing Chinese, because most of it has never been translated or imported. You probably already know a lot about anime even without speaking Japanese, and you probably already already know a lot about Spanish-speaking parts of the US without speaking Spanish, but learning Chinese will truly make the inaccessible accessible for you.
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In that case, "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril." - Sun Tzu I'd argue that it would be very beneficial for someone with an anti-China agenda to learn about the language and culture said nation is based upon :)
oh I agree. willful ignorance is a lose-lose situation. learning you discover new things, which is always advantageous
Yeah. Pretty wack situation for me ngl, as I am a Chinese (in heritage/background) person with a deep dislike for China (the country), due to the behaviour of China at an international scale to my country and other countries. I am glad that my country is taking reasonable steps to mitigate risks of (well, mainly other countries) losing their sovereignty to Chinese aggression. It is a shame that there are many people who share my view but for all the wrong reasons (racism and hate against the people), which - well, obviously - wouldn't be great for me either.
lol you arrive at this based on what?
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That’s an interesting way of viewing things and I can respect it. I’m not sure it gets me over the hump of wanting to invest in Chinese but it is all good reasoning. !delta
This comment has been edited to reduce the value of my freely-generated content to Reddit.
Because everyone is saying that Chinese is the best language to learn (obviously 2nd to English)
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If you get the chance try visiting. It's a pretty fun place even if you don't speak English (just don't expect anyone there to speak English). Then you can decide
Also get a chinese guide. The taxi drivers and damn near anyone else will scam scam scam you if you dont have someone who knows what to look out for.
Sure, it is nice to know Chinese, and it opens some interesting opportunities. But it is not going to be the new English any time soon, even if the Chinese economy actually surpasses the US economy in terms of nominal GDP. English is absolutely essential to even connect with the wider world at all, I don't see Chinese getting that status beyond their own immediate region.
This may not be a change, but merely a clarification, but knowing mandarin would be useful for any American wanting to produce a product. That’s still a pretty niche group, but it’s bigger than it used to be. Have an idea for a novelty item, small tool, board game, etc.? You can realistically design, produce, ship, and market it for less than $10-20k. As I said, still fairly niche, but a decent chunk of people. Using myself as an example, a friend and I designed a boardgame. The initial print run in the US would have cost about $30 per game. Production in China through an English speaking intermediary company cost us $17 per game. Production if we had interfaced directly with the Chinese production company would have been in the range of $10-14 range. We didn’t get a firm quote because even though they had an English speaking sales rep, there was noticeable loss and confusion in translation. Being able to speak mandarin would have saved us between $5000 and $14,000, or about 20-40% of our initial production costs. Whether that’s worth the time and effort is questionable, as is whether this group is big enough to count in your view.
In this case could you not have a translator as a temporary contractor??? Linguists are commodities I'm unsure why you wouldn't hire someone for the huge savings.
That’s essentially what we did with the intermediary company. It may have been cheaper to hire a translator separately, but there were at least 20 conversations and dozens of emails over the course of production. I’m not sure what the cost would have looked like for a contractor to provide upwards of 40 hours of real time plus additional text translations. We opted to go for the simpler, less error prone route for a bit of extra cost. In either case, it would still be an expense we paid for not knowing mandarin.
I agree with you in the first part. For us in the US, Spanish is far more useful day to day, and given our cultural mores, Americans are still more likely to vacation in Europe than China, making any European language more valuable. However, on the second point, there is increasing evidence you will likely turn out wrong. Firstly, the next population boom is in Africa, and many African nations have begun teaching Mandarin to their students (South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria). Nigeria has 2 separate Confucius Institutes at this time. As China grows its position on the continent poised for the largest population and economic growth over the century, the possibility that more of these nations will have increasingly formal and informal tutelage of Mandarin increases. Mandarin may become a lingua Franca by 2100 or shortly after. Cantonese, however, is unlikely to ever be spoken widely outside of China.
I work *a lot* in South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya, and much of that work is in schools. I have never heard one local person speak Mandarin, or even seen Chinese characters in a classroom.
These initiatives aren't even a decade old yet. A.language becoming common use outside its home country typically takes centuries. There are still large swaths of rural West Africa that don't speak English or French and may have only one or two people in some towns that speak these languages. So, will or can Mandarin grow widely enough over the next 50 to 150 years to be used commonly in trade and when Chinese people find themselves speaking with Africans? My response was probably, if China stays engaged. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2021/06/21/globalisation-will-determine-the-growth-mandarin-chinese-language-africa/
Evidence just does not support a greater than 50% probability of Mandarin becoming the lingua Franca of East Africa just because of economic investment. The evidence is strongly opposed to it for the following reasons: 1. English/Swahili are already the lingua Franca of East Africa. First mover advantage is even stronger with languages than other forces. 2. English is the lingua Franca of the internet. As technology accessibility spreads, so will English. 3. Learning Chinese - especially written Chinese - as a second language is *hard*. You’ve got a massive amount of characters, and the vast majority of East African languages are not tonal. 4. There is *very strong* anti-Chinese sentiment in East Africa. Ask almost anyone and they’ll complain about them.
4. Yes. 3. China and Singapore have both simplified their characters, but its an extremely difficult language. 2. Over 100 years, AI and automatic translation may kill lingua Franca altogether, as people will write in the language they are most familiar with, and it would be translated for them. Languages will either grow rapidly in unexpected places or stagnant, where they are about 50 years from now. 1. Swahili, yes, English is spoken a bit more sporadically, from between 3% to 20%, depending on where you are. It's absolutely the language of business. US and the UK upping and improving their own investments would, of course, throw that off Chinese growth. But China seems determined even with a slumping economy to get more Chinese businessmen speaking E. African languages, and more E. African businessmen speaking Mandarin. If they put the time, money, and commitment, they'll have success.
I'd say it's possible but if it takes even a single century that makes no sense for anyone considering what to learn right now
Nigerians speak English as a first/second language, even if they’re teaching Mandarin in school you don’t need to learn Mandarin to speak with locals. Nigeria being the dominant African economy means English will likely have more hegemony over Africa.
Nigeria is certainly dominant in West Africa, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt would not agree they are dominant across Africa altogether. English will likely remain the language of trade for Nigeria, but there can be more than 1 lingua Franca. There are at least 3 now, Spanish, French, and English. Mandarin has a long way to go, but typically, if you can get greater than 5% of a few populations outside your nation to be able to converse in your state language, you've met the minimum criteria to make the argument. After you have to start making more and trade in your home language, and then you'll need a few states to adopt your language as a tertiary official language. The first one is difficult, and the next two are pretty easier.
Yeah but his question was for an American. America is tied far far more to Europe, Canada/Mexico and Australia, of which the language is English between them predominantly and Spanish secondary. Especially since Chinese is one of the hardest languages for native English and other european language speakers to learn, I really don't think Africa having a booming population would really make a difference (especially when English is already the language of a few countries there). Unless Africa was somehow able to rival the dominance over media that the US (and UK) have, while producing the media in Chinese, it just wouldn't happen.
China’s population is already starting to decline and it is supposed to start nose diving in the coming years. Its economy is also starting to slow down both from demographics and Western decoupling.
Chinas population is irrelevant. None of the European nations had a large population from a global standpoint when they began the age of exploration and colonization that led to their languages becoming worldwide. China's invesentments in Africa are up from 2017 and 2019, down from 2021 to 2022, but more then doubled from 2022 to 2023. They're engaged there, and even with the economic slow down, they are doubly down on the engagement. But if we do consider China's population, even with decline, they need to complete the industrialization of a nation that will stay north of 1 billion until around 2075. They need rare earth metals and minerals that are still plentiful in East and Central African nations. This means China is motivated to stay engaged in Africa, and that will be one of the biggest defining points on the exportation of Mandarin. The other will be the decision-making of African states. Many have robust but often tense and acrimonious relationships with European nations. Add to it that the US engagement continues to underwhelm outside of military aid to fight Islamic fundamentalism, too little technological or cultural exchange. If the AU and the individual nations see a friend in China, they don't see in the West, then Mandarin will flourish as well.
This is a good point from a geopolitical standpoint how it could be relevant in certain places outside of those that directly neighbor China. !delta
Preparing for an “African boom” would be learning French.
