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Foreign languages fade-- except Chinese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| yawn Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5425 days ago 141 posts - 209 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, FrenchC2, SpanishC2 Studies: GermanB1 | Message 25 of 30 02 February 2010 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey guys - being the person who started this thread in the first place, I find all these debates really interesting :D
I'm personally spared from having to choose between Chinese and, say, Spanish, since I'm already Chinese by race and learned to read and write simple Chinese characters at the same time I began learning the English alphabet. So I basically grew up with both languages. There are actually many more Chinese speaking people in the United States these days than people think. My folks know other Chinese people living in major cities all along the East Coast (New York City, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore), as well as California (somebody brought up San Francisco earlier, and there are also a fair amount from Los Angeles). Of course, Spanish-speaking people are growing to be the largest racial minority in this country, but the number of Chinese people living in the United States is significant enough not to be ignored. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| zooplah Diglot Senior Member United States zooplah.farvista.net Joined 6367 days ago 100 posts - 116 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: German | Message 26 of 30 03 February 2010 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
We have two things in common, it seems: we're both from West Virginia and we both majored in computer science (which was mostly useless; often, I knew more than the professors). I didn't have to take a foreign language, but I took Spanish anyway. I thought it would be much more fun than those awful business and math classes they were making me take. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5690 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 27 of 30 04 February 2010 at 7:06am | IP Logged | |||||
Reasonable in what sense - it is a job market, not a field. If you want to learn a language that will help, and everybody already speaks Spanish, you will compete against them - if you enter a job which needs Chinese, Spanish is useless. In that sense, Spanish is important geographically, but is learning Chinese worse? Perhaps if you don't intend on doing anything with it, like working/going to China, or do business with China, then it is useless, except for the great cultural benefits, but that all depends. Honestly though, Spanish, to understand, isn't that difficult, whereas Chinese takes a bit more of a commitment, so the choice isn't absolute - if you start younger with Chinese you are at a bigger advantage than if you start young with Spanish, in a practical sense, in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5959 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 28 of 30 04 February 2010 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
American high school students already do so poorly with the relatively easy languages they learn like French and Spanish. I think it's safe to say they will do even worse with Chinese. It's been said before, but it's usually wiser to learn a relatively easy language as your first foreign language. It's one of the reasons why most Japanese can't hold a simple conversation in English despite all of them studying it in middle and high school. They take on a too difficult language as their first foreign language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| yawn Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5425 days ago 141 posts - 209 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, FrenchC2, SpanishC2 Studies: GermanB1 | Message 29 of 30 05 February 2010 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
No kidding - I was actually looking up the Advanced Placement statistics for a random state (Massachusetts), and out of all the students whose racial identification was "White", the vast majority of them failed the AP Chinese Language 2009 exam. I think there was only 1 person who got a 5 (the highest possible score). Mandarin, Japanese, and other such languages can be pretty difficult for Westerners to learn, especially when they're still young. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6658 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 30 of 30 05 February 2010 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree, but I'd add that they probably aren't any easier when you're not so young. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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