Slashdot Mirror
Kenya Will Start Teaching Chinese To Elementary School Students From 2020 (qz.com)
Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China. From a report: The country's curriculum development institute (KICD) has said the design and scope of the mandarin syllabus have been completed and will be rolled out in 2020. Primary school pupils from grade four (aged 10) and onwards will be able to take the course, the head of the agency Julius Jwan told Xinhua news agency. Jwan said the language is being introduced given Mandarin's growing global rise, and the deepening political and economic connections between Kenya and China.
"The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin," Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.
"The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin," Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.
Made in China
By 2050 2 of the 3 most crowded countries will speak chinese ?
The first step of many towards English losing it's place as the premier language in the world and the world's "second language". More countries will switch as China replaces US as biggest economic power. No surprise it's happening in Kenya as Africa is heavily invested in by China.
A better investment would be if the world adopted Esperanto; so much easier to learn than Mandarin. Based on European languages, so very easy for an English speaker to learn- especially since it was designed to be easy to learn (2 months to become low-level conversational)... and guess who else is a big believer in Esperanto? China. China already publishes all their official news in Mandarin AND Esperanto.
I bet if the EU committed to Esperanto as a universal second language, China would too- and the rest of the world would follow. Makes so much more sense than the world learning English or Mandarin, two of the hardest languages to learn as an adult.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Made in Kenya
It is bound to be a lot more useful to those kids in a global commerce environment than Swahili.
The biggest problem is the US, and EU is loosing its global influence, and politically many of these countries, are moving to becoming more isolated. While China who had been historically the isolated country, is started to become more involved in world affairs and trade.
This is bad for US and the EU in general, because as we become more isolated, we cut off more and more potential customers. The growth of the US after WWII was in part mostly from rebuilding the rest of the world. The billions of dollars that went to fix foreign countries = trillion of dollars of future trade. As we create countries, who learned how to deal with the US and created compatible business models, and was able to show and present products they may be interested in buying.
The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is that China is colonizing the African continent, filling the vacuum left by US and British withdrawal. You won't find a more racist culture than the Chinese either.
It's always a good idea to learn the language of the master class that bought your country.
China numba one!
I object to cultural appropriation of Mandarin and find Kenyan actions deeply offensive. This is one step removed from wearing yellowface.
We'll see if their students really get any good at Mandarin in large enough numbers to be meaningful. English became a world language in large part because spelling aside, and there are reasons (sometimes dumb one though) for English spelling being what it is, English is just not all that difficult of a language to learn.
Pros of English:
No grammatical cases (except for a few pronouns).
Roman alphabet widely known in the world.
No gender for words. Nouns aren't masculine, feminine or neuter.
Cons of English:
Spelling, but again, there are real reasons for why some/many words are spelled strangely.
Verbs can be ridiculously complicated. I know of no other language where you can say "All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life." and have it make complete sense and be accurate. In fact, if you're a native speaker and you hear this said, it's a lot easier to understand that reading it.
I'm wondering if in the end, this will just be a lot like people in non-English speaking countries in Asia (not Singapore though) who have mandatory English classes, but in reality the students aren't very good at it. Like in Japan, for example. There are some very real downsides to learning Mandarin though.
Pros of Mandarin:
Grammar is ridiculously easy. Verbs don't conjugate. They use adverbs to indicate past or future tense, not verb changes.
I think i read that there are only something like 400 possible syllables in Mandarin where as English has over 15,000.
Cons of Mandarin:
Chinese characters are far more numerous than an alphabet and take a very long time to learn. This is why even in China schools teach little kids Mandarin via pinyin (this is Mandarin written in the Roman alphabet in a way to indicate the tones). I doubt that more than 1 student in 100 who studies Chinese in Kenya will ever get close to fluency in Chinese characters. This makes them essentially illiterate, although the same problem exists with Japanese learners, for example.
Tones. If Kenyans speak an African language with tones, this may not be a big deal, but as a native English speaker who knows a tiny bit of Mandarin and Cantonese I can tell you that getting used to tones is a gigantic problem for many foreign students and probably most will never get very good at it.
If all Kenya does is produce a bunch of students who can read and write pinyin but not really anything else, we'll see how this goes.
In the short-lived series, Firefly, Mandarin Chinese was a common second language. So... a good prediction, or life imitating art?
Africa is doomed to be someone's colony. Hopefully the Chinese will be benevolent overlords.
woa xiang kenyajen hao Congmíng
It won't be long for China before a downtrend gets them. Cheap, substandard, as well as stolen trade secrets will leave them economically isolated with nothing but scraps from the world economy, which is why they're investing in Kenya.