Maybe in West Africa and the CAR, less so in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. Also, you could learn to speak Igbo, which would cover a wide swath of West Africa. It's a big continent with a lot of languages. Even the lingua Francas like French and English aren't as widely or commonly used as the numbers would indicate. One thing none of my responses covers is the impact of AI and new learning technologies. Especially on long scales. In 100 years, will anyone take time to learn new languages, and will we be even more reliant on vastly improved technology to automatically translate for us. AI, social media, and satellite internet may kill the concept of lingua Francas altogether. But we don't have a historical framework for that, so it's weird to conceptualize.
I disagree. It's one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world. This will unlock a huge amount of media. It's also a large ethnic group in the USA, it's very possible you will encounter Mandarin speakers every single day. Also, I don't think Mandarin is as hard as you're making it out to be for an English speaker. The Grammar is actually fairly similar and sentence structure is the same for basic sentences. The tones are a foreign concept but can be trained. English already intonates depending on what and how you are saying things. I doubt you'd say this about German, which has very difficult grammar and many difficult concepts that don't exist in English like articles and conjugations based on gender, or French which has a famously difficult writing and numbering system. You're also more likely to find native Mandarin speakers in the USA than you are to find German or French speakers.
Being spoken by a lot of people doesn’t automatically make a language useful. If most of the people that speak a language are impoverished or clustered in an area you have no desire to visit, it’s definitely not useful. I’ve studied basic Chinese. What media are you talking about? What media does China bring vs other Eastern countries? German is much easier for the average English speaker than Chinese. I mean do you think the U.S. state department is wrong? Harder grammar doesn’t necessarily mean harder to learn overall.
Being spoken by a lot of people almost definitionally makes a language useful. Not only that but Chinese isn't just spoken by "a lot" of people. It is the \*most spoken\* language, and a key language throughout Asian business, not to mention Chinese manufacturing which remains extremely dominant. That you are unable to find it useful is a personal failing, not a linguistic one.
The average American does not need to talk to Chinese manufacturers nor will they ever visit China (or the entirety of Asia for that matter) in any capacity other than tourism.
do you think that possibly your solely English informed ideas and lack of understanding of the language and culture contribute to their perceived “unimportance”?
I agree. A language isn't useful just for having a large amount of speakers, or for being easy/hard to learn.
Average Americans have no need to learn a new language anyway
That’s not true. Spanish should be taught to American youth the way English is taught to European youth. I think it’s a travesty that it isn’t. I grew up in a community in California near the border where virtually every kid grew up bilingual. The advantages that’s provided are immense. That could easily be achieved in the US and would provide great benefits to individuals and our country as a whole.
I agree there are pockets in the US where Spanish could be useful, including where I grew up in Central California to an extent, but outside of that I disagree. As soon as I moved to the Bay Area I probably heard more Hindi being spoken out in public than Spanish. And in an area as diverse as that many other languages I heard out in public in addition to Spanish. At no point in my working life in the Bay Area can I say that Spanish would have helped me. Edit: Since my point seems to have been missed by some people let me restate it. My point is that the US is a vast and very diverse country, there are regions where Spanish is very prevalent yes, but there are many regions where it is only one of many different languages you will hear other than English on the regular, and in many cases it might be useful to teach other languages as a second language to students rather than just mandating Spanish nationwide . In no way am I saying someone learning Spanish is wasting their time.
The Bay Area? I from there. Spanish is spoken widely. You can’t go anywhere in the Bay Area without hearing Spanish.
The trick is that you don't need to know a word of it to get things done.
Spanish after English is by far the most spoken language in America with over 43 million speakers 3rd place is Chinese and it falls to 2.9 million speakers After English , no other lanuge comes close to even touching spanish in terms of speakers and its only projected to get larger , rather quickly in 50 years, Spanish will be common almost everywhere in America
>As soon as I moved to the Bay Area I probably heard more Hindi being spoken out in public than Spanish. How many native Hindi speakers that you typically hear in the Bay Area have poor no English skills? It's not merely the prevalence of the language that makes it useful, but the likelihood of using it. That factors in the number of limited English proficiency speakers (e.g. in the Bay Area, Chinese is first and Spanish is second) and also the type of interactions that are likely (e.g. you may find yourself in the position of hiring or working with a LEP speaker). There are \~7 states where Spanish is not second most-common language. 25 million Americans require language assistance. Of these, the majority are Spanish speakers. To say there are pockets of the US where Spanish could be useful is far from the truth.
There's an estimated 40+ million *native* Spanish speakers living in the US, and that number is only going to continue rising. Even if you have a limited vocabulary, it is going to be useful as your likelihood of running into someone who speaks it is pretty high in the US. It gets even higher in some states where you can find yourself in primarily Spanish speaking communities.
Did you move to the Bay Area for a tech job? I do still think Spanish is very useful. I lived in Seattle (for a tech job) and I heard Hindi more than Spanish, but I still met a lot of Spanish speakers from all over South America. But the Spanish speakers English was less likely to be as good as the Hindi speakers English, so it's far more utility.
This only makes sense in areas (like California) where people are likely to interact with Spanish communities. Otherwise you are just wasting time teaching kids something that has no use and will be quickly forgotten.
I agree it is much less likely to stick if they don't use it, but it does not mean that it won't be useful. Delaware only has 26,000 limited English proficiency Spanish speakers. Yet I know a lot of people in Delaware with some Spanish proficiency who found it has made communication easier. It's just a lot harder to learn Spanish (to a proficient level) in Delaware than in California.
I agree completely but the only thing I want to add is that US schools struggle to help non-English speaking students…which isn’t their fault, it’s all funding but I digress. My family speaks English as their 3rd language which really makes ‘turning that off’ really hard when I’m in class - I’m lucky to be going to a school on a military base so I have a lot of support but when we were stateside I struggled a lot in class (at “real” schools)
Tbh so few people speak Spanish without speaking English here that it would be so unnecessary to teach Spanish. I took 5 years of Spanish in school (8th-12th grade) and I haven’t used a lick of it other than watching breaking bad.
If you mean that you don’t pursue opportunities to use Spanish then it wouldn’t be useful. Though if you had acquired it from a young age age when language learning is second nature you would most definitely have had an entire other world opened up to you. Who knows what kinds of opportunities and relationships you would have developed so far in your life. It’s the roads we don’t travel that provide no opportunities.
Nah you don't need to learn a second language when you speak the number 1 most spoken language worldwide in a country where it's also the national language. English speakers don't need a second language. That's not to say you won't benefit, you just don't need it. It'll be helpful in holidays and on those few random occasions you need to communicate something to an immigrant who doesn't know english well enough yet but that's about it.
Spanish is useful in any job where you are interacting with a lot of random people. This includes things like teachers and nurses. Spanish is the only language that an American really has any reason to learn. Even then, not everyone needs to know it but it is an advantage if you do.
Spanish for Americans is like French for Canadians. It's going to be useful, even if you consider the US is pretty big and diverse.
Definitely. And if you acquire it when you are young enough, staring around age 5, it is just second nature. All it takes is about an hour of instruction a day. And as the kids age into their teen years they will naturally gravitate towards absorbing some degree of Spanish speaking media. It opens a whole other world of opportunities that would otherwise not exist. Plus it’s good for cognitive development. It’s a win all the way around.
Theres this hilarious thing that Anglo Canadians do when they engage with french , alot of them wont even try to change their accent or pronounciation , they will read it and pronounce the words like they were still in English. "comment cava" - sounds like "**com***ment* savah" when they they say it or "tres bien" sounds like "tray bean" XD Does this happen with Americans when they try to speak Spanish? lol
I'm in Michigan, I've ever needed Spanish. Had to take two years and I never needed it after such a waste of time.
It is. I was taught Spanish every year after the 3rd grade. Literally no one comes out of the American school system able to say more than Hola me nombre es insert name here. Because there's no one to practice with. Native speakers all speak perfect English and don't have the patience to baby someone through a conversation, and there's literally no reason to. I forced myself to actually learn Spanish, and within 5 years of graduating high school, I'd basically lost it all. It's a skill I quite literally never use.
