

Foreign Languages Fade in Class — Except Chinese - rmah
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html

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Jd
I spent several years of my life learning Mandarin and, although I am about
ready to enter a Masters program so that I will become proficient in both
Japanese and Classical Chinese, I strongly doubt the utility of any and all of
the above for most professionals. While there is certainly a large degree of
discipline and effort necessary to be fluent in these languages (I am
technically fluent in both Mandarin and German, although technical fluency
seems a low bar to meet) this means little all things considered.

Why? Ask yourself what you will do with the language once you have learned it.
Unless you have a strong interest in classical literature or contemporary
politics, both of which would essentially making the transition to an academic
career, it is hard to justify the time invested in learning such a language,
esp. when the best and brightest speakers of that language also speak yours
and have more hours (cumulative over more than a decade) to become proficient
in yours than you do for theirs.

Now, you might say, what if I go to China and attempt to make something of
myself among the economic maelstrom?

Well, what exactly will you do? Have you thought that far ahead? I was there,
in several cities, with part-time work as a translator among other things. My
experience and the experience of close associates is that, despite frantic
generation of infrastructure and cheap consumer products for sale in the
United States, there simply isn't a lot going on that would qualify as
"interesting," and "interesting" and "challenging" work is what I personally
thrive on. Also, since you cannot be a Chinese factory worker, you will be
limited to making dubious investments with generally disreputable business
partners (see the China Law Blog, an excellent resource on this topic and the
enforced opacity of the Chinese Legal system), or serving as a middleman for
cheap consumer products. You could also try to promote human rights or green
tech but, frankly, why do you need to go overseas to do that? There are lots
of opportunities in the US to promote environmental consciousness or reduce
sex slavery.

Moreover, from what folks who invest at a much higher level than I have access
to, corruption is rampant and infects virtually every aspect of public life
and the necessary shift to transparency which should accompany liberalization
(e.g. open media) has not happened, meaning that corruption often increases
instead of being exposed (reporters are routinely dismissed who do not tow the
party line).

So learn Mandarin, sure, if you are really interested in it. I spent
approximately four years of my life on it, worked as a translator, co-founded
for a non-profit dedicated to China-related issues, worked in a think tank on
economic policy and China. I learned a lot about how the world works and,
ultimately, how poorly it all works.

Of course, it might also be an eye-opening experience as to what is happening
in the United States. Another commentator on this thread remarked how trade
will optimally decrease wars. Yes, it is possible to subject virtually
everything to an economic motive and many policy makers in the United States
seem to see complete integration of Chinese and American systems as an ideal.
Decide for yourself what that means.

~~~
wondermnd
Not a total waste. At least you will get better service at the local Chinese
restaurant....

But seriously, from the tech angle, China is becoming a dominant force in the
global technology supply chain, whether it be services or products. Trying to
depend on English only as the sole form of communication is not efficient in
long term. It will indeed become much more useful in commerce. At the very
least some immersion in the language will allow you to understand a little bit
about the culture and country, which is actually much more important....

~~~
Jd
Please explain why dependency on a single language that everyone knows as the
sole form of communication is less efficient than multiple languages.

Please also explain which global tech sectors China is becoming a dominant
force in.

As for immersion and understanding the culture, I completely agree.

------
foulmouthboy
I am very discouraged by how dismissive most of the comments are in regards to
learning another language regardless of what it is. I thought this was a group
of HACKERS. Understanding another language, especially one as challenging as
Mandarin is beneficial education to learning the capabilities, strengths and
structures of communication.

To me, the "English is enough", is totally akin to fanboy mentalities
surrounding technology. I supposed you've only bothered to learn C or Java and
are completely indifferent to even bothering with any other language.
Obviously, this is an extremely limited view.

Additionally, exposure to another language provides exposure to other
cultures. In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety
of cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.

