There is 0 reason to learn mandarin if you're doing it for travel/business reasons
In Taiwan street signs do mostly have English translations. A lot of citizens speak English, especially night market vendors. You'll also have a lot of native English speakers in Taipei due to expatriation from US and Canada.
In Singapore signs officially are in English. And it's one of the four official languages, which means most people speaks English.
In Malaysia people usually speak at least 4 languages. Because it was ruled by Britain before, people speak English fairly well.
Lastly, in China, well, nobody is traveling there now. International travel is down 97% this year, even after reopening. And if you're doing business there, well, there's no point understanding the contract in Mandarin because most likely it won't be enforced, and will favor local business anyways by the courts. What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound. So even if your read the English part of the sign you cannot understand it.
>What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound.
I don't think this is a fair take for a couple of reasons.
Mandarin is unlike other languages in that it's written form is famously ideographic. Phonetic translation is all that is done in any pair {L, M}. I assure you there is no such thing as a literal translation in any language.
Secondly, english as a global lingua franca is not a given and we in the anglosphere ought to be gracious in it's modern historical role, lest it decline (this is an exact mirror of dollar reserve privilege). Your statement reads as "be more accommodating for me". But through the prism of good manners it smacks of liberal entitlement.
>There is 0 reason to learn
hoo boy, i don't get paid enough for this... carry on
English IS the global lingua franca TODAY, used by most travelers to navigate through an unknown environment. if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY, then there's no reason to go there TODAY.
Honestly tho, as long as the street signs have English characters on them and I can find them and I can match them to Google Maps, I’m good. Compare with the UK where all the street signs are in English but I can never find them! (They’re often attached to buildings rather than anywhere useful…)
> if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY
Could you give me an example? I just Googled "beijing airport sign" and everything seems translated as expected, e.g., Gates, Beijing Capital Airport, International Departure, Drinking Water, etc.
I assume you don't mean you want Beijing written as "North Capital"?
This seems like a better choice for the sake of "compatibility".
Given that English is not a major local language outside of Hong Kong, I'd expect there's a very high chance that an English-only speaker might need to interact with a Chinese-only speaker. It could be something like trying to relay their goal to a taxi driver or delivery person, or something as critical as trying to gain the attention of emergency services (I'd assume if you called the equivalent of 999/911 and shouted a location in the phone, even if you couldn't explain further, that would be enough to trigger a response)
Providing the English speaking audience the Pinyin gives them a chance to be understood in that situation. The translated only name is more likely to be unrecognized by the lisstener.
It doesn't seem so bizarre when you go into the Montreal metro and the signs say "Gare Bonaventure" instead of "Bonaventure Station", and that's in a country where English is nominally a supported language.
I do not think that anyone is arguing that it does not make sense that we say write 東京駅 (Toukyoueki) for "Tokyo Station" in Japan and that -eki as a suffix is to be expected here. However, if you see a purging of already existing terms in a country, akin to turning Sauerkraut into Liberty Cabbage, it probably indicates that something other than an increased consideration for monolingual speakers is going on.
If what the grandparent's linked Economist article says is true: "The province of Hainan has launched a campaign to 'clean up and rectify' kindergarten names by purging a variety of words, including 'world', 'global', 'bilingual' and 'international'", it does make me feel somewhat sad, as I would hope that many of the terms they list as falling out of favour should remain positive and aspirations for us as a species regardless of the political winds in Beijing.
I don’t have a dog in this thread’s particular fight and am basically just doomscrolling on a Friday night.
But I don’t think English is a nominally supported language in Quebec. IIRC all of Canada outside of Quebec requires dual signage in english + French, but Quebec only requires French. I’d guess Gare bonaventure is an artifact of that law rather than a translation strategy.
That may be the case, but you'd expect that a service like public transit is likely to have a higher than average number of users (travelers from elsewhere) that don't speak French and they still chose to minimize concessions to English.
I'm confused at what you think isn't a fair take. It is pretty screwy to replace existing English translation (useful to people who speak English) with phonetic transcriptions of Chinese words into Latin characters (useful to... who?). Sounds dumb to me.
> Mandarin is unlike other languages in that it's written form is famously ideographic. Phonetic translation is all that is done in any pair {L, M}. I assure you there is no such thing as a literal translation in any language.
There's no Mandarin/English translation for a "STOP" sign? I expect there is such a thing as a literal translation for most short instructions, the type of which you might see on a sign, for instance.
They're talking about street names specifically, not traffic signs. What's the point in having a street name that none of the locals know because they know it by a completely different name?