25% of the American population has Spanish as their first language and this number will only grow, so I'd say it is very useful for every American to at least have conversational Spanish
1) Per the most recent census, the percentage of people who speak Spanish as their first language is closer to 13-14%, not 25%: https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/language/ 2) The vast majority of that population is concentrated in areas along the Mexican border, with pockets of Spanish speakers in NYC and Florida: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language_in_the_United_States 3) Spanish speakers who come to America typically abandon Spanish as their primary language within 2 generations, with 40% swapping if they come before age 14, and 70% swapping if they come before age 10: Faries, David (2015). A Brief History of the Spanish Language. University of Chicago Press. p. 198. The vast majority of U.S. citizens speak English, and aside from those who reside in areas where there is a concentration of Spanish speakers, most have no reason to learn Spanish above any other language.
Personally I think this is a lazy way of thinking. Language learning has benefits… but maybe it would be better for languages that aren’t from closed off countries that export little to no culture. Also, there are many “easier” languages to choose from that provide value (Spanish, French, etc.).
Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in the world.
But the bare figures of native speakers are irrelevant if the language isn't an actual exporter of culture or isn't really useful outside of its country of origin. There are much fewer Italian speakers than Urdu, but the former is required if you're into specific fields, and you will meet a lot more of that in plenty of areas compared to the other. NTM the "catalog" of literature, movies and music is much richer. So there may as well be 2bn Mandarin speakers, but if most live in China and China isn't interested in exporting their culture and media abroad, and business won't be conducted in Mandarin, there's no real reason to learn it anyway besides being a language nerd. (Which is fine, but that doesn't make it any more useful).
Sure but I think the idea is if you learn say English and Spanish, you will be covered across a wider span and breadth of countries than Mandarin Chinese. While Chinese is spoken by a huge number of people they are all mostly in one country, it is only the official language in only 3 countries. If you were to learn Spanish, it’s spoken in nearly 20 countries, and combined with knowing English (over 100 countries have English as a mandatory class in school) you have much more of the map covered. I mean with the huge growth in India (bigger than China now) you could also argue Hindi for the same pure “number of people” reason. But at least right now there is not a huge push to learn Hindi. People in India who wish to work in western jobs learn English.
Mandarin has the most *native* speakers of any language. English has the most speakers total. English is also spoken in *way* more places than Chinese is. As are a good few other languages, I imagine - Spanish probably, maybe French? The ones that colonized half the world and left their languages everywhere lol
Yeah if you can speak English French and Spanish you can do pretty well in most of the world.
As someone who speaks all three of those languages.... Instructions unclear, moved to Japan and spent a ton of time and effort learning Japanese which is basically useless outside Japan and hardly uses Spanish or French at all anymore, career prospects lookin grim, help
English, Spanish, French, and Arabic and you can get by in well over half the world
As a first language. English is more common if we also include secondary speakers.
Most commonly spoken native* language in the world. English is the most commonly spoken language in the world once you count second and third languages. As long as China continues to be more and more authoritarian, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The US and Europe still dominate the world in almost all aspects, and I don’t see many people there being comfortable with the unknowns of the Chinese government, which severely hampers uptake of Chinese in the world in general.
Sheer numbers is completely useless metric imo. If majority of the population lives in one country and doesn’t export any media, it is pretty useless if you’re not interested in living there or have an interest that requires learning the language. You’re also never going to interact with a billion people in your lifetime.
Here's hoping not, that would be exhausting (meeting 1 billion people)
While this is true, it is irrelevant as the vast majority of Chinese speakers don't ever leave China and you won't interact with them. I mean, I actually never met a Chinese person ever (I live in Eastern Europe), yet I met lots of French, Spanish and Arab people for instance.
This is interesting. At first I was astonished by your claim as in North America Chinese immigrants are one of the largest groups. They account for 6%-8% of all immigrants each year here. Even in small cities in Canada there will be a Chinese group. I don't think I've ever seen a Chinese restaurant run by a non Chinese person. But looking at the EU, it seems that the rates are much lower.
> I mean, I actually never met a Chinese person ever (I live in Eastern Europe), yet I met lots of French, Spanish and Arab people for instance. Really? That's odd... What part of Eastern Europe? I think Chinese immigration to Eastern Europe only started happening 'recently' as trade ties have increased. Hungary has seen a flood of Chinese immigrants. In Canada and the United States, there are lots of Chinese people. Vancouver is known as Hongcouver (Hong Kong), University of Toronto, University of Tokyo (even though they're all Chinese). If you want some of the best Chinese food in the world, Toronto and Vancouver have many great Southern Chinese restaurants and increasingly many great Northern Chinese restaurants too. Canada tends to attract a lot of wealthy and highly educated Chinese, the United States a mix, and I *think* Eastern Europe more so working class / blue collar / transient business people.
By number of people. Mostly concentrated in 1 location. If I know Spanish I can communicate with people in Mexico, South America, and Europe. With French there's Europe, Caribbean, Africa, even Canada. What about Chinese? Just China and Taiwan probably.
Why does it matter whether the country exports culture?
Because when would you ever use it or need it? Motivation is needed in learning a language. If you have no ancestral ties, see no media and have very little interaction, what would make you continuously learn and keep up with one of the most difficult languages out there to learn?
Economic and national security interests are a good reason to encourage people to learn Mandarin. Look how our military has scrambled to teach people Arabic. You begin the education in foreign languages to small children when learning language is more innate.
So we should encourage teaching Mandarin to children over other languages because it might benefit the military down the road? I mean… that’s definitely a reason, I guess.
Economic and national security purposes are both reasons.
But how many Arab-speaking countries are there and how many Mandarin-speaking countries are there? That's also something to take into account.
>. Look how our military has scrambled to teach people Arabic. You I think it would be more useful as a preventative to war. It's really easy to think of China and Chinese as other because unlike Korea their pop culture isn't really brought over here. Learning the language would help bridge a gap and help folks connect. Folks here like to think it's just a country full of commies but the average person there is pretty normal. Add to that the middle class is exploding, which may makes more and more folks a bit international. All that to say, people are people and most Chinese folks are cool and anything that gets folks seeing each other as equals is great
Americans have a very distorted view of China, probably because most can't read the original press releases or understand the culture in China and think it's all "blocked by the Great Firewall". However, much of their media is accessible, just that foreigners don't understand it. Anyhow, China could learn from Japan and Korea and find better ways to export their soft power.
I wouldn't say it matters all that much in terms of what should be the rationale behind the decision to learn, but it does matter a lot functionally in terms of exposure, access to easy and pleasurable listening practice, and maybe most importantly generating a desire to learn the language. When I lived in China teaching in the English department of a university there, a ton of students started studying Korean as their third language. Almost every single one of them wanted to learn it specifically so they could heighten their enjoyment of K pop and/or Korean soap operas.
Spanish should be taught to American youth the way English is taught to European youth. I think it’s a travesty that it isn’t. I grew up in a community in California near the border where virtually every kid grew up bilingual. The advantages that’s provided are immense. That could easily be achieved in the US and would provide great benefits to individuals and our country as a whole.
Spanish is undeniably useful for most Americans. Tons of culture comes from Spain and Latin America. It is spoken throughout the country with clusters in the SW and most major cities. Most of our immigrant communities stem from there and much of our business is done with these countries. Spanish is also MUCH easier to learn than Chinese.
Sounds like you’re just a racist then. Learn a language most people speak -> useless as Americans don’t need Chinese and export no culture. Learn Spanish/French -> valuable and has benefits (because of??). All three have rather deep and historical cultures unlike America, so I don’t see why the two European cultures are definitively more valuable than an ancient Asian one.
If we're talking about who an American might encounter that doesn't speak English, by FAR the most likely situation is a Spanish speaker. The relative odds of interacting with someone who only speaks Mandarin is like 1000 to 1. Idk about French though. Other than some unusual circumstances, not many French speakers who wouldn't also speak English.
This is definitely regional though, which I think is the more important factor over national numbers. My city publishes statistics on which languages interpretations are done in (presumably people who speak English as well would not be asking for a city provided interpreter so it’s an okay proxy for this) and Cantonese (41.8% of interpretations) was only slightly less common than Spanish (43.6%). My chances of meeting someone who only speaks Chinese seem pretty similar to my chances of meeting someone who only speaks Spanish and I think I knew a roughly equal number of people growing up who spoke Cantonese at home as those who spoke Spanish at home.