And you americans worry about a few thousand spanish speaking illegals entering your country from the southern border... Your turn will come soon enough.
And what about all those whiny canadian anglos bitching because the big bad federal governement forces them to learn french in school. Try to avoid hearing mandarin or cantoneese anywhere in Vancouver these days. You too will be forced to jump on the chineese band wagon.
China doesn't need nuclear weapons. All it needs is to move five hundred million chinese along the border of the country they want to invade, and have them yell "BANG !" all together.
colonialism is only bad when whites do it.
be assured the chinese will be much less pleasant masters.
English doesn't have one rule for spelling that'll work for all. In some languages they don't have spelling bees because nobody will miss a word. English is already the lingua franca for scientific communications but to truly be the global language, spelling must match the pronunciation. Currently system of memorizing exceptions to the rule is a barrier.
Disclaimer: I'm an American who has been to Kenya recently.
For English not familiar with the national language (Swahili), you see some Swahili words in The Lion King (simba, rafiki, hakuna matata).
Everyone is multi-lingual. You start with your local/regional/tribe language (20-60 of them?). You then learn swahili when you go to school or travel. As you progress and want to start interacting with foreigners, you learn English. Kenya was a British colony in the early 20th century. The capital Nairobi was founded as an British railway town, and people learned English.
China just funded and operates the new Nairobi/Mombasa railroad that's key to getting goods to and from the shipyards in Mombasa inland to other parts of Africa through Nairobi.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funded-railway-in-kenya-sparks-debt-trap-fears
New road construction has chinese-sounding names on the green tractors, not American Caterpillar or .Japanese Komatsu.
Kenya Airways has flights from China. I saw many Chinese tourists.
Managers of Chinese-owned operations would benefit from having more Kenyans know Chinese rather than possibly double-translating through English.
If you want to be successful working with the new Chinese money and management, it helps to speak Chinese, right?
Wake up western colonizers. China is learning from the IMF and World Bank of the last century.
Why the fuck (click bait) Does this even matter in out part of the werld?
Why is this newz 4 nerdz?
What the FUCK does this really have to do with anything related to the meaning of this website..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91XUyg9iWM
Perhaps those whom are unaware, the above link I think best describes the situation @ hand.
again and again,, fucking stupid
Go find a foot, and stick it in ur mouth.. Please
English is the (or a) official language of Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, the three countries mentioned in the summary. This is about adding Mandarin (as an elective) in schools, not replacing English.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Just switching one colonial master for a new one. Or sucker for elites to steal money from. Pick your interpretation.
That's ok, the west can wait them out. Give it another 15 - 20 years and their population will grow old -they will be a has-been just like Japan. Remember the Japanese boogeyman from the 1980s? Yes, populations have been declining in most western countries too, but not nearly as dramatically, and immigration has helped to buoy western countries.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-demographic-time-bomb-one-child-limit-2018-8
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/chinas-rapidly-ageing-workforce-threatens-its-economy-but-beijing-still-discourages-childbirth/news-story/b1918b24ac721bbda3e92ebb1fe6afd9
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201802/07/WS5a7a35cea3106e7dcc13b2a2.html
The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.
No, the US and EU has learned from experience that Africa is a hard place to do business for a lot of reasons (corruption, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc.), which has made them cautious. The Chinese don't have experience with this, but they're quickly re-learning the colonial / imperial lessons that Western nations have learned. As the Chinese dump money into the continent, they're starting to learn that these projects aren't as simple or profitable. Raises the question of what happens when African nations start defaulting on Chinese loans? Will China be sucked into the same cycle of violence that Western nations are engaged in to try to protect or recoup their investments?
Perhaps China will start getting their fair share of the Nigerian Prince email scams too :D
You need the GDP per capita with PPP (purchase power parity) correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as such china is already ahead of all the country you listed yes they have only 8K$ GDP but with ppp correction you realize they are ahead already of everybody. Furthermore the GDP per capita contains not only good but also service. Eliminate the bank and financial sector from the GDP per capita and the picture may not be as rosy for the US and some heavily financial service invested countries (e.g. the UK which will lose quite a bit of it with brexit). Once you take into account both those factor the US even drop further.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
good luck teaching chinese to a negroid
obviously, china is investing heavily in china, it makes sense for them to do this;
https://youtu.be/zQV_DKQkT8o
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Easier than trying to mass migrate to white countries. God help us. A world with billions more soullless Chinese in it, what could possibly go wrong?
when the next machete civil war comes, if those blacks will move to china, or england, or america, considering its the languages they SORTA speak, and if i will have the tremendous pleasure of not finding them in the streets of MY FUCKING COUNTRY, that has NOTHING to do with them or with africa