Btw, based on Wikipedia, China uses symbols for traffic signs like Russia and Europe. US and Canada are the exceptions who use text and only a small few symbols.
Which part of Taiwan did You visit? I visit Taiwan yearly. Only those night vendors served tourist area speak basic English. Futher away from Taipei my English less useful. Doing business with English is painfully slow.
I dont speak Mandarin I usually rely on my basic Taiwanese dialect.
In Malaysia it is depend on which part of Malaysia. Not all Malaysian Chinese can speak Mandarin. Certain part speak Cantonese or other dialect.
Even in places as English friendly as the Netherlands or Germany, working with locals is going to be smoother with a grasp of native tongues of the people you’re interacting with.
And if you’re actually interested in riding the ranks as a career it’s a must that you can be able to work in the language comfortable for your superiors (in some places that’ll be English, of course…)
It’s possible to not have it, but every successful outsider I’ve seen in foreign countries learn the local language even if it’s “unnecessary”
I recently read something suggesting that the US State Department and Foreign Intelligence Agencies are having a hard time with language training and I'm not sure anyone could hold up the argument that their capabilities have remained at the same level as during the Cold War. There are some circumstances that explain this, areas and languages of interest change more now. But I remember when Pakistan's underground nuclear test came as a surprise and even after the Global War on Whatever, I'm not sure the US ever had as much understanding as the Soviets. (Who knows about the Russians?)
Language will be a human struggle as long as humans run the world, I think you're absolutely correct on the meaningful and valuable practice of learning the language of the place you want to succeed in.
I'm only fluent in English, and I like it very much for its flexibility and expressivity, but I'm familiar with a handful of romantic languages and think every language has it's high and low points.
I can’t help but think that if you’re doing business in China from abroad, it’s good to know Mandarin. Seems like a weird take to claim there’s zero value in it.
It's definitely hyperbole, but the core idea that learning Chinese is rapidly becoming less useful for Westerners is fair. It'd be a fantastic idea if you live in BRICS and friends though. I expect China to essentially dominate that group for the rest of my lifetime, at the least.
How are you going to do any kind of business with Chinese companies without speaking Chinese? Even if you use an interpreter, clearly someone in the loop is speaking Chinese.
If there are any business to do in China in the next 10-20 years. Foreign investment in China is down 90% this year. Again, international travel in China is down 97% this year. Apparently everyone else except hacker news readers are aware of the shift.
Such hyperbole. If you seriously think there will be no foreign business activity in China in twenty years let’s bet real cash on that.
It is true that China like most countries at some point is experiencing a crisis at the moment.
As an aside, I think Xi needs to go. Deng Xiaoping’s strategy was better imho. The semi-planned economy approach has worked surprisingly well for now but it’s clear it’s running out of steam. China has already suffered greatly due to such a strategy before.
I can't cite numbers but I don't think it's hyperbole. A friend of mine recently did her Master's thesis on the effects of Covid on international business in Guangzhou. She interviewed a number of business owners and the consensus was basically that a lot of businesses that shut down because of Covid don't seem to be coming back, with most seeming worried about Taiwan.
But still, there was one business owner arguing that there's never been a better time to do business with China because it's cheaper right now, so who knows what will actually happen.
The CCP leadership doesn't care what you think. Xi seems fairly healthy. He could be in power for decades to come. We need to plan around the expectation of a new Cold War with China and declining foreign trade.
I doubt I can train myself to do better than ChatGPT can, this late in the game. When I last needed to communicate in Chinese, which I often have to for products I’ve ordered or other mishaps, all I did was use ChatGPT and compare the result in other translation apps to make sure it approximated what I wanted to say. I also included the English version for completeness and accuracy. While it’s true I should learn other languages… right now it’s simply easier to assume computers can take on this role in the near future, at least until ChatGPT can be trusted as an education tool.
I am stunned that only one of 99 comments here mentions ChatGPT. If computers can transform one language into another as fast as I can type, why would I try to learn to do it with my brain? It's like majoring in the abacus.
I think it depends on your goal. If it’s to communicate, I think it’s fine to use machine translations especially in limited situations like directions or something like that. But language is also a social act, and you can’t really build the same rapport with someone using a translator as you can by speaking their language- especially in person.
But the machine translations are not (and will probably never be) perfect I’ll show you why:
Habló con su jefa y le dijo que le tiene ganas.
Google translate:
He spoke to his boss and told her that he feels like it.