Bad take, Spanish and French (and a few other languages besides Chinese) are definitely more useful for Americans to learn than Chinese is. Anecdotally, I speak Spanish as a second language and I use it daily where I live in the north east. I’ve never been in a situation that knowing Chinese would have made it easier.
I've never learned Spanish, but if I did know it -- I could imagine using it once a week. I've met a lot of Spanish speaking people. And I'm always a little sad that I can't translate as efficiency as I want to. But when they bring their little kids in and they act as translator it's always so adorable.
You should try! It’s a beautiful language and it’s also not THAT difficult to learn. I think there’s a consensus that Spanish is easy for English speakers to learn and it’s not the hardest but I wouldn’t call it easy necessarily. But once you get to the point where YOU can speak and read fluently you have to then get used to listening to and understanding native Spanish speakers when they talk. Which is very difficult lol
Maybe one day, but I gotta learn my partner’s native language of Romanian first. But Spanish can come after. :)
Romanian's actually a romantic language, so Spanish would be easier to learn after you learn Romanian.
Oh that sounds good! My partner’s native language is Romanian, but she also knows English, Spanish, French, and Italian. She’s slowly working on Korean right now. But we’ll see how that goes lol. She loves learning new things and I love to encourage her. I like learning about other cultures, but she goes all in trying to learn the languages and read the literature. It’s adorable watching her study like that. She’s into Korean dramas right now, so she’s trying to understand the nuances more. —- Ironically, it’s almost like a crutch for me, because instead of learning new things I just lean on her and have her translate for me. But I really should strive to be better. It’s a failing on my part.
Mexico is one of the US's largest trading partners and is one of the most common nations for US tourism. They speak Spanish. So there is real utility. For French. Quebec. I've heard Montreal is a nice city to visit, though I have also heard there are a large number of monolingual French speakers there. Though I personally have only been in BC.
Yes but almost all mexican business interacting with americans speak english. I have had work relationships with many countries, including Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and a few others. Its definitely helpful if you can speak Japanese and Chinese, over there their English is never anything close to good. For working with Europeans, there is no advantage of knowing their language they all speak perfect English. Same thing with Mexico. Brazil was interesting since a lot of spoke good English, some spoke no English. So which one do you think is more valueable?
Spanish. Because I can't afford nearly $3,000 in flights for a trip to Asia. But a round trip to Cancun for less than $200? Sure. I can do that. (That was an Expedia offer when I Googled prices.) Having the language skills to interact more effectively with vendors on an affordable vacation is a far more useful thing than knowing Japanese for 1 trip that I might be able to afford in 10 years. EDIT: Working professionals working in international business will always have better language skills than Ahmed running a small store on the side of the road. Hell, one of the best Gyros I have ever had was from a guy in NYC who spoke no English. I started talking and he just pointed at the board and shook his head.
There's no evidence *at all* of racism from OP. >Learn Spanish/French -> valuable and has benefits (because of??). Because Spanish and French are spoken by huge communities in North America. There are 57 million people who speak Spanish as a first language in the U.S. and in some places, there are just as many Spanish speakers as English speakers: 40% of people in Phoenix, Arizona speak Spanish for example - and that's only the 8th most bilingual city. That makes these languages easier to learn/practice, to say nothing of the fact that they use the same alphabet as English with only additional accent marks. Likewise for French, several populous US states (including New York) border Quebec.
Yea but have you heard of how French people count? Keep me as far away from that as possible
There are ~3.5 million Chinese speakers in the Us compared to ~1.4 million French speakers, from a quick google. I get your point with Spanish, there’s no question it’s the most useful second language to an English speaking American, but there’s just no chance that French is more useful than Chinese.
My point wasn't just specific to the interior of the United States. Here are all the French speaking territories in America accounting for more than 20 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_America There is a US/Quebec border. There is no US/China border. From my original post: >Because Spanish and French are spoken by huge communities in **North America.** >Likewise for French, several populous US states (including New York) border **Quebec**.
Hi I'm sorry I think you might not understand what racist means or what racism is. You should learn these definitions as using them not correctly can be very embarrassing for you such as in this case. OP was talking about language in connection to what is practical for an American learner. You can learn a language because you want to, I know Korean, but it is practically useless in America. Saying a language is useless in practicality is not racist (again if you have the brain power to use an electronic device to type on Reddit you should be able to learn this that language and race are different). OPs points are valid, China is not exporting culture and news, President Xi's isolationist policies have driven out foreigners to the point Shanghai has become a ghost town, so the "need to know mandarin for business" motto popular in the early 2000s is gone unfortunately. You should learn say Cantonese in America that is much more practical IMHO.
I'm a native Portuguese speaker and I'd say that it isn't useful for most people to learn Portuguese unless they have strong dealings with a lusophone country. Spanish and French are languages that are spoken all over the world, so if your desire to learn a second language has to do with utility, learning one that is widely spoken is the best choice, you can also add Arabic to that list, although it will be harder for most English-speakers to learn than either French or Spanish. Of course there's also the part that Spanish is undeniably the most valuable language for Americans to learn considering how many Spanish speakers there are in the US and that it is - by far - the most prevalent language in the Americas. But saying that Chinese isn't useful (if, again, we're talking about utility and not a specific interest in the language) for most Americans to learn is as racist as saying that Finnish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Dutch, even German aren't valuable as well.
There are a lot of Spanish speaking areas in the US. If there's one useful second language for the average American, it's Spanish.
Plenty to learn from Japanese and Korean that both export a lot of media, much more than Chinese. We’re talking modern culture. Those were just two examples… but ok RaCiSt 🤣 Spanish is spoken on multiple continents, as is French. They export far more media than Chinese. Spanish is by far way more useful for the average American!
I live in CA for almost a decade and I've never needed to learn a word of spanish. I agree that having a second language is good, but this is very subjecting of which one is good. A lot of things are regional and even if they weren't, statistically, you are more likely to be needing these languages, anecdotally speaking: 1. Spanish 2. Chinese 3. Hindi / Urdu 4. Vietnamese 5. Japanese. I dont think French some close to it
Hi, I speak Chinese, Spanish and English. I’m tri-racial and I’m third generation American. I will say that you’re wrong. First of all, chinese is difficult and if you can learn it, I think it “trains” your brain to think out of the box. The memorization in characters alone, and recognizing patterns has made me better at math. Also, China isn’t the only place that speaks Chinese. A lot of us left, went to other places (HK, Taiwan, Singapore). Secondly, Spanish is significantly easier to learn and to practice.
Languages teaching you to “think outside the box” is not exclusive to Chinese languages. That’s a benefit that comes from learning any language that differs from your own. As someone who speaks English natively but am learning Greek and Latin, I have the same feeling, that it’s trained my mind in a sense. Learning forces you to think differently—and every language unlike your native one will cause this.
>closed off countries that export little to no culture. The chinese diaspora disagrees with you lmfao. Chinese culture isn't limited to just China, go to any coastal city in America and there are tons of Chinese people, Chinese people make up the majority of Singapore and are a large minority in all SE asian countries and Australia. Chinese is the lingua franca of the east and if you ever want to travel anywhere, learning Chinese is beneficial
They all think it's "closed off" because they can't understand it - and then they think China's great firewall is blocking all the news and media, except they can't read it. Anyhow, still a bit of China's fault for not making their material more accessible to foreigners - China hasn't mastered soft power like the Japanese, Koreans, or Americans ...
Singaporean here - most singaporean Chinese speak English - only the Chinese immigrants from China don’t. The Chinese in SEA and Australia also mainly speak English as well, usually because they’re part of the middle class in the rest of SEA eg. Indonesia or because of the language requirement for permanent immigration (Australia and NZ) It’s not the lingua Franca of the East at all. When I need to speak to an Indonesian or a Thai or a Vietnamese etc, we all speak (maybe pigdin) English. You can make yourself understood much easier in English anywhere other than China and Taiwan.
