Feb 10 2010
Is Mandarin Chinese The Language Of The Future?
I keep hearing this from various sources like the internet and people who are studying it in school. I am considering taking it as a double-major or something in college.
Any opinions on it?
Related posts
13 Responses to “Is Mandarin Chinese The Language Of The Future?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[...] Is Mandarin Chinese The Language Of The Future? | China and Chinese [...]
You already have several “pro” responses, but I’m going to offer a contrarian opinion.
Yes, Mandarin is spoken by more people in actual numbers, but its relative significance on the world stage is miniscule compared to English and that is not going to change soon, if ever. I will list a few points:
- Billions of people do NOT speak mandarin — the ruling elite does, but hundreds of millions of Chinese speak other dialects and can’t even understand spoken Mandarin.
- It is a monosyllabic tonal language, extremely difficult to learn if you’re not born into it. I say this as a person who lived in Asia for many years and speaks one tonal language with some fluency, but it was an order of magnitude more difficult than learning a Romance language, which I have also done.
- Chinese has no phonetic alphabet — it uses thousands of logograms, much less adaptable or useful for modern technology. How many can you put on a keyboard?
- Communication of abstract scientific concepts requires requires a degree of precision that the Asian languages lack.
- While English has the drawback of non-uniform spelling of words, it is still basically simple, can be very precise, and has a huge vocabulary. With over 200,000 words in a college (never mind unabridged dictionary), there is no other language like it.
- Chinese are learning English by the hundreds of millions — they know they have to in order to do business with the international community today. They are in no position to demand that foreigners learn Chinese.
- There’s a big fuss here on the West Coast today about putting Mandarin in our schools. Kids spend years in Spanish class and don’t learn to speak the language, but at least they learn a little Latin background that might increase their English language skills and maybe, if they ever HAVE to learn a Romance language in the future they will be a little better prepared. With a tonal language and no alphabet they are not going to pick up or retain anything, a complete waste of time.
- Sure, businesses say they want people to go over there and speak Mandarin to Chinese, but what happens is that they take some lessons, learn a few common expressions, go over there and transact ALL their business in English, with translators at their side.
I could go on, about their lack of tenses such as pluperfect and future imperfect that we use without thinking, and the imprecision this leads to, but I’ll stop here. Bottom line, if you’re really dedicated and have demonstrated language skills, sure, it might be interesting. But if you ever took French or even Spanish and didn’t get anywhere, don’t even think about Chinese. And it is NOT going to take over the world in 50 years, even though they will probably own it.
I think that English, French, Spanish and Portuguese will be the more international languages for quite some time to come . Especially English.
Arguments that Chinese or Japanese are necessary to do business in Asia are bogus since most of their businessmen know English and a typical meeting between an Asian and American businessman will be in English.
However, just as there were lots of technical and scientific works in German and Russian during the twentieth century that were never translated into English, so will there be lots of Chinese research and scholarship that never gets translated into English either.
The advantage of learning Manadarin, at least well enough to read it, would be that you will have access to some Chinese academic writings unavailable to Western scholars who do not know the language.
Also, If you could even learn the language just well enough to read titles and topic sentences in whatever your field of study in college is, you could have the translating services translate the portions of the text you don’t understand.
That would still give you some scholarly material to quote coming directly from a previously untranslated foreign author… and a lot of college professors like that.
It’ll mainly be an important language in business only. Because China is likely to become the next superpower, many businesspeople are investing in China, and are making an effort to learn Mandarin. While English will likely be the international language of choice, those who wish to do business with China will often learn Mandarin. If that’s what you’re interested in, then give it a shot. It doesn’t hurt to learn another language.
Kind of insulting that people say the future, when in reality it is spoken by more people than English. Plus, the Chinese population isn’t shrinking also not to mention how many Westerns get tattos in Chinese glyphs, so in reality it is the language of today!!!
Not just business but culture wise
In my opinion.
My guess would be yes. I was at a job fair earlier this year at Notre Dame University where a lot of Fortune 500 companies attend. I talked with several of them a mentioned that I was doing International Business. They then proceeded to ask me if I spoke any foreign languages and more specifically Mandarin Chinese. I had read in a lot of different places like you that Mandarin was important but I guess it really didn’t hit me until I spoke with the different companies.
If you have the opportunity of doing a Chinese major, by all means do it. My current university (not Notre Dame) doesn’t teach Asian languages and this irritates the hell out of me! I want to transfer somewhere that I can do a Chinese major/minor too.
Best of luck!
People who’s studying it at school say so because they have to justify somehow why they’re actually learning such a complicated language lol.
I think that in order to make it a lingua franca as is English now, they should start simplifying the language, otherwise, just a few people will learn it…
My mom keeps telling me that! Arghhhhh and telling me I should learn it. Is it really true that it’s being taught in schools now?
For me I think it’s really hard to speak because it’s just I dunno different. The sounds are different but that’s probably because it wasn’t the first form of Chinese I learnt, nor was it what my parents spoke dominantly.
It’s actually the language of the present! One out of every five people in the whole world speaks Mandarin. Definitely a useful language.
definitely if you want to go into a financial, business, marketing, economics, or teaching career. Otherwise spanish or russian is a good second choice.
Yeh even on the internet it is already pretty big.
I love Cantonese better though
undoubtedly
Yes, they will be the big financial force of the next 50 years