Well in Spanish this could mean:
(He/she/you) talked to (his/her/your) (boss/wife) and told (him/he)r that (he/she/it/you) (somewhere between wants and craves) (him/her/you/it).
This sentence mind you, isn’t especially contrived. It’s just how people talk in Spanish. And while all of these potential translations are good, only one is actually accurate. The only thing that it certainly doesn’t mean is:
He spoke to his boss and told her that he feels like it.
Which is what Google said it meant.
The problem is that what may be and can be ambiguous in one language, often needs to be explicit in another language. And when it must be explicit, the translator or whatever’s translating makes a choice and you don’t know what’s being said on your behalf. And while you can certainly improve a machines ability to guess what’s meant, you’d have to change the languages themselves to actually solve this problem.
What I find most amusing is when English speakers complain about why Spanish uses genders and say its pointless. Because Spanish uses genders for precisely the same reason English does. To add specificity and make things less ambiguous.
I realise this is a very long way to both agree with what you said and disagree.
It’s easy. The Chinese companies that do business with me speak English to me.
However, after the first couple of times trying to teach in China and South Korea, I turned down further gigs, because I felt the students were not understanding me.
I doubt it's about COVID now. The government has really ruined China's "brand" internationally.
1. You need an onerous-to-obtain visa to visit. There is no visa exemption.
2. Banking is a total pain for a foreigner. Many places only accept Alipay or Wechat, which require a Chinese bank account. Cash doesn't work well either, because the largest denomination is tiny.
3. Many US-China flights were canceled in the pandemic and never restarted afterwards. As a result, flights to China are expensive.
4. The Western apps are commonly blocked in China, and the local apps don't have an English translation. Your smartphone is a lot less useful in China.
5. Many US employers ban their employees from bringing company equipment (laptops) into China for fear of corporate espionage.
6. Lots of reports of hostile behavior toward westerners...
The list could go on. There's a reason e.g. Japanese tourism is booming!
7. I have no desire to be a political prisoner abducted to leverage a concession from the west. Same reason I would avoid Russia, North Korea, or probably areas of Mexico with cartels. See Michael Spavor, Michael Kovrig, and Brit Gringer.
I doubt they would do that to an average schmuck like me, but the fact that it's a common consideration shows how far the Chinese government has fallen in the international public's perception.
It's a shame, too. China has some really great cultural sites, substantial natural beauty, cosmopolitan cities, and excellent and varied cuisine. It would be a great tourist destination under a different government.
I gave you two specific, recent examples of Canadians who were in China and arrested in response to Meng Whanzhou being held for extradition to the US. While she was living in a mansion they were in jail with 24 hour lighting, daily questioning for hours, and being denied to consulate officials. I'm not against China or making a political statement about their domestic policies, but I'm not oblivious to foreigners having no rights there or recourse which is certainly not the case here. As a Canadian the other frustration is this was really a US-China spat and Canada was immaterial.
It's not pervasive. Incredible claims require evidence, which you have none. If anecdotal evidence is enough, dozens of people I know go to China with zero issues regularly. Many people we know live there with zero issues. There's 1.4 billion people, logistically what got are saying is not feasible for a country that size. It's nonsense.
Holding up a blank piece of paper is a completely different scenario and topic! We are talking about normal, everyday travel for business and recreation. If you go there and do something taboo, something that's clearly intended to cause trouble, then what do you expect?
With any foreign country you should understand their cultural norms and laws. Your own ignorance is a valid consideration for travel, not being arrested as a political prisoner. You won't get in any trouble as a tourist or business person 99% of the time.
You're right; the risk of abduction is vanishingly small, even if many people are terrified of the power of the Chinese government. I'll replace "legitimate" with "common" in my comment.
1. My visa took less than a week. In SF, where the consulate is busier than usual.
2. This is actually better than the last time I was there in 2019. Alipay now supports international credit cards.
3. Very true. Direct flights are rare.
4. It's annoying that even Gmail etc are blocked. VPNs that worked pre-Covid don't work anymore. The only thing that reliably worked was my roaming T-Mobile connection (but slow...)
5. This was always the case at my previous employer. We were issued temporary Chromebooks that were wiped after we returned. This time, I was extra careful and took a burner phone and left my personal phone off till I got to HK.
In Canada's case, you also had the CCP essentially kidnap two random Canadians who happened to be in China as retaliation for Canada's cooperation in exercising a US warrant against a Chinese national[1].
Good luck getting any Canadian that is not a dual citizen with China to visit, especially because CCP tyranny combined with Trudeau's incompetence cost these two people almost 3 years of their lives in Chinese detention.