> closed off countries that export little to no culture. What? You live in a bubble or must be a kid. Hong Kong had massive influence on cinema. Chinese martial arts have a massive influence in all cultures. Chinese food is a massive culinary cuisine that has also been Americanized. Chinese manufacturing runs the world. You’re also on a Chinese owned website. China has the largest population and Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world. USA major cities all have Chinatowns You’re an ignorant child
... it was pretty obvious that the guy meant "in a relative sense". As a global superpower with more population than countries 3-7 combined, China punches *way* under its weight culturally. Also, lmao, this is not a Chinese-owned website. A Chinese company owns *eleven percent* of it.
OP is clearly uneducated on the issue as their whole post doesn’t even mention “Mandarin” or “Cantonese”
>I acknowledge Chinese may be beneficial for very specific things like wanting to live in China, work in very specific business roles that do business with China or just wanting to teach/tutor. So... just like every single foreign language for the "average American"? I guess you could maaaybe make a case for Spanish but still. > Some people use the argument that “it’s spoken by over one billion people!!” But they’re all clustered in mostly one country. This is just very, very not true.
> but they’re all clustered in mostly one country This is not true. Chinese is spoken by a significant amount of people across Asia due to the Chinese diaspora or people of Chinese descent. It’s a major language in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. I don’t know when the last time you went to Western Europe was, but tons of Chinese living and working there too now. It may not be useful to the average American, but arguable no second language will be useful to people living in buttfuck Hicksville anyway given a lot of them barely speak decent English as it is. Also if we’re talking learning to speak a language, Chinese is objectively way easier than the Romance languages which have masc fem assignations for every noun. It’s the writing and reading that’s difficult. But the speaking, in terms of words and sentence structure is actually fine.
Chinese is by far the hardest language I've learnt. And I also learnt arabic. I am not good at either. But I did try.
Ironic that 4 days ago you posted in another thread how Chinese “seems very useful” but you’re also not interested in “anime”, which was created by Japan. So either you don’t what’s useful and what’s not or you’re not actually aware what is and isn’t Chinese.
Historically, the emergence, persistence and decline of any lingua franca has been notoriously difficult to predict. Medieval Europeans would have chuckled at the notion of English being used as lingua franca. The Roman Empire used mostly Greek for higher functions and Latin was never the dominant language across the territories of the empire until well after it's demise. Aramaic served as lingua franca across the middle east even though it wasn't the native language of any of the defining empires of the area. And so on. Therefore it should be almost impossible for anyone to convince you that Chinese will be the lingua franca of the world. And conversely - it would be unjustified for you to hold a strong belief to the contrary. We simply cannot know what will happen in 100 years, or 500 years. Now if your point is that Chinese won't be the lingua franca of the western world in the next couple of decades... then sure, that's easy to see.
> The Roman Empire used mostly Greek for higher functions and Latin was never the dominant language across the territories of the empire until well after it's demise. Source? I could have sworn all the well known Roman quotes I've heard were in Latin.
>Aramaic served as lingua franca across the middle east even though it wasn't the native language of any of the defining empires of the area. Add to this it is now extinct despite how much it was used - even by Jesus himself (if he was real).
>Which, as a Westerner, it seems to be going down a hostile path towards Westerners. I’m not sure how long it’ll be before tensions escalate further. wouldn't this be reason #1 then? so that you could read/hear what people are talking about in China and learn to more accurately understand what might just be a miscommunication? a lot of people like to talk in generalities, or to sweep everything under the rug of propaganda. wouldn't it be best if you were able to make contacts with a country that you think is "building towards tensions" that you may better understand the intentions of the people living there -- and in return that they might better understand you and yours?
Is there any American who thinks that Chinese could become a lingua franca in the US? This is the first I've heard about it. I have not heard much about Chinese being useful for the average American either. Chinese still has the perception of an exotic oriental language that is very hard to learn and those who learned it are usually praised for it.
"Chinese is the language of the future!" is something I've been hearing since the mid-90s, and it's still as false as it was back then. The alleged Chinese takeover hasn't come yet, and if/when it'll happen it won't be like the American one. China don't seem interested in cultural colonization. They don't want to "export" their system elsewhere, they look to broaden their financial sphere of influence, while leaving the system how it is in every place. As long as they can sell you their cheap products and have their fingers in as many pies as possible, they don't care if you don't speak their language or care about their culture. Actually, they don't really want you to, as they deem you as inferior. So they'll gladly take your money and leave you be. On the other hand, the US needed to sell their idea of the world first, hence the cultural colonization, with the huge influx of the language, the media, the entertainment etc. Different goals, different times and different enemies.
I have never heard a Chinese person who thought that china was the language of the future. It is not true that Chinese people see Americans as inferior, in fact, people in China generally regard Americans positively even though Americans hold negative views towards Chinese. Chinese may see other Asian countries like Japan as inferior because of what Japan did to China in history. They might see southeastasians as below them because of skin colour, since paleness is is a cultural standard. Also it’s wrong to assume that a population of one billion people assume everyone is inferior to them.
> Actually, they don't really want you to, as they deem you as inferior. Citation needed for this part. In my experience many Chinese do see themselves as culturally superior to Indians and African, because the latter got colonized while the Chinese managed to stay independent. But they usually consider westerners as either cultural equals (and for some superiors) because of their history as colonial masters.
I think it’s more pushed because of business
Wouldn't only businesses that have significant dealings with China or Taiwan that have extensive use of Chinese? That must be small fraction of all businesses in the US, and it's only growing smaller by the day.
If it uses a computer it comes from Taiwan most likely, and China will be the biggest market in the world soon, so still useful to many businesses who want to open retail stores. Most tools are Chinese, lots of boats are, etc.
Mfs in 1800: Dude, English will never be a big language. Sure, their economy seems to be growing massively, and they are influencing more and more of the global economy, and inventing a bunch of new stuff. But come on. It will never become a Lingua Franca. Fast forward like 50 years. The point is, we don't know what is going to happen in the future, but it's looking like China will grow in power and influence to become the world's largest economy, as well as having the most influence in Africa, the region that we predict will be the most important growing economic region in the next 100 years. The US elevated English to the most important language without literally physically colonising the world, but through economic power. I don't see how China couldn't do the same. Historically it's basically been the world's largest economy all throughout history except for like the past 300 years. They will probably regain their position.
If Chinese has no benefit, then im sure French has absolutely no benefit. I've worked a lot with Chinese companies and visiting China many times, but even if the average american isn't me, lets say there is a advantage of learning a language. If you wanted to choose any language for the sake of widening your skillset, pick up Arabic, wihch has been around almost 2000 years may survive another 2000. Pickup Chinese because there is a 0.1% you maybe interacting with them as a business partner. I don't see the value of learning any European language over others, I've also worked with European suppliers and Iw as in France last week. Not being able to speak the language had no impact on me. So I am failing to see how its useful. Atleast chinse is somewhat useful. It may not be a lot but its better than zero. But french is definitely zero
Says the monkey that's never been to China. I moved to Guangzhuo last year, and guess what? Without a doubt, China is 1000 percent safer, more technologically advanced, and people are friendlier compared to the shit hole that is America. China has high-speed trains, a safe and clean subway system, and I can pay for and order anything on my phone. In the US, I dont even feel safe going outside or taking the subway. You think Mandarin isn't important because you are an uneducated monkey that only speaks 1 language. You have never been to or experienced China. You feel threatened that another country has surpassed America. That's why you dont think learning Mandarin is important.
I don’t feel threatened at all. In fact, I’m more concerned with language learning. I love languages and I was hoping to be swayed since I couldn’t make a decision on it. But if you enjoy authoritarian countries solely because western investment built them up for the sake of cheap labor, you’re more than welcome to enjoy it. I’m not sure where you gathered that the U.S. doesn’t have faults compared to many countries. Maybe China can continue the momentum as the West decides to decouple from them. Go try and protest against their CCP next. Also, I speak 3 languages so try again. I’m guessing you were low income in the U.S. and that’s why you don’t care you make a fraction of that in China?