I know a lot of HNers are dismissive of formal education in general, and maybe
knowing Chinese isn't directly applicable to most, but come on. We need to
teach our kids early on that it's OK to learn for the sake of learning

~~~
silencio
Agreed. Even worse are the comments talking about how difficult
Mandarin/Chinese is to learn compared to English, so let's just stick to
Spanish and French. Well, I wonder just how many people learned English or a
similar language as their first language. Some people fluent in some languages
are going to find another that is completely different to be difficult.
Welcome to reality. (Although if my high school foreign language classes were
any indication, similarity of languages was something most people had a very
hard time grasping...only a few could see that Spanish/French/Portuguese had
some things in common and took advantage of that to learn languages faster. We
had a mandatory Spanish 1/French 1 freshman year curriculum, and some people
just struggled the whole year long and chose the language they struggled with
less for the next year.)

> In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety of
> cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.

My first languages were English and Korean, and I had no difficulty whatsoever
in a couple semesters' worth of Mandarin classes, and I'd like to think I can
hold some kind of basic conversation in Mandarin and understand basic written
Chinese text. The downside of trying to use my knowledge though, is realizing
just how little i18n/L10n support there is in applications out there (for
starters...TextMate completely fails because it assumes fixed-width - see
[http://img.skitch.com/20100724-kcjdt411djee6u59p4pc9x5qe6.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20100724-kcjdt411djee6u59p4pc9x5qe6.jpg)).
If for that reason only, hackers should care :)

For what it is worth, I've taken a bunch of language courses just for the hell
of it. Languages intrigue me, even if I never end up speaking it ever again
(ask me how often I speak Spanish in Los Angeles....never...). I never did it
for any economic advantage, I'm probably never going to spend more than a week
of my life in China as a tourist, but it's interesting. I can walk around in
Chinatown and understand what signs say, I know how to address people
correctly, et cetera. That's all.

------
ImFatYoureFat
The problem with this (at least in theory) is that unless US schools devote as
much time to learning mandarin, or spanish for that matter, as chinese and
taiwanese schools spend teaching english the effort is useless. I have studied
mandarin for several years and traveling to anywhere outside of rural china
makes my efforts seem largely pointless. There is always a chinese person who
speaks far better english than I do mandarin. Essentially unless these schools
plan on starting kids in mandarin from kindergarten an going through high
school and using it for at least 3 hours every school day, these kids are
never going to catch up to chinese children's second language proficiency.

~~~
Jd
Moreover, the Chinese do not want to speak Chinese with you but would prefer
English.

That said, this is only true in certain circumstances and among the younger
generation. Among bureaucrats, for example, you will be hard pressed to find
good English spakers.

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VengefulCynic
Mandarin is spoken by roughly 1 billion people. Most Americans only speak
English. Learning a second language, especially one spoken by that many people
can only be a good thing. That said, while I certainly feel that any efforts
to get Americans to learn languages in addition to English are a good thing, I
can't help but being suspicious of the agent and financial backer of the
program that facilitates these teachers: the Chinese government.

Put it this way, can you imagine the Chinese government being receptive if the
US State Department offered to send over several hundred English-language
teachers and pay part of their salaries?

~~~
alextp
I think, however, that the Chinese government itself pays for americans to
teach english in China.

~~~
dublinclontarf
Not just Americans, anyone from a country whose mother tongue is English. And
not just this, English or at least passign the English exams is a requirement
for EVERY UIVERSITY DEGREE. I teach Tradtitional Chinese Medicine undergrads
and postgrads, and they all need to pass the English tests to get their
degree.

Although the vast VAST majority can only speak a few words, something of a
failure when you think that they study English in School for hours each day
from middle school, all the way through Universty and only 1%(probably less)
have any level of fluency.

In my University of 20,000 students there are about 4-5 students whose English
is good enough for me to have a conversation. Including the teachers, there is
only one person in the Entire college who I would say has excellent English.

So in short, take this with a pinch of salt, China does quantity, not quality.

------
kiba
We should learn X language for X reasons!

Seriously though, it's like saying that you should get a liberal art
education. Most people will just goes around carrying quadratical equations,
biology trivia, bad impression of Shakespeare and biased historical views and
other sort of random information. Now we will remember random Chinese
characters and Chinese phrases too. They are certainly _useless_ to the
average Joe because they're just a bunch of disconnected facts.

There's no emphasis on teaching people to be rational thinkers who can make
use of said random information or learn to cope with imperfect information.
It's _hard_ to teach anyway. Can you imagine finding 6 million teachers who
know these kind of stuff? Never mind launching a serious Chinese language
program so that we don't get people who only know random amount of stuff about
the Chinese language.

------
rsheridan6
How many of these kids will actually achieve any sort of fluency in Mandarin?
When I was in school, everybody took easy languages like French and Spanish,
and almost none of them ended up with any sort of fluency. How are they going
to handle a hard language like Mandarin?

I'm not against learning a second language (I took 4 semesters of non-required
elective language classes and then learned over 2000 kanji on my own), but if
you go into it half-assed it's a waste of time.

------
blintson
I lived in Japan for two months. I've been to China for a week. I'm fluent in
Japanese and I've taken a Mandarin class.

There is no doubt in my mind that English is the superior language and we'd
all be better off if the Chinese would learn English rather than the other way
around.*

* We'd probably be better off still if we all learned Esperanto, oh well.

------
rmah
I know it's an oldish article (from Jan 2010), but I still think it's both a
little frightening (another sign of China's economic rise) and heartening
(we're able to adopt).

One point of interest, the Chinese government now pays to send teachers to the
US to teach Chinese in US schools.

~~~
MoreMoschops
Is not China's economic rise a comforting thing, rather than frightening?

~~~
w1ntermute
Considering the fact that they are a political enemy, of course it's a
frightening thing.

~~~
MoreMoschops
My local council has political enemies on it but we don't frisk them for
weaponry when they come in. Given that China is benefiting more and more from
trade, do you think it's more or less likely that they will attempt to destroy
their trading partners? do you think that they dislike having better, more
comfortable lives, and will want to throw it all away?

------
giardini
Despite any teaching efforts I don't believe they will be _learning_ it soon,
especially the written form. It takes years longer to learn any Chinese
dialect than to learn English.