You can receive funds to an Alipay account in yuan without having a Chinese bank account. Thus services like Swapsy exist to coordinate pairs of private transactions, where the other party sends USD through Zelle or similar.
2.) No business need to travel there. Foreign investment is down 90% this year. Literally no US/europe presence in the trade fairs in China the summer.
3.) Flights are super expensive, because of low demand, upwards of $5k-10k. travel out of China is down hugely due to the economy, you can search on youTube for videos from Shanghai airport where the airport is devoid of travelers, and filled with empty shops.
4.) It is very hard for travelers to navigate through China. No English translations in street signs. One needs Alipay to pay for anything in China, which is complicated to setup. Ethnocentrism from rising nationalism means there could be racism/violence against travelers.
I traveled to Shanghai in 2018 for business. Attitudes were mixed, but mostly impressed by the pace of development. Flights were cheap for the amount of fuel required ($1200). The (Japanese) OEM I was subcontracting for wanted to install and train the operators using the same equipment in their US final assembly plants as in the Chinese factories where the subassemblies were made. I studied the FSI Mandarin course enough to catch a few basic phrases and read a little pinyin, and I set up Alipay on arrival with a small amount of help from my host. The only shortcoming from a travel perspective was that I ran out of my (TSA-approved) travel-size deodorant and could not find Western deodorant in any of the shops.
On the one hand, it's staggering to me how rapid the pace of change against China has been. On the other hand, it was also staggering how rapidly they were modernizing and building in 2018.
Flights are super expensive because of high demand. They're limited not because people don't want to fly, but because China still hasn't fully ramped down the tit-for-tat COVID restrictions that at one point only allowed one flight per week per airline from the US to China.
I can probably provide some perspective on this given I:
- studied Chinese at university in both Australia and China
- worked there for about 5 years
- have a mobile app for learning Chinese [0]
I think the biggest difference between when I started learning (20+ years ago) and now is that China is no longer seen as a positive, growing force in the world economy. I started learning because I thought it would be useful for business in future, and I was probably right - up until around 2012.
Since then, the country became increasingly hostile to foreigners, foreign companies decided to cut their losses and pull out, the internet ecosystem has become worse and worse and visas are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. China doesn't have much in the way of soft power (unlike, say, Korea), so it's just not a top destination for anyone coming from overseas.
That being said, there's also been a huge outflow of Mandarin speakers to other countries (like Australia), and Mandarin is becoming the default second language at junior/primary schools.
Mandarin is always going to be relevant (I mean, there's more than a billion speakers - it's not like they're going to vanish overnight). But I do agree that the language is becoming less "useful", because there are fewer and fewer prospects for working in China. Even international tourism is becoming less and leas attractive.
As an American born person with some Chinese heritage, it's interesting to see this trend play out in myself alongside wider society.
When I was growing up, my parents and relatives would constantly try to convince me to learn my ethnic language, half to know my roots and half to catch the "China train".
In university, I took it upon myself to take Mandarin courses for several years, but only got to middling competency.
Now, as the years go on, I find that once innate desire to "one day learn Mandarin" gradually fade away. In terms of usefulness:
- it seems less and less likely that I'll ever live in China for a significant length of time due to all the common reasons others in the thread are mentioning
- I have many international Chinese friends, but our friendships are based on cultural affinity rather than linguistic affinity, so they're perfectly fine switching to English whenever we need to talk about something complex.
It's interesting, but many of my American peers of Chinese heritage are actually learning Korean or Japanese, which would have been extremely rare 10 years ago.
I'm not ethnically Chinese but I studied Mandarin in college in the early 2000s then moved to Taiwan for almost a decade. I don't regret doing it, but it didn't provide me any sort of business or career advantage like everyone thought it would in the early 2000s
People never looked at the need for foreign language with enough granularity. For example there was never and real large demand for Westerners to communicate with mainland China. We send specs, they manufacture them. China doesn’t really do FDI here. Now there was a time language skills were a major plus in law or finance in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure about that anymore. The new US TSMC plants might have some needs but probably won’t have trouble filling them.
10 years ago Western companies though they could and should make businesses in China.
Today, even many Chinese companies believe that China is not a good place for making business (e.g: AliBaba, Ever Grande, Country Garden, Tencent, etc).
Slightly off-topic: about 15 years ago Golman Sachs would say that the BRICS were the next countries to become rich.
Guess what...
Brazil and South Africa reverted back to its historical kleptocracy, Russia to autocracy, China to communism and India stuck in its economic protectionism.