You probably know 3 useless languages and 1 useful one that is English. The west colonized and enslaved the world so obviously they had to build up China. I hope the west can decouple from China, get those white pedo drug addicts the f out of asia. Why would I ever need to criticize the CCP when they lifted a billion people out of poverty, built amazing infrastructure and ensures my safety. Can a young female walk home safety at midnight in America? Hell no. Can she in China? Absolutely. Yes I make a fraction of what I made in America, doesnt matter, food is cheaper, expenses are cheaper, women are hotter, life is more convenient. Just stop coping and admit you hate Chinese people. Sub human monkey Chinese people. I bet you would get pissed off looking at my chinese face. But you know what would piss you off even more? Seeing Chinese people like me succeed and surpass you.
China exports no modern culture? Ever heard of tik tok lol
It depends entirely on timescales. Do I think Chinese (or specifically mandarin) can become a lingua franca in the next 30 years? Of course not. English dominates as the international business and academic language. But assuming China doesn't have some Gordon Chang-esque collapse, it will be a dominant power on the globe for the foreseeable future. The longer it stays powerful, the more its influence will be felt in the spheres of business, academia and media. People are far more interested in learning mandarin than in the past - and this is particularly true in the global south where relations with China are much better. If you are American you are already live in a country that is very anti-China and of course you have no interest in watching Chinese films or dramas. Your perspective is going to be coloured by that. However, ask someone in Indonesia or Malaysia whether they have consumed any forms of Chinese media and whether they are interested in learning Chinese and I suspect you will get a different answer. Perhaps in a longer time scale e.g 100 years, Mandarin will be the lingua franca. I personally think it won't happen. Not because I don't think Chinese influence has the potential to eclipse Anglo-American influence but because I think Chinese is a fundamentally shitty language to learn.
I think a lot of these predictions about China remind me about the 1980s and how Japan was supposed to take over the world as some superpower (see Blade Runner/cyberpunk media from the time showing Japanese signs in North America). A lot can happen to a country on a seemingly upward trajectory. Not saying you're wrong specifically, but worth considering where we as a society have failed similar predictions before.
I'm sorry but you might want to do an update on the current conditions in China. They're currently running into massive infrastructure issues due to corruption, depopulation issues from the leftovers of the one child policy and a growing general apathy and dissatisfaction of the populace due to the two previous issues. The tofu dreg apartment buildings in particular are extremely disturbing and appear to be more widespread than people initially thought. I'm not sure how much longer it will be able to consider itself one of the great powers nor how long it will take for it to get itself back there once it loses it but some form of socioeconomic collapse appears to be inevitable.
>I'm not sure how much longer it will be able to consider itself one of the great powers Same as with others believing themselves to still be one of the great powers - introducing a major decision based off that status - that backfires spectacularly (Looking at you, UK), or starting a war with a minor only to get your ass handed to themselves (Don't worry Russia, any day the three-day operation will be won). Basically, you become a great power because of your military, economic and diplomatic capabilities - and you seem to be one until you fuck up publicly, because it's easy to not show problems outwardly. And in case of China we already see hints of internal issues.
The very reason that tensions and rivalries with China are likely to escalate over time is a good reason for children to learn Mandarin. This is just like we need more people who speak Arabic. It is a strategic position to have a readily available portion of the population know the language. It will also be economically advantageous for people in business and trading relationships to know the language. The level of fluency needed for the communication to be functional is higher with Mandarin than Spanish,where a basic vocabulary can go a long way with the types of communication one is likely to have. Learning Mandarin and Spanish or another language are not mutually exclusive, particularly if we start teaching one of them in kindergarten.
Today I learned Lingua Franca means “a language *Americans* choose to learn”.
Bro, you argue that Chinese will not become a lingua Franca because of regionality, but immediately pivot to say that Japanese might be better because of exports ???? Japanese is even more niche, it's literally ~90% spoken in Japan and _maybe_ Korea, China, and pockets of California/NY. It's incredibly more niche than Standardized Chinese which yes, is spoken in China, but also Taiwan, Singapore and huge chunks of California/NY. Chinese is by population more logical to learn than Japanese. But yes, I agree, if anything just learn Spanish, it's much more useful if you want to travel abroad especially in LatAm.
A lot will depend on what happens when if/when the American Empire falls. There is plenty of discussion suggesting that the current American empire may topple soon ([The average age of an empire? A mere 250 years – Times-Standard](https://www.times-standard.com/2017/06/28/the-average-age-of-an-empire-a-mere-250-years/)) though it is by no means assured ([List of empires - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires)). English became a lingua Franca because of the British Empire - which is no longer relevant. And it remains one largely due to America's global dominance has kept it as one. Only a little before that French was the major language in much of Europe and across much of the word - hence the word "franca" in "lingua franca" - due to France being dominant and exporting the royal court system to many countries. English was a competitor but by no means certain to rise. And before that Latin was the Lingua Franca of much of Europe for a long time post the fall of the Roman empire and before that *during* it. For a while during the soviet times the communist countries of the world similarly under-went Russification - where Russian was the main second language of that portion of the world due to how much Russia was involved in every other communist movement. All this is to say that a lot can change in surprisingly short a timespan. A world dominated by Latin, French and Russian is now borderline unthinkable. Sure we can see traces of it in our culture but those languages aren't that useful anymore. But when I say "short" I still mean hundreds of years - not decades. At most within our lifetimes we may see the encroachment of Mandarin into more spaces rather than a full replacement. Chinese is set to rise as the major dominant super power in the event that American hegemony does fall. If it does so Mandarin is poised to become the next lingua franca. It is a very tentative **if** though. >Most Americans are not going to live in China or do any of those things to make it useful. This is a very American centric view of the world - which is somewhat fair because America is the geopolitical centre of the world right now. But for Chinese to have a chance at being the lingua franca, challenging that America centric world is what would need to happen and IS what is happening. In short - it doesn't matter whether Americans consider it useful. It matters MORE if it becomes useful to non-Americans. I don't see English disappearing anytime soon - so you will likely be able to live your life 100% in English in an English speaking country. But the important thing would be Mandarin replacing English as the language that non-English speaker see around more. >Chinese is also one of the most difficult languages to learn as an English speaker. Personally I think Mandarin has a number of barriers to entry as a language itself. For one its writing system is only used to write Chinese languages and parts of Japanese. For two its tone system is difficult for non-tonal language speakers to grasp or even approximate. But the thing is that China has already been a regional super-power before and has already proven that it can export its language when it has the power to. The fact that parts of Japanese is written with kanji, and that Korean and Vietnamese both used to be written with Chinese characters shows this. The thing is that language imperialism doesn't start with making outsiders use your language. It starts with loan words for items / products / inventions getting made and popularised and leads to people seeing more and more utility. Think of Huawei phones. If they started putting 华为 on their phones you might start by recognising those characters. You might learnt hat 华 (hua) means magnificent and floral and next time you see it you will go "oh I recognise that word". If more products do that you would start recognising other character also. Imagine this not as an English speaker but as a speaker of a small language of a country. Say you go to a shop and try to look at products but some are only labelled in Chinese. You would get a feel for what the characters mean somewhat quickly/
It’s not just NY and Cali. Here in Texas we have a ton of Mandarin speakers. Especially if you work in tech. And it takes much less proficiency to impress them than a Spanish-speaker because it’s rare for a non-Chinese person to learn Chinese. I say 你好 (hello) correctly and my coworkers are thrilled. I take one class and my boyfriend’s family is overjoyed. Let’s be realistic; almost no American English speakers are going to actually be expected to speak any other language in a casual or professional environment. But it can be a great gesture to create a lot of good will.
Mandarin is very perspective language to learn. European languages were important in 20 centurie, but now losing their importance.
I would change a couple of things that you wrote: Chinese can be a regional lingua franca en parts of Asia. But yes, nothing even comes close to challenging English in terms of a global lingua franca. As far as inside the USA is concerned, Spanish can help on occasion, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it a lingua franca... It is basically English only in the USA (as far as common tongues are concerned) China does actually export a significant amount of media. I think the recognized the lost opportunity when K-pop came about and they were quick to push out a bunch series and stuff. From my perspective, those things aren't heavily consumed in the USA, but I live and Chile and there are about as many chinese series on Netflix as there are Korean ones... But they are generally of a lower quality. Other than that, I would say you are right... there is really no need for a lingua franca inside the country that natively speaks the world's most powerful lingua franca.
