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Why People Who Make Things Should Learn Chinese
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine is making that case that any 'maker' who builds, buys or creates electronics should learn (Mandarin) Chinese. MAKE outlines the resources for anyone wishing to learn the language of the soon-to-be largest economy and source of just about everything we buy in the USA."
It's the future!
China is poised to become the worlds largest non-native English speaking population in the world. They are learning English at a much faster rate than any Americans can learn Chinese.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
That Was The Week That Was
What remote evidence is there that the PRC will ever be the world's largest economy? They're displaying symptoms characteristic with a bubble, and their GDP is only roughly half of that of the US. Or is massive growth going to continue forever, just like it was going to for Japan and South Korea?
It's important to learn Chinese so that when you are doing business with Chinese people in English, you can understand what they are saying about you behind your back, cause that's what people do when they speak foreign languages.
have anything made there.
Well, if you wanted to learn a language with the largest number of speakers, Mandarin Chinese would be your best bet.
why? So I can save a few bucks on some shit PCB's while giving the knockoff capital of the world the blueprints?
Maybe its just me, but that sounds pretty fucking dumb
Chinese people don't buy the technology they manufacture in their own company, because China is an off-shoring region for corporations to cheat the local populations where they departed from to sell at lower prices.
China is worse than a bubble: it's a boat dock in a desert: corporations are all going to depart back to their origins and take the tools and jobs with them. At-least America has trees and rivers in their desert, but China is a over-population nightmare that the United States is trying to aleviate at the moment. Ever hear of a Technology Zone? Well if you didn't, then look-up the 1st 50'square-mile "self sustaining" city that a Chinese Government corporation is building south of Boise IDAHO: 1 of 4 to migrate Chinese factory workers and jobs onto America behind the backs of US taxpayers that were sold-out. China would rather find loopholes to move these corporations back *near* America in a legal void rather than the corporations leave China, so they ship Chinese communists onto America to work for these corporations.
n/t
Absolutely true. To deny this is to not understand that the shift to offshore manufacturing isn't in its early or even mid stages - it has happened.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
I remember the 1980s when everybody said that you'll need to learn Japanese. In popular culture the Japanese were shown as our future overlords.
I already bought Rosetta Stone - Klingon edition to try to fit in on slashdot.
Why would a country that doesn't have either a historic animosity, or religious animosity try to wipe out a faith?
So, while I'm at it, should I learn how to read traditional, or simplified Chinese?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)
Life imitates art, or as is often the case, sci-fi is "Future History".
They can learn English if they want to keep up with me.
I have a very hard time with new spoken languages. This is a diagnosed disability: auditory comprehension learning disorder.
Will there be accommodations or will I and people like me be tossed aside?
Learn Esperanto!
My dad owned the same electric can opener my whole life, which is to say it over 30 years old.
My dad owned the same clothes dryer my whole life, which is to say it over 30 years old.
I cant find an electric can opener that lasts 6 months.
Therefore I say:
The Chinese need to learn to make things.
America, Fuck yea.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I'm married to a Chinese lady. One of the difficulties in learning Mandarin is that people do not speak it in the home. Within family, they speak a "home-town dialect", which is usually much different than Mandarin (unless one comes from a few select areas). It's difficult to learn Mandarin by being "embedded" in the culture because most Chinese only use Mandarin in a narrow set of circumstances, such as shopping or doing business away from their home city. And in the southern parts, Cantonese is used more often for that purpose than Mandarin.
Why would a country that doesn't have either a historic animosity, or religious animosity try to wipe out a faith?
Such a country would not, of course. China, on the other hand...
You're kidding, right? Look up Uighurs if you want one example...
Stop perpetuating the Bitcoin scam please.
Palm trees and 8
I'm pretty sure that the GP is being sarcastic, brah.
China has a very large Muslim population. Every town I have lived in has had at lest one, and often several mosques. China includes Islam prominently when identifying its nations religions.
"Chinese citizens enjoy full religious freedom. China is not only a large country in terms of population, it is also a major country in terms of religion, with schools of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism and others, and a total of 100 million religious adherents among a national population of 1.2 billion." http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/zt/zjxy/t36496.htm
NA/Europeans (not raised in China) that speak traditional Chinese even semi-fluently IN THE ENTIRE WORLD
1. Because the writing system is ridiculous (arguably 5,000-25,000 characters to learn, the vast majority of which one can find in an everyday newspaper)
2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.