> 10 years ago Western companies though they could and should make businesses in China
When I was in college in the late 80’s, I studied Japanese and even did a foreign exchange program there because OF COURSE I would be working with Japanese people after I graduated.
I'm very interested to see how this picture will look 20-30 years out.
Wealth is concentrated in pockets and the average person gets by. China wealth Gini index is moderating somewhat around Japan tier. US Gini is very high and closer to the world average.
Parts of China did, parts did not. The income inequality is really quite striking for what's notionally a communist worker's paradise.
A few years back I was in Xining, an obscure third-tier provincial capital. The main shopping street could have been Tokyo.or Seoul, full of neon, fancy brands and expensive restaurants. But you walk one single block out and you're in a street market with flies buzzing around sheep heads and slabs of meat hanging off hooks.
It's sad, I think people wanting to learn a language represents some kind of hope, and 10 years ago we were overall bullish on increased international collaboration. Now things have become way more insular, a future of international collaboration between superpowers seems way less likely. It's really sad.
We are absolutely moving towards a more fractured world with regional centers of power. Frankly it's hard to imagine what would re-consolidate power. Probably something terrible. Last time that was the widespread destruction of the industrialized world (save the USA) and a long, protracted nuclear standoff that the United States won through economic diplomacy and security guarantees.
I would be interested in seeing the numbers around Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Spanish etc. in my opinion, this may specifically be an avoid China phenomenon.
It's certainly more of a China focused phenomenon than say, Hindi and Spanish at least.
With Spanish learning rate would be high because it's just in general a very popular second language to learn, especially for Americans, regardless of any anticipated economic benefit.
With Hindi, English is also commonly spoken in India and a large portion of official business is done in English due to it being an option external from the many different languages spoken in the country. So there wouldn't be much benefit to learning Hindi specifically unless as a hobby.
Japan and Korea might be seeing an uptick in foreigners learning the language due to their cultural exports, which are increasingly popular in the West.
I can't understand this impulse. It seems blindingly clear to me that the international influence of China is rising and will continue to rise, and the need for Mandarin-English bilingual work will continue to skyrocket. If you do not believe that China is going to be an even more massive world power in the coming decades, then I guess I understand the drop in interest. I just cannot fathom how that could happen, though.
The article puts some import on "soft power"... but is the economic rise of China really going to be soft power? The manufacturing capacity in China is amazing. We're not talking about exporting cultural goods. It's real goods and real power.
The money quote for me:
> The market may have also got more competitive. Bilingual Chinese graduates now fill many of the jobs that require Mandarin. In terms of language skills, they are often more qualified than their Western counterparts. All Chinese children start learning English by age eight, some even earlier. University-entrance exams in China require a high level of proficiency.
So basically, the US students are being out-competed by the Chinese students. Learning Mandarin is not incentivized in the US.
I do not look forward to a time when all the important jobs require Mandarin proficiency, and none of the US graduates have the skills to occupy those positions.
I look forward to deeper comments or at least substantiated refutations.
> I can't understand this impulse. It seems blindingly clear to me that the international influence of China is rising and will continue to rise, and the need for Mandarin-English bilingual work will continue to skyrocket. If you do not believe that China is going to be an even more massive world power in the coming decades, then I guess I understand the drop in interest.
China is having less and less influence globally. Look at the decoupling. It is having more influence regionally. This is a global trend by the way - a weaker global order and a rise of regional poles of power. Regardless of this, English is the de-facto international language and China is hostile to foreign business. It's really only useful if you decide to move to China.
And even if this is not convincing, the trajectory of China is questionable at this point between allying with Russia, a complete disdain for democratic values with 0 constitutional protections (free speech, privacy, etc.), abysmal demographics, and shakey economics. There will be no Chinese global order.
this, from tfa, seems like perfectly adequate reasoning to me:
8<--------------------------------------------
Students in the West may have also soured on the idea of doing business with China. Mandarin teachers point to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 as a seminal moment, when excitement for learning the language took off. Since then, though, China has grown more oppressive under Xi Jinping. Its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been widely reported. In most rich countries negative views of China are at or near all-time highs.
8<--------------------------------------------
i know that if i were a student in an american university right now, the thought of doing business in or with china would not cross my mind - kind of similar to how, when i was growing up in the 80s, there was very good money indians could make working in saudi arabia, but neither me nor any of my friends would have been remotely interested in going there.
I'd hire a Chinese student who graduates from a US university. Their understanding of Chinese & American culture/language would be far better than an American who studies Mandarin for a few years.