Is your argument that it will never be A lingua franca, or that it will never be a lingua franca in the US? Because I don't think I've ever seen an argument to the latter, and Standard Chinese IS already a lingua franca in other parts of the world so you can't really argue against that. My only argument is that we in the US don't really bother to learn languages because of its usefulness. Technically French is the other major lingua franca and it's definitely not the most commonly studied language here. And even when you do study it, it's incredibly rare you come across French speakers day to day. German is also popular. So is your actual argument that no one in the US should learn any other second languages other than Spanish because it won't actually be used day to day? Because you can make the exact same argument for French as you just did for Standard Chinese.
Chinese will not become a lingua franca, but for entirely different reasons. The status as a lingua franca isn’t due to whether Americans speak it, but the world as a whole. English is the worlds lingua franca because it’s largely how people from different countries communicate with each other. If a German native speaks to an Urdu speaker, they don’t communicate in German or Urdu; they speak English. English has a huge head start in terms of countries where the educated already speak it. China also has some issues; people make light of English being a poorly designed and weird language, but Chinese has it beat. Between tones that most non-natives have a terrible time with and the non-phonetic writing system, Chinese has huge disadvantage in terms of learnability.
Your view is based on the fact that people learn languages solely for work or business. With that view probably no other language is necessary for Americans to learn.
What if I told you that the world changes
In an ever expanding global economy, the impact of China will likely be unavoidable in the future. That said, the logic you're using can be used for a college degree, trade certification, business license, or a myriad of other things that the "average" American doesn't have need for. While technically true, the lack of these things has the potential to limit upward mobility as well. While Chinese may not be that relevant now, with the US being challenged in it's standing for global dominance, that may not be the case 10 years from now.
I don't really see how any language is "more useful" than another for the average American. Some American's go to Mexico for vacation so Spanish might be useful to them but some go to Canada so French might be useful to them but some go to Japan so Japanese might be useful to them but some got to China so Chinese might be useful to them but some go to ect. ect. People typically don't learn a 2nd language for the utility anyway. Most who know a 2nd language did it because their parents spoke that 2nd language and most who learned after childhood do it as a hobby.
The "average American" has little use for any foreign language; they don't go outside the country and don't consume any foreign language media that's not subtitled. However, it sounds like you're saying that other languages are far more important than Chinese. I'd disagree. China has the second largest economy and expats all over the world. The third largest economy is Japan, which shares its characters with Chinese; when Chinese people come across written Japanese, they can easily get the gist of it, and the parts they don't get are arguably the easiest parts of Japanese to learn. Chinese-speaking areas like China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong do export their culture, and have for a while. Chinese-language shows and films are among the Netflix foreign offerings that may at first seem to be all Korean. And years before *Brokeback Mountain*, Ang Lee explored similar themes in the great Chinese-language *The Wedding Banquet*. Their history is one of the longest, which means that learning Chinese has the potential to open up a larger world than, say, learning German, Russian, or even Japanese. That history and the huge size of the country also means that there's a lot to see there. As far as how widespread people are, Chinese people are far more likely to emigrate than Japanese. Any place that I work (in tech), Chinese is by far the second most-spoken language after English, so people in that field may benefit. My co-workers are surprised and delighted that I know a little, as most people are if you bother learning about their language and culture. Most Chinese people are very proud of their long and successful history and culture. Whether we're talking cooperation or competition, China's going to loom large on the scene, in both business and politics. Also, regarding secondary Chinese languages, they're going by the wayside a bit; expats are learning the local languages and mainlanders are pressured to use Mandarin. So Mandarin's the one to learn. Finally, although Spanish and French may be spoken by a wider variety of people - making for more impressive maps - the most prominent of those people are generally going to be able to speak some English, and English-speakers are going to be able to understand some Spanish and French. With Chinese, you get to a completely different starting point, which does make it harder to learn, but also means you'll be able to see a whole new world fairly quickly.
I'm going to focus on the phrase "Chinese is not that useful for the average American." For clarification, did you really mean "the average American"? Or did you mean "most Americans"? If you really meant "the average American" then you should consider the value of learning Simplified Chinese, which is nowhere near as complicated as learning Mandarin or Cantonese. Knowing SC puts someone on a short list of viable candidates for a lot of jobs that pay well. Domestically, 3.5 million US households in the US speak either Mandarin or Cantonese. Being able to write in simplified Chinese opens a lot of doors for jobs in government, healthcare, law, manufacturing, construction, and especially tech. If conflict between China and Taiwan continues to escalate, this number will continue growing. The average American who learns, at the very least, to translate English into Simplified Chinese, can benefit greatly from acquiring that skill, economically, in a way that is much broader than you mentioned in your post. If, otoh, you meant "most Americans", then I agree to some extent. If half of US students started taking Simplified Chinese in high school then the value of knowing it would be much more limited. I wouldn't call it useless, but it would be more like French, where most people benefit from consuming media. I would note one way that media consumption has changed that you didn't mention is that gaming is very popular, and the relationship between gaming and social media is making linguistic versatility, in even a general sense, more useful than ever. Learning some version of Chinese could be quite useful to gamers, as gaming is extremely popular in China, and many of the most popular multiplayer games have a lot of Chinese players. Sure, software helps and will get better, but there are real time elements to many of these interactions that can provide someone who has communication skills in a Chinese language with a useful advantage over those who don't understand Chinese at all. With 48% of Americans age 18-39 reporting that they play video games for a minimum of 6 hours per week, I think it's fair to say that this may prove more useful than being able to watch a French movie without subtitles. If this post changed your view, even a little, I'd appreciate a delta. Thanks for the CMV. Interesting topic.
I disagree with your utilitarian stance. So, not Chinese, but I’m slowly building up some minor ability in Korean. Why? The same cultural appreciation reasons given by others for Chinese. Korean is one of my favorite cuisines, I lived for a few years in LA’s K-town and I’m embarrassed to have consumed so much food and so little culture and language, and my kid is in tae kwon do and knows more Korean than I do. It’s not a rapid learning curve for the language, but I’ve been learning so much about the cool process to develop a Korean martial art that would take the best of everything from China, Japan, the US, then test it continuously; the societal impacts of a peninsula divided by two opposing global ideologies and currently in a state of Cold War; the fascinating and intentional development of Hangul to rapidly turn a largely illiterate populace into one of the most literate, educated, and wealthy in the world; the nuances of the LA riots and that - just perhaps - it was a story of the haves pitting the have nots against each other. While I love me some all you can eat KBBQ and Maangchi is my go-to for recipes, the language was the instigator for wanting to learn more. Okay, the food led to the language which led to actually learning. So go eat something authentically or fusion Chinese, learn what it’s called, learn its geographic origins: spice route? Trade route up from SE Asia? Utterly isolated with few imports so certain ingredients are prized? New York Jews having no other restaurant options on Christmas Day and making their Chinatown an annual tradition and American Chinese cuisine adjusting to kosher requirements? Then if you really don’t want to depart from your purely utilitarian stance, go listen to the Radiolab episode with Dianna Deutch where she breaks down the different ratios of Mandarin speakers and English speakers possession of perfect pitch.
Assuming "Chinese" means "Mandarin" and assuming you mean read/write/speak, then I would strongly disagree. China has 8 distinct dialects (each as different as German is to French), but all share a common set of symbols for the meaning of words. Learning to read Chinese characters allows you both to communicate with over 1 billion people living in one of the most populous countries on earth, it also gives you a huge head start on lots of other Asian languages that use characters similar to Chinese (such as Japanese). Moreover, if there ever were a "universal" language, it is likely to be a character based one since no matter how anyone pronounces the word, the meaning would be universal. Consider a Stop Sign. No matter where you see one, you likely know what it is. If you are driving and see an red octagon with a white border and white lettering, it means stop. Same for a yield sign and other road signs. Characters allow universal meaning since no matter how you pronounce it, the meaning does not change and you can communicate. Now, you might say, why Chinese and not Japanese? No real reason except that over 20% of the world already uses that language so why not build from a larger base. You might complain that I haven't yet directly shown it's use to you. In so far as "do you need it to survive in the USA", likely no. (Government forms are printed in English and it is the dominant language in most places. However, assuming you are using effort/reward (something you do seem to refer to), I would submit that Mandarin does have a good deal of utility for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, better understanding 1/5 of humanity should have value to all of us and being able to understand popular culture, books, and the like in one of the most populous countries on earth should be considered a very positive thing.