3. Because the writing system is MINIMALLY phonetic if at all.
4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates (cognates vastly accelerate the learning of language, especially when living with indigenous speakers).
5. Because its a tonal language.
6. Because translation can require multiple (5-20) dictionaries, and using the dictionaries is incredibly complicated in and of itself.
7. Because we don't see language like this:
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."
If you live in the US, learn Spanish. Do not waste your time trying to teach yourself Chinese with rosetta stone, YOU WILL FAIL!!!!
"MAKE Magazine is making that case that any 'maker' who builds, buys or creates electronics should learn (Mandarin) Chinese.
MAKE has no idea what they are talking about. I DO manufacture electronics (electronic data harnesses primarily) for a living and fairly little of the parts we make come from China and most of what we buy is commodity parts. (wire, terminals, connectors, etc) Lots of it comes from Japan and much of it is made here in the US. Sure there are some parts from China but it isn't as much as one might think. The manufacture of many of these products is highly automated and China has no cost significant cost advantage.
Furthermore, virtually all sales of commodity electronic components are done through distributors. You simply are NOT going to buy direct from China unless you are a purchaser for a manufacturing company. Distributors have customer service representatives, most of whom do not speak a word of any Chinese dialect. And even if for some reason you did need to contact someone in China directly, there are a HUGE number of English speakers there. I've been to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chengdu and other places in China. It is NOT hard to find someone who speaks rather good English.
source of just about everything we buy in the USA.
The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and most of that stuff we make is also sold here in the US. In 2010 the US imported $364 BILLION in goods from China or roughly 10% of what the US makes itself. A big number to be sure, but nowhere close to "just about everything".
China is a billion people, 3x the US, I bloody well hope they'll have a bigger economy than the US at some point, because otherwise it means that they remain poor. Same with India.
The sooner they take the "#1 spot" and the responsibility that goes with it, the better as far as I'm concerned. The US is still big enough to make sure its own interests are preserved, and Europe can then kvetch about China for a while, while the US can focus on improving its infrastructure and education.
Can I just play WOW on a Chinese server and pick it up that way?
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, German to my horse, and Mandarin to my electronics.
The cookie told me to.
the summary should probably read "I make the case in MAKE magazine". honestly, the case isnt very conclusive in the article, just really a story on how someone tried learning chinese.
That China ever becomes the world's largest economy (there is no evidence for this now, as it is already looking bubbly over there), It would be the largest economy with a huge number of people, thus the average income per person (and thus the standard of living) would still be much less than the US, Japan, South Korea, or Europe. Mind you, I am not saying this is good or bad, it's just reality for now.
Forther, while China is (currently) a manufacturing powerhouse, they don't manufacture everything. In fact, they tend to manufacture simpler stuff, and put more complex stuff together. They buy components from Taiwan, Korean, and Japan (my country), when it comes to building sophisticated things, and then assemble them ans export them. There's nothing wrong with this, but thinking that they are making everything from scratch is a bit of an overstatement. If you need persuasion, take a look at the high-speed train fiasco that's currently going on in China. They couldn't build it themselves, so they imported the technology. Yet, they didn't want to be dependent on someone else's technology, and wanted to hack it themselves, so they bought pieces and bits from different vendors in different countries. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't fit together.
The point is, China is a big and important country, but they don't do everything, and won't for a while. If you wanted to cover "manufacturing asia" you would need to know at least Japanese, Korean and Manderine - and that's just for now. (To be honest, though, people who matter in China for high level business will be more likely to learn English, so it's more practical to study Japanese in a way). Still, the important factor is this: Learning a language well enough to useful in business will take 5-10 years, by which time the situation will change. China is already starting to move up the ladder and outsource manufacturing they don'T want to do to cheaper places like Vietnam.
Anyway, you should study a language because you are interested in it, and given that things change: economics should be at most one factor.