~~~
w1ntermute
_It takes years longer to learn any Chinese dialect than to learn English._

Do you have any proof of this? It's not like Chinese is inherently more
difficult than English. You are underestimating the difficulty of learning
English as a second language for a native Chinese speaker.

~~~
thailandstartup
I believe it is inherently more difficult -
<http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html>

~~~
w1ntermute
I have read Moser's essays before and agree that passable written Chinese
(have to be able to write the characters correctly) is harder to learn than
passable written English (just get the spelling close enough and the reader
will probably figure it out).

However, giardini said "It takes years longer to learn any _Chinese dialect_
than to learn English", and I'm also referring to the spoken language. In many
ways, spoken Chinese is easier to learn, especially at more advanced levels,
than spoken English. One reason is that most of its word roots are native. For
example, the word for computer literally means "electric brain". In English,
OTOH, most advanced/scientific terms are derived from Latin/Greek roots, which
makes them much more difficult to remember.

~~~
notahacker
In that particular example the English word "computer" simply adds a suffix to
the already-in-native-use Latin verb "to compute" which is a standard English
way of converting to a noun meaning "a thing that computes". The main problem
here is that compute is a relatively uncommon word (especially outside the
context of computers), and English as a language has too many uncommon words.

However there are more important things than vocubulary (which you can learn
by rote given sufficient motivation) when applying basic foreign language
skills learned in your homeland from a non-native speaker. English-speakers
tend to be unusually tolerant of mispronunciations as well as misspellings;
likewise with our excessively complex grammar. When you're not having to
master things like tone usage, communication on a basic level (surely all that
can be expected of most US high-school students) is a lot easier to master.

~~~
w1ntermute
_In that particular example the English word "computer" simply adds a suffix
to the already-in-native-use Latin verb "to compute" which is a standard
English way of converting to a noun meaning "a thing that computes"._

Which is exactly the problem. We shouldn't be using Latin roots to derive
English words - we should use native vocabulary, because then we don't end up
with commonly used words based on obscure roots that are rarely used.

 _When you're not having to master things like tone usage, communication on a
basic level (surely all that can be expected of most US high-school students)
is a lot easier to master._

If you think that the Chinese aren't tolerant of accents, you are sorely
mistaken. In fact, a large portion of Chinese TV contains subtitles because of
the various accents from different parts of China that can make it difficult
for them to understand each other.

Also, do you think that English doesn't convey meaning by tone? One English
sentence can have several different meanings based on things such as tone and
stress, and is one of the most difficult aspects of English for ESL speakers
to master.

And in all honesty, the tones aren't that difficult to master. If you take a
Chinese class, you'll spend at least the first month working on them, and once
you've got them down, that's that.

~~~
notahacker
Many Latin words are arguably as native to the language as those with Germanic
or Norse ancestry; compute was present in the language long before the concept
of a computer was conceived. Obviously there are purposely archaic examples
designed by intellectuals to make their new discoveries more impressive.
Borrowed words are a problem for any language, I understand the influence of
Western culture and innovations difficult to express using native words is
increasingly leading to awkward transliterations in Chinese which mislead both
when it comes to semantics and phonetics.

I'm aware of the huge differences between Chinese dialects, but lack of mutual
intelligibility when listening to other Chinese is hardly a sign of
receptiveness to the incoherent ramblings of foreigners.

English intonation is subtle (which might make it hard to learn). It's also a
relatively advanced skill, with it being quite possible to converse in English
without intentionally using tone at all. Tone in English might imply something
about the context of what is said, such as whether it is intended as a
question, but doesn't change the meaning of the word and make the sentence
nonsensical.

------
tkahn6
It's a very common thing to hear that eventually Chinese will become the
language of commerce. I think this is wrong for a few reasons.

1\. Chinese is relatively hard to learn

2\. English is relatively easy to learn

3\. English is part of the standard curriculum in most of the world's schools
and therefore has immense momentum.

4\. Despite America's economic troubles, I believe we're still the leaders in
technological innovation. It's my impression that China's economy is
fundamentally based on manufacturing and exporting Western products. How many
original and innovative products have come out of China in comparison to the
US?

I think Chinese is a good language to learn if you're involved with
manufacturing and international business, but English will remain the language
of technology.

~~~
mootothemax
_1\. Chinese is relatively hard to learn 2\. English is relatively easy to
learn_

I think that depends on what your native language is. Certainly I know that
Chinese people struggle with English.

------
sabat
In the 1980s, we used to get articles about how we'd all better start learning
Japanese. Now it's the Chinese.

I'll believe it when I see it actually happen.

------
jiberishcloth
si

------
Spreadsheet
wo zhi dao zhong wen