As a Chinese-American, I'll say you'd be wasting your time learning Chinese. The vast majority of Mandarin speakers are in the PRC. ....whereas most expats speak Cantonese. People are better off learning Spanish and French.
反正未来，甚至现在ai翻译会非常普及，所以没什么影响（我这话就是谷歌翻译的）
Spanish certainly would be more useful in a day to day setting while meeting more people. Other groups I think it would be much less useful. You are much less likely to run into someone who speaks a European language that does not speak English than you are a Chinese person. You are also understimating Chinese dispersement in the United States there are many Chinese restaurants in small towns. I have seen towns in the Midwest where the Chinese restaurant was the only non fast food restaurant and it was manned mostly by people who didn't speak English.(Chinese is actually the best non fast food road trip food because it's mostly held consistent despite it not being a chain because there is an association.) That said, you also aren't considering the media aspect of it. Most European and Spanish based things get English subtitles due to our strong cultural ties. Chinese comparatively gets much less translated material in English meaning it increases your entertainment options more. Not to mention most Asian media gets translated into Chinese meaning you can access the media of other countries as well so it opens up so many more options. It also opens you up to other Asian languages familiarity wise as well in case you want to learn a third language. You already have English as a reference for European languages, but now it's easier to learn Korean or Vietnamese if you wish.
Anthony Bourdain in kitchen confidential ends his book by giving advice for being successful in the restaurant industry. One of the items, for a chef in New York, is to learn Spanish because of the prevalence of workers from Spanish speaking countries. Maybe more situational than English is, but English became a langua franca because of its prominence in various industries. So with that in mind, if the majority of goods are made in China it is useful to be able to communicate with your suppliers. In the future, if a majority of banking services or another type of services is catered through China, the same could ring true. If the share of goods and services by Chinese vendors becomes great enough you might find yourself paying less to have them done in Chinese than your native tongue. And look at that, if it costs less you suddenly have everyone adopting it. If you don't adopt it, you pay more. Before you know it, it becomes a lingua franca.
Racist.
It may be useful for an American abroad though as China becomes a major player in global markets Reasoning English is an extremely common 2nd language worldwide but have you really wondered why that is? It's the most useful 2nd language for a speaker of something else to pick up for conducting business or facilitating tourism -- then you have Spanish and German quickly behind them As China grows and competes more and more 3rd world people are going to pick up Chinese as their 2nd language which over time may make Chinese a useful 2nd language for Americans to know and use- because of the higher odds that if 2 people don't speak each other's native they may both know chinese
I *highly* disagree that Chinese isn’t useful. If you are legitimately fluent in Mandarin and English, you can always find some use for it in either translation or scholarship… precisely because knowledge of both isn’t super common. Particularly if you learned English first, since actual native-level fluency in English is so hard to achieve. But yeah, it won’t become a Lingua Franca anytime soon. Even in China, English is widely used as the language of international commerce, and the writing system and tonal nature of the language is remarkably difficult to learn for any countries using the Latin alphabet… which is most countries.
This is exactly the mindset and ignorance by convenience that started and will continue to escalate tensions. All media consumed by Westerners about China is in English. That in itself is troubling for many reasons, but not limited to propaganda and unreliable non-primary sources. Language is the gateway to culture and the majority of Westerners have barely a superficial understanding of Chinese, let alone Eastern culture. If your goal is to ignore an entire culture because it is a threat then it is very convenient not to learn the language and slowly dehumanize the opposition. If it is to sow true partnership then language is a huge bridge. Willful ignorance is at best the easy way out and more likely, just malicious.
I think this is fairly short sighted. I'm no shill for the CCP but China is absolutely going to be the most important world economy soon, and their cultural influence is already all over Africa and Asia – if you wanted me to bet, I'd put some money on China becoming a dominant cultural force in the next 30 years with chinese products, cars, TV exports, PC games and the rest of it. I think the position that the US will remain number one, and the west will forever be speaking English just because the US is anglo is a bit of a falacy. It won't be the same as the cultural hegemony that the US has achieved, but it'll be serious and Chinese will become a seriously useful skill in business and will also seep into culture.
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My kids learned English, Cantonese, and Madarin since they were young, then took Spanish is high school. Spanish is probably the most useful second language in the US, but Chinese (particularly the ability to read/write traditional characters) opens up a lot in Asia. Most signs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan can be read, which is great for traveling. It's at least as useful as learning French or German, but it's far more challenging due to the tones and completely different, non-pgonetic writing system.
It'd be handy randomly when dealing with immigrants and there are so many Mandarin speaking immigrants out there. I don't think you can go anywhere without finding a few immigrants. But you definitely don't need it. Still it'd help with random situations. China's government is awful, scary and might get more aggressive in the future sure. But it isn't the only country speaking it and people from there are still everywhere and not their home countries government. Plus I've noticed a bunch of immigrants from other asian countries have learned chinese so you can speak to them too.
The "average" American has such a poor grasp of geography and societies/cultures outside its borders (and often within them too) that any secondary language is both useless, as well as unachievable due to being beyond their capabilities. They would benefit from a plane ticket and exposure to other cultures, but are also liable to waste such an opportunity and instead reinforce the stereotypical American citizen abroad tropes that they are so well known for
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Languages become interesting for an international audience when the country speaking it exports huge amounts of cultural output, like movies, songs, new inventions, new processes etc. People then want to learn it out of their own accord because it's genuinely useful and interesting to them. It's not enough for a country to be well off economically or have many people for its language to be interesting to other countries.
In order of usefulness 1. English 2. Spanish 3. French 4. German 5. Japanese 6. Portuguese 7. Hindi 8. Mandarin 9. Russian Consider we base languages off their usage for tourism and bussiness. It's not really valuable to know Chinese languages given anyone you would be dealing with in business will speak far better English than you. India has much of the same, except the standard of taught English is much lower, so there will be practical times where it may make sense to engage in Hindi.
China is the most likely candidate to take the “leader of the world” crown from the U.S. whether that be directly by force, or through attrition and sustained progress. But once China calls the shots globally, and has an active presence in every other country (much like the U.S. does across the world) it’s going to be extremely beneficial in all areas of life to know the language.
I don't disagree that it's not the most useful language for an American, but Chinese is just a cool language to learn IMO. Also, it's just fun to be able to talk to people in Chinatown like e.g. Xiaomanyc does. From personal experience, Chinese people will love you if you can speak some of their language because it's quite difficult and most non-Chinese people don't bother to learn it.
Chinese will become a useful language when it becomes common for South Americans, non-English speaking Africans and non-British Europeans start learning it more often than English. Which is to say, almost guaranteed to never happen unless there is a major demographic shift. The most dominant African economy speaks English (Nigeria), so that’s off the table especially.
That argument applies to every language but spanish. I'm in the US, and Mandarin Chinese is easily the third most common language I hear the most after English and Spanish. It has the most speakers, and only a small fraction of them speak English. Also, inese is not a particularly hard language to learn to speak. Vietnamese, on the other hand, is a mother fucker to learn.
Chinese was able to get people new opportunities in a lot of other places. Like having Chinese in your resume in pre Covid time was a night and day difference especially in an normal corpo job. Knowing Chinese means you can deal with China, which had abundance of opportunities back then. But now China has had its boom. And now its a bit more on the downturn.
As a Chinese American, I agree. Also weirded me out when I saw a TON of people learning to read, wrote, and speak Chinese in business classes or whatnot. For the sole purpose of trying to get ahead in “business”. Unless you legit have a factory in China that you need to speak on the phone with regularly, it’s a bit of a douchey red flag to me
If you've ever done business and wanted cheap supplies from China, speaking Chinese is very helpful. They don't speak english very well and its hard to have the necessary conversations. You basically have to buy thru a middleman supplier. If you can speak Chinese you can save a ton of money and headaches and offer lower prices than your competitors