The author states that he intends to be fluent by 2016 by studying in his free time. I don't think this is likely to achieve fluency unless you're living full time in a Chinese speaking enviornment. Of course 'fluent' word that tends to get thrown around indiscriminantly and rarely used in the linguistic sense of true fluency. If he means functional or conversant, then it's definitely doable. If, however he means C2 on the CEFR scale, then 5 years of full time study might be enough to achieve that, but it's not guaranteed.
I will say that he's on the right path using Pleco & spaced repetition. These tools mostly appeal to us engineering types, but I can tell you that they truly exploit the power of your memory.
Chinese is just a harder language than others. It presents numerous challenges for non-native speakers, especially westerners. These include:
* Difficult writing system
* awkward pronunciation
* difficulty distinguishing tones
* numerous characters associated with any given syllable which makes it diffulcult to infer meaning of new words that you haven't heard before.
* abbreviated forms, (i.e. huan2bao3 - huan2jing4 bao3hu4)
* Larger vocabulary. To understand 90% of all content in English, you need to know about 5000 terms, with Chinese, that number is about 9000.
So, if you're the type that likes a challenge, then it can be very rewarding, but just realize what you're really up against. Most folks who take it on give up before reaching true fluency.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
...to learn the languages of countries that I might actually want to visit because they aren't yet censor-happy dictatorships / overflowing with toxic pollution / not biased against female children / not known for selling toxic crap overseas. I'd love to visit Japan, but you could not pay me to visit China any more than you could pay me to visit North Korea.
I have nothing against the Chinese people, but they allowed their government to get out of control, and their government cares more about keeping outside ideas out of its populace than improving health and safety and living conditions, and now their country probably un-redeemable.
I'm sure eventually things like this 3d printer will make chinas manufacturing obsolete.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxMsSz5Aw
just a thought I had
I remember the 1980s when everybody said that you'll need to learn Japanese. In popular culture the Japanese were shown as our future overlords.
With the Japanese we were competitors almost as equals - they showed US companies that they took the US consumer for granted for too long. But never the less, both the US and Japan made things and we competed around the World with the Euro zone and we all traded with each other.
In the case of China, we're NOT competing - how can we? Their labor is much cheaper than ours and they don't have many of the (much needed) environmental and financial regulations.
China isn't competition: they're a replacement for the American manufacturer and services.
The Chinese are not interested in trading. The Chinese are only interested in getting our tech, sucking us dry, and then supplanting us - they have no desire to have an equal trading arrangement. As far as they are concerned, we will buy from them and won't buy from US: very one sided.
The complete and utter stupidity of American business and their dealing with the Chinese is just laughable. The benefit for us is that the multinationals are sealing their doom which will leave openings and opportunities for the little guy here. IBM, Intel, Boeing, etc... are doomed. Good riddance. Now, some entrepreneur can come in and innovate without those companies blocking their way.
I've been paying more attention to labels of late, and keep finding more and more of the stuff I buy is not made in China.
Hell, according to the labels, I should really learn how to speak Canadian, eh?
Yes, yes, a million times yes.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
The issue is not whether you need to learn Chinese or not. It's about whether you really need to go to China anymore at all. I've been in the electronics industry for 21 years. Slowly everything is moving out of Asia. First everyone was in Taiwan, now they outsource to China, now they have begun outsourcing to Thailand and Singapore. With the many advances in automation, both from a flex manufacturing perspective and final product packaging, there really is no need to go there anymore with the proper upfront capital investment back in Canada or the US. I figure in about 10 years, the only reason you'll need either Japan or Singapore is for high-value production materials that the Japanese have invested heavily into already from an automation perspective and that downward pressure and competition will make it worthwhile to still produce there. Again this depends on what you make but for the most part if you invest properly in your own equipment you can do it yourself here back home and employ operators locally to boost your own economy.
Everyone in the USA should learn Chinese. For economic, political, and social reasons. I find it absurd that we still push Spanish on kids in our country as a second language, when the sum total of all Spanish-speaking countries doesn't have the economic, political, and social impact of China. I took three years of Spanish in school and hear someone speaking it maybe 3 times a month. I hear people speaking Chinese nearly every day.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That Was The Year That Was was a collection of songs he did for the TV show
They held a massive expo. They're building huge skyscrapers, They've got crazy real estate prices, and now Americans are thinking of learning their language. They've got both bases covered if they want to emulate Japan, circa 1986. We all know where that went.