China has shown how hostile and vicious it can be, and damaged its reputations as a safe business environment.
No one can sleep well at night, knowing that they're completely reliant on a foreign
country with such aggressive and hostile policy. Which is why many countries all over the world are starting programs to diversify and promote local manufacturing to cut back on reliance on China, one step at a time.
So, don't worry about future jobs, for me, I'm betting it's downhill from here for China. They played their card too early.
It's not China vs US. It's China vs the whole world, china has literally no friends that share its interests because it's so self-centered and intolerable, not even many of it's own oppressed people.
In short, china reputation as a safe business environment/partner is already damaged, and if it continues with the same policy and overplay its hand, then in the next two decades its role will diminish and it'll be isolated, even if it was still super power by then.
Their population is set to drop about 500,000,000 by 2100, and they have scared away investors with the imprisonments. Also, destroying your own tech sector in the name of ideology means they aren’t super interested in the people.
I think the general feeling is that even if China continues to rise, “we” don’t really want anything to do with them. Alternatives will be found and China will at the very least be a soft enemy that espouses something we don’t want to be, very much like the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
Soft power matters. "Cool" matters. China will always struggle against freer and more open societies that bring people into their culture, music, art, and other forms of expression. The comparison to what Japan and South Korea have done should be a wake up call for these places. Even Russia doesn't have the cultural cachet it did during the Cold War.
Something which I think I in my "western ignorance" underestimated is the massive amount of soft power Japan wields through its economy and culture in East/South Asia. Possibly because Japanese culture mainly reached geeks such as myself in Europe.
All the way down to Oceania and even the most nationalistic PRC national, every single one of them that I know have experienced Japanese manga and anime since childhood in the same way that Disney had a reach across "The West". Heck, look at today's "geek culture" in the PRC and tell me that you do not see the obvious parallels to Japan.
I don't think framing it as unilaterally China's fault is helpful. Obviously they have their issues, though it seems like ~40 years of increasing trade with them has improved their standard of living and backed them off of a lot of ideology, even of they still have a long way to go. The issue now is the regression back to isolationism - according to the article it's over the past 10 years that interest has eroded.
It's just not that useful. It's only useful in China and foreigners can't really conduct business there. It's basically only useful if you move to China which is just a handful of people and shrinking at this point.
"unless you live in a bilingual neighborhood" is key here. Many countries across the world teach English as a second language and in western trade it's the lingua franca. Mandarin is spoken in various countries, but many of the Mandarin-speaking countries also have English as a common second language.
I am going to climb onto the reasonal branch of "mfs still got multiple concentration camps in 2023" as a intuition for peeps not learning their language
Of course now that Biden took over, continued their operation, and quickly allowed them to overfill to the point that there's now a full blown border crisis, no one in mainstream media would dare call them that.
The article mentions that "the study of modern languages is falling across the board in many rich countries" so this phenomenon is not exclusive to Chinese.
I think it's part of a larger trend of people choosing not to learn any language besides English because they think that everything else is "useless".
The article also mentions Korean as an exception, but it only shows the increase as a percentage. I wonder how many people are actually learning Korean though, because otherwise this could be like that xkcd joke about the fastest growing religion.
China has peaked. Anyone studying mandarin will be like those studying Japanese at the peak of Japan Inc. in the 80s. Globalization was a great time for some while it lasted though, hope some of you of age have made money during the zenith.
Japanese is still a great language for business. Obviously if one learns it then joins an industry that doesn't benefit from it that's one's own fault.
That's good. And I am biased. I personally liked American and Japanese culture better anyways.
Growing up in China, everyone I knew keeps telling me our culture is fake, reconstructed from a pile of burning books and detached from both history and modern life, at least ever since Cultural Revolution.
But frankly every country is having a cultural crisis today. I just want to preserve some things more. And yes I know that is biased.
In Taiwan street signs do mostly have English translations. A lot of citizens speak English, especially night market vendors. You'll also have a lot of native English speakers in Taipei due to expatriation from US and Canada.
In Singapore signs officially are in English. And it's one of the four official languages, which means most people speaks English.
In Malaysia people usually speak at least 4 languages. Because it was ruled by Britain before, people speak English fairly well.
Lastly, in China, well, nobody is traveling there now. International travel is down 97% this year, even after reopening. And if you're doing business there, well, there's no point understanding the contract in Mandarin because most likely it won't be enforced, and will favor local business anyways by the courts. What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound. So even if your read the English part of the sign you cannot understand it.