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Top 10 Languages - Rankings in 2050 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Huliganov Octoglot Senior Member Poland huliganov.tvRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5356 days ago 91 posts - 304 votes  Speaks: English*, Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto, Czech Studies: Romanian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 81 of 108 14 January 2011 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I saw this in the Telegraph today, which may have some relevance on Japanese's position in 50 years time.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8257400 /Third-of-young-Japanese-men-not-interested-in-sex.html If a third of Japanese men are not interested in sex, then as long as that doesn't also apply to their ladies too, I'd say it was a very good reason for Western men to learn it so as to step into the breach more easily! I don't believe it, anyway. Any young man who says he is not interested in sex is either lying to the survey person or to himself. Unless what was meant was "I'm not 'interested' ... I'm fascinated!" We all know what "hentai" means - are they just trying to appear the 'hantai' of 'hentai'? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Huliganov Octoglot Senior Member Poland huliganov.tvRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5356 days ago 91 posts - 304 votes Speaks: English*, Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto, Czech Studies: Romanian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 82 of 108 14 January 2011 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | ||
It's entirely up to you, but I can tell you that my kid is fluent in three and is learning three more at ten years of age. You don't get that from school. In fact you can't be sure of coming out of school with one single foreign language to usable level. One very nice way to cripple your children mentally is to rely on others to teach them and not provide an example of lifelong learning and the joy of learning at home. But like I say, it's up to you. God didn't give me your children to look after, he gave me mine. [/QUOTE] This is impressive. What 3 languages does your child already know and what 3 are they learning? [/QUOTE] English, Polish and Russian fluent, learning French, German and Japanese. She's also getting pretty advanced on the piano. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6961 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 83 of 108 14 January 2011 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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But you can still get pasta anywhere. They kept that.[/QUOTE] But it is not a good pasta. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6961 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 84 of 108 14 January 2011 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
Italian is the language of the Roman Catholic Church. If you want to become a Pope you have to learn it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5386 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 85 of 108 14 January 2011 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
But it is not a good pasta. [/QUOTE] The average Italian makes $27,000 USD per year. The average Ethiopian makes $760. Given these numbers, I'm not going to fault the Ethiopians for not buying the same quality of pasta. Especially when they have so much awesome injera and wot lying around. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5386 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 86 of 108 14 January 2011 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm not really referring to a specific post with my comment about fear, more a general current of sentiment I've felt here in the US and in some of the developing countries that I've been lucky enough to visit. As I've already mentioned Ethiopia, I guess I can expound on what I heard from middle-class Ethiopians there: a lot of them recognize that their country is poor and needs foreign investment, but many people resent and fear the Chinese influence in their country. Which was part of their motivation for looking at the language--as a measure of economic self-protection. I've heard similar sentiments from my Latin American friends about some of the attitudes people have there about the Chinese investment. If there's not fear, there's at least distrust and a sense of "Oh boy, now another group of people is going to colonize us, too." Of course I wouldn't *like* to think that fear was a large motivator for learning English, but that doesn't mean it wasn't. In India it was often mandated by the Raj, or seen as the only way of surviving under the oppressive conditions. Even to this day the Raj is gone, but a sort of economic fear is just as strong among working-class Indians regarding English: they feel that if their kids don't learn English well enough before a certain age, they'll never make it to the middle class. They see English as the different between getting a job at an IT firm or a tourist shop and spending your whole life driving an oxcart through malaria-riddled rice paddies. Since these parents don't have the level of skill in English to pass on to their kids, they're very afraid. Nevermind the Chicano and Native American populations in the US, where inability to speak English and conform to Anglo standards was used as a justification for attack by government forces, and even now attacks against Latino immigrants by gangs of teenage thugs are on the rise. Every place has a different situation, but as an ESL teacher who's interested in working with underprivileged groups, I can tell you that there is still a lot of fear involved in the rush to learn English, or at least to make your kids learn it. And with Chinese I see some traces of the same thing. Ironically it's most "feverish" amongst upper-middle class Americans with plenty of money already--I guess they just don't like the competition. And I'd hate for that to be anyone's primary motivator because in the case of Chinese I just don't see it happening. Regarding my snark about hanzi, I'm referring to the fact that hanzi is objectively more difficult (or at least time consuming) than any alphabet system. Even Chinese- speaking Chinese children, immersed since birth, end up taking a few more years before becoming basically literate than do children who learn alphabetic systems. And these kids are going to school full time. To ask this sort of task of 4 billion adults, most of whom have jobs to do and families to raise, on *top* of learning another very difficult foreign language? It's just an extra hurdle in the way. And the more time the language requires, the greater the incentive has to be for people to bother learning it as a "requirement." Most monolinguals are quite happy to remain so if they can. Your point about hanzi being used as an international sort of writing is an interesting idea, but if people are learning characters without the language, are they actually learning Chinese? This system could work well enough for simple nouns and concepts like "fish" and "school" and "eat" but eventually you hit a translation wall once you get into discussing things like theories, shades of emotion, etc. Not to mention that each person would arrange said characters in different ways, according to the grammar of their native language. This makes character reading, already a tough task for non-Chinese, even *more* demanding. So you'd have people handing each other notes that read like: "Wednesday house mine you go eat?" "Have I things busy for. Dislike I office mine have boss angry cruel. Be Thursday you freedom?" While you'll (maybe) get your message across I just don't think people would enjoy using such a system, which would be a barrier to convincing them to spend hundreds of hours of their time learning it. And I would imagine it would drive a lot of Chinese people insane to see their mother tongue being so abused all day long. Not to mention the massive logistical and paradigm shift that would be required in education all around the world to even get started on such a task. I just think that English has too much inertia at this point, and short of some cataclismic disaster like a meteor strike or nuclear war wiping out the West, I don't see the global ship reversing course so fully by 2050. So while I see your points, I guess I just don't agree with you on the plausibility. I certainly didn't mean any offense, though. Any snarkiness on my part was probably more directed at concerned Manhattan socialite parents who are shoving their kids into Chinese classes without really having a shred of interest in the culture beyond their fear of the upcoming Red Dawn. Edited by robsolete on 14 January 2011 at 8:00pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6961 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 87 of 108 14 January 2011 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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But you can still get pasta anywhere. They kept that.[/QUOTE] But it is not good pasta Given these numbers, I'm not going to fault the Ethiopians for not buying the same quality of pasta. Especially when they have so much awesome injera and wot lying around. [/QUOTE] I don't want fault the Ethiopians , nor the Americans . I think that Ethiopians make good zighinì and americans good hamburghers. And Italians make good pasta. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Huliganov Octoglot Senior Member Poland huliganov.tvRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5356 days ago 91 posts - 304 votes Speaks: English*, Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto, Czech Studies: Romanian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 88 of 108 14 January 2011 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||
I just retained the part of your article that I want to comment further on - firstly your question whether learning Chinese characters without sounds is really learning Chinese. I should say that learning Chinese characters without sounds is the epitome of learning Chinese, whereas learning the sounds and the writing is the epitome of learning Mandarin, Cantonese, or which other Chinese language you've chosen. Even if a person uses sentences like the ones you've given, they would be communicating far in advance of the way people normally communicate without knowing the sounds of each others' languages. Then I just wanted to say about your not believing the world can change so much between 2010 and 2050, I dare say they would have said the same thing in 1910. Now isn't THAT a frightening thought? 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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