All we need now is for Time magazine to put China on the cover. Maybe they already did, perhaps more than once.
Despite all these contrary indicators, China rolls on... for now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Just as in every other market, you have to look at supply and demand. The world is already brimming with people who speak English and Mandarin or Cantonese. Learning a language takes a lot of time and effort, and if you're past your early 20s you probably won't ever be a fluent speaker no matter how much you put into it.. Are you really ready to risk millions of dollars because you accidentally offended your client?
You'd be far ahead getting a second job and then hiring a translator with the money you make.
Wow so this is what jealous Americans look like!
I don't see why we can't just let the call centers in India and the Philippines handle all that translation. They're already used to faking cultural and lingual fluency, and do a damn good job of it. I don't know many Americans who would spend that much time trying to get that good at not only the Mandarin language, but the culture and figures of speech as well.
Why would you need an electric can opener?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
bitcoin scam lol. its not a scam but it cost more to mine them then they are worth.
They'll take the current technology and roll it out faster, cheaper, and (not better but) in more standardized fashion than anyone else, and capture market after market. They'll rack up victory after victory, until one day when winning depends on creativity and innovation, then they'll stop winning.
So the same kinds of people who once insisted we needed to learn Visual Basic, then MFC and Active Server Pages, then C#, then Silverlight, are now saying that we need to learn Mandarin.
1.3 billion. That is over 4 times as big as the United States. The US is screwed.
Google "Chinese ghost cities" and take a look. Strange stuff going on over there.
It's China we're talking about, you insensitive Western clod. Baidu for "Chinese ghost cities" and hopefully you'll see "better" information.
except you probably already do.
The "Oh the US doesn't make anything!" You see it on Slashdot all the time and it is so amazingly wrong. In fact, prior to the downturn the US manufactured more than it has ever made in the past, and prior to the end of 2010, it made more than China. It is now a close second, manufacturing more than everyone but China.
I think part of the problem is just people wanting to believe America is doomed and/or crap for some reason but the other part is people don't understand the very global and distributed nature of things these days. They also function by what they happen to notice, which in terms of "made in" stickers is a lot of Chinese things.
Ok well that doesn't mean anything but that final assembly was done there. The "made in" or "assembled in" mark has to be put on something where it was put together. That has nothing to do with where any of the parts or major part of the work was done.
As an example: Buy an Intel processor in the US and it'll generally be stamped from Costa Rica, but sometimes Malaysia. Well if you do some research, you discover they have no fabs in those countries. Most of their fabs are in the US (7 of them) 1 in Ireland, 1 is Israel and one still being finished in China. All the high tech ones, the 32nm ones, are in the US so that's where the new CPUs are being made. Why then the labeling? Because it was developed there? No, you find their R&D centers are in the US and Israel. So what then?
Well the chips are tested and assembled there (also other locations, including one new on in the US). The wafers are shipped off, and the chips are cut off, tested, and packaged, then sent back. However, since that's the final place they are put together, that's what you see stamped on the chip.
When you do some digging, you find that indeed the US does make plenty of stuff, not all of it finished products though. When the US does make finished products, you discover that their are parts from all over in them. It isn't a situation where many things are built, start to finish, in one country much less one location. Companies all over the world make things, and they buy and sell form each other.
The US has a big share of that, as I said, second only to China currently.
After years of frustration while reading incomprihensible English instructions from Chinese products, it's time for revenge!
What about India?
http://xkcd.com/605/
North America produces food for the world. If the Chinese want to eat, they'll learn English. If they want Maple Syrup, they'll learn Francais. ~:-)p
Indeed. Only non-mathematicians could mistake "x^3" as being "e^x".
[Write out the Taylor series for "e^x" and you will see that this mistake is extremely silly]
An English speaker (and for that matter a speaker of any other non-East Asian language) is likely to find Chinese harder to learn than any other reasonably common language, except possibly Japanese. David Moser's paper "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" may provide a useful reality check. He wrote it in 1990 while he was a student of Chinese. (He later got his doctorate in Chinese Studies and is currently Academic Director of the Chinese Studies staff at CET Academic Programs, an American study-abroad organization with a strong Chinese focus. He lives in Beijing with his Chinese wife.)
I don't think I'm in denial at all. I have no doubt the balance of power is shifting (and really, HAS shifted in many ways already). Since the 1980's, the USA gave up most of the raw manufacturing capability that made us great in the 1950's and 60's. The plan was, essentially, to get the majority of our population doing less labor-intensive work, substituting use of our brains for equal or better pay. But this was somewhat foolish in hindsight, because despite the U.S. still having a big lead in supplying such things as Hollywood movie entertainment and considerable success with computer software products, there's no denying that everyone needs numerous "hard goods" which we now constantly import.
It's unfair to compare what the U.S. government says/does with the thought processes of the general public over here. I find a BIG disconnect between the two.
But that said? China's enormous population doesn't really guarantee them any advantages over other nations, prosperity-wise. For every one of the benefits China can obtain with those numbers (larger workforce and more people to collect taxes from on income, etc.), they have an equal penalty working against them. (The larger population means more people consuming resources at a faster rate and creating more waste/trash to dispose of.) I don't claim to know the actual math or anything - but I strongly suspect there's a "sweet spot" for the optimal population of a nation. Beyond that, I imagine you see diminishing returns on additional populace equating to a "better country".
Certainly, you see this with businesses. A small business needs growth in their number of employees to succeed and prosper. But once you reach a certain size, you become much less agile. Historically, it's these "mega corps" that usually wind up getting toppled by a small, agile start-up type of company (think IBM, for example, up until Microsoft came along and knocked them down).
The funny thing with the trend towards "globalization" is, all the major players' economies become intertwined, to the point where one can't really afford to let another fail. The "rising tide lifts all ships" theory about the economy has a lot of truth to it, but I think people often forget the reverse is equally true. If the "water" around your nation drops enough, it affects more than just your OWN ships! Therefore, I like that Josh Wheaton theory (Firefly) a lot ... that in the long-run, we may simply see the USA *and* China as major "superpowers", even if the U.S. never again sees a situation where they're the "most prosperous" nation.
but I already was supposed to learn japanese because they were going to own everything only 15 years ago.
damnit!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Screw the economic incentive. Learn chinese because it's a completely diferent language (if you are a germanic or romance speaker, anyway). It's fun.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Learning Mandarin is probably a good idea, I've been doing it myself, but don't expect it to be easy. It is very hard, and not because of that stuff about tones. See How Hard is Chinese or Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. It has also been a lot of fun and you pick up a lot of Chinese culture along the way.
Conventional wisdom has it that China lags India in English proficiency, for obvious reaons. However, this report says:
"Asia’s English proficiency scores show that reputations are not always accurate. Take for example the nearly equivalent scores of China and India. Despite its British colonial legacy and reputation as an English-speaking nation, India is today no more proficient in English than rapidly improving China."
http://www.ef.com/sitecore/__/~/media/efcom/epi/pdf/EF-EPI-2011.pdf?ctr=ca
It's so you can welcome your new Chinese overlords in their native language.
"Since the 1980's, the USA gave up most of the raw manufacturing capability that made us great in the 1950's and 60's."
This is untrue. US manufacturing output, measured in cost of goods produced, is near all time highs, and has been continually rising except for a small blip during the most recent economic unpleasantness.
US manufacturing employment has dropped dramatically due to automation and concentration on manufacturing of higher value goods.
This is very similar to the fate of agriculture in the US. 150 years ago, the vast majority of Amerians were employed in agriculture. Today, only a few percent are, yet those few workers produce far more food than the entire agriculture workforce of 150 years ago because of farm mechanization.
China excels in low-skilled assembly of products that is just hard enough to not be easilly done by robots. If it can be done by robots, it can be done in the US it Japan.
Isn't there a saying that goes something like:
"An optimist learns english, a pessimist learns chinese and a realist learns how to handle an AK47"
15.25% of all those parts actually read "Mde in China"
Learn Chinese? Nah. It is stupendously difficult for native speakers of English to learn Chinese at a level that provides an advantage. It is even more difficult to learn to read. Not impossible, but just very difficult. Your time is better spent elsewhere. Tons of Chinese are learning the international language, English. Especially little kids. They will be quite fluent when they grow up in 10-20 years.
Oh, you're going to impress Chinese people in your country? Guess what Chinese do when they travel overseas? They deal with the ethnic Chinese native to your country. So, you're a hairy barbarian who speaks their language? Congratulations. They still won't do business with you, or hire you, or be impressed in any way.
Chinese is a freaking mountain. The more you learn, the harder it gets. And guess what: Chinese people don't even speak Chinese. Millions of them speak regional languages. Mandarin (putonghua) translates as "the common language". It was invented so that a giant country could have a dialect that could be used nationwide, a great advantage. Meanwhile, America is busy teaching foreign languages in its schools and anyone who thinks that a country should have a common language is attacked as a racist.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Never read a post with linguistics, economics and multivariate statistics in a single paragraph. I salute you
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
"They are learning English at a much faster rate than any Americans can learn Chinese"
That's an interesting comment. Do you mean Chinese folk are more clever than Americans, or more highly motivated, or something else?
I already learned Russian near the end of the Cold War, I'll just take a pass on learning Chinese right before the 700 million people *not* included in their glorious creation of a privileged elite burn the whole thing to the ground. This is a state in a desparate race to reform its corrupt police state architecture before the majority of people notice that the ideological justification of its existence was abandoned long ago. And they're losing.
The people that make thngs should look around and start offering solutions locally. You are not going to compete with China, you should not try to because the global model is making us poor and is destroying the ecosystem.
It depends.
The rates fluctuate, sometimes wildly.
New things are always on the horizon
they're still just 1 market.
Despite the giant market that they are, it probably doesn't help your companies competitiveness if 20 people speak mandarin vs 2 or 3.
There are still more people who are not Chinese than those who are and if you want to break into other markets, well..
Frankly just don't waste your time because everyone else is better (more prolific) at learning English than English speakers seem to be at learning other languages. Even in Asia, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, etc all do business in English because they're all learning English. Just let them do all the hard work because their biggest market has English in common. Work smarter, not harder. In fact, ignore all advice about learning a language for business because no matter who you're going to do business with, they're probably learning English right now.
...learning Spanish would be far more useful for those of us who already don't speak Spanish.
And btw, many of us do, for those who like to hard on Americans not knowing a second language. (My Spanish is lame, but passable).
We have a cheap labor pool in Central America that will be picking up the slack once the Chinese workers become too expensive and the price of fuel rises enough... which it will soon.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Ever watch TV on an American Made TV? Any Stereo equipment? Ever think that consumer electronics are the gateway to military products? THey learn, we forget how to make these things. Call me paranoid, but China is guided by a group of Engineers who are choosing which industries they want to own. Their succession path is not hotly debated as it is here, rather its guided by the Party. http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/17/china-leaders-stars-leadership-rising-stars.html . We are possessed with morality battles aligned with rhetorical red/blue party lines as if there were only two choices on how to live. Heck we are fighting as if both sides think they are James Kirk and the other is a Gorn. We are easy pickings as we are too predictable.
Having spent nearly 20 years in Japan, I have become somewhat of an expert at learning eastern languages. If you really want to learn the language, live with someone who speaks it fluently and has no desire to learn your language. If you are serious, you can master conversational japanese in two years and chinese in a little over three.
Reading and writing will require real work. However, if you apply yourself, you can attain high school reading ability during this same time period.
And if you choose your teacher(s) wisely, it can be fun as well as educational.
That reminds me of this sketch from A Prairie Home Companion:
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2011/03/19/scripts/bank.shtml
Wait. Americans start the first foreign language in 7th grade? Thats ridiculous. I think 10y should be the latest point to start, after that language is more or less hardwired.
FWIW, I started studying Japanese in 9th grade at the age of 14. Had it in high school for two years, then the program was dropped for lack of students, and I took once-weekly night classes for the next two years (because I'm a geek). I didn't take any my first year of college (choosing instead to take intensive Spanish and a semester of Chinese), and got back into it in my second year. Spent 6 months living with a host family in northern Japan between my sophomore and junior years.
When last I was living in Japan, I could fool folks on the phone (you know, where they couldn't see me) into thinking I was Japanese.
Mind you, I'm a decent mimic anyway, with an ear for accents. Always have been, so far as I can remember. And time spent living in the language and culture is hard to beat, and not something that most second-language-learners in the US ever really get around to doing.
That aside, the basic premise that language is hardwired after some age in the early teens is, frankly, bupkus. The main age-related issue regarding language acquisition has vastly more to do with social awareness -- part of learning any language is experimenting with making the sounds until you can sound like a native, and playing around with words until you have a solid grasp of valid syntax and grammar. For example, I can guarantee you that a 5-year-old will have far fewer compunctions about going "ba ba ba flub bla bla" on the bus than anyone who has gotten as far as puberty.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I know the value of learning languages you'll never use again: very very small.
As with most things having to do with language, it depends on the context. (<-- a linguist's way of saying YMMV.)
I'm a Japanese-English translator with an interest in Japanese word formation patterns, archaeology, and human migration patterns. I'm currently studying Navajo of all things, simply out of curiosity and because I love a good puzzle. I have zero opportunity to use it in speaking, and a very limited opportunity to use it in written form, primarily by puzzling out articles on the Navajo Wikipedia.
Despite the apparent sheer uselessness to me of studying Navajo, I have still found it helpful in nudging my brain this way or that with regard to looking at Japanese word formation. Note that I am in no way arguing that Navajo and Japanese are somehow related -- any relation would have to be so distant and so long ago as to be of dubious utility anyway. But I *have* found that studying the language has prompted new productive lines of thought in my study of Japanese.
So, from my point of view at least, the value of learning languages you'll never use again can be quite large indeed -- depending on your specific circumstances.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The problem with Chinese is just it's such an awful language, with a bizarre and retarded method of writing it down which just makes it incredibly hard to learn.
What makes it "awful"? I find it quite lovely to listen to, at least when spoken clearly as it is in the soundtrack of the movie Hero. The use of aspect markers instead of tense and the way that verbs do not conjugate, as well as the way that nouns have no plural, gender, or case distinctions, all make Chinese much easier to learn.
And when it comes to writing, anyone writing in English has no grounds for complaint -- both Chinese and English are written using a limited number of graphic elements (radicals vs. letters) combined in specific ways to form specific words. Both writing systems require years of study before they can be used productively (though less study just to read -- this is one example of the difference between passive use [reading] and active, productive use [writing]). Both writing systems contain obscure elements/words that are best left to specialists or arcana buffs. Basic texts in both writing systems make repeated use of the same elements/words.
Written English has the benefit of purveying sound information, but with notable lacunae and complications -- the word chough is a good example (apparently pronounced chuff), or perhaps slough would be better (I've heard slow, slue, and sluff, depending on region and context). Meanwhile, written Chinese has the benefit of purveying meaning, regardless of pronunciation -- allowing its use to write down very different languages, including all of the Chinese dialects, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. (Bonus points for folks who are at least passingly aware of CJKV text processing issues.)
I suspect the Chinese will end up learning English, not English speakers learning Chinese.
This I agree with, though for different reasons -- I think this will happen because (1) most native English speakers in the US (and possibly in other countries?) tend to exhibit a certain sense of entitlement (and ensuing complacency and hubris) from the long years of being near or at the top of the geopolitical dog pile, and (2) people on the rise and trying to make something of themselves tend to have the ambition and drive to get in and get to work.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
This is because almost anybody can learn English faster than Chinese. This is the reason why children begin communicating at an earlier age in the west than their equivalent Chinese counterparts.
This claim is wildly at odds with what I have seen -- spending time with both native-English and native-Chinese families, I saw zero appreciable difference in the ages at which children began communicating.
Besides which, the vagaries of English (verbs inflect for person and tense, tenses are varied and inconsistent, nouns inflect for number and gender, comparatives are inconsistent, articles exist and can be either definite or indefinite in hard-to-define ways, etc) that are not shared by Chinese would suggest that English would be the harder language to learn.
Do you have any references to back up either of these arguments? If so, I'd be quite interested in reading them.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."