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English Here to Stay? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6512 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 9 of 23 18 January 2011 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Present trends do not always indicate future events. The Chinese will likely become stricter in upholding copyright laws as they generate more material that need to be protected. The current regime has been investing heavily in education, and there has been among Chinese scientists to create patentable discoveries. These discoveries will drive the development of ways to cut down on piracy, rather than being an effect of curbing piracy now. And, from my discussions with writers and musicians, they feel the same way. When they start out they would be happy making a living as an artist because it beats the heck out of a normal job, even if they won't become multi-millionaires. It's only when an artist gets that much money that they feel the need to make more. When Metallica was first starting out, they encouraged their fans to make bootlegs recordings of their concerts, even setting up special sections for people to bring in recording devices. Later on, after they made their millions, they were in the vanguard of the attack on Napster and online music piracy. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7033 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 10 of 23 18 January 2011 at 6:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Judging by the enormous movie/book/music industries in China I can only assume that the answer to all your questions is a resounding Yes. I'm not even really sure how there can be any question. Are people under the impression that there's a shortage of Mandarin works being produced or something? It's such a bizarre idea. As for your suggestion that the Chinese don't innovate, does the fact that China is a developing country mean nothing to you? You're talking about a country that's poorer, dollar for dollar, than places like Jamaica or Belize; the remarkable thing isn't the paucity of scientific or intellectual innovations in China, it's that they're closing the gap with the developed world at all. But, since supercomputers and maglev trains aren't your thing, in recent years China has had the likes of Li Siguang, Yuan Longping, and Wu Wenjun innovating in the fields of geology, agriculture, and mathematics respectively. There are undoubtedly more, but science isn't really my thing and those are the first ones I found through Google. The idea that Chinese culture, past or present, somehow lacks innovation is both offensive as well as patently untrue.
Born in China, raised speaking Chinese, has held political office in China, never denied Chinese citizenship, etc. The PRC has more of a claim on the DL than any other country I can think of; he may be ethnically Tibetan, but that has absolutely nothing to do with it. As for the actual article, the guy's arguements weren't terribly convincing. People keep saying that Chinese is too difficult to ever become a commonly used international language, but, 1) Those people rarely if ever actually know Chinese, 2) They never have any evidence to support the idea that difficulty has any bearing on the issue (Where's the line between languages that are easy enough and those that are too difficult? I've always wondered that), 3) They ignore the fact that Chinese was in fact used as an international language (The only one) throughout East Asia for quite a while. The idea that English is going to last forever because it "got there first" is at least plausible, but yeah, unconvincing. Qwerty keyboards may not be perfect, but as long as the job is inputting characters from a somewhat restricted set of symbols into a computer they'll get it done, and as long as people need to accomplish such a task they'll be around. English only works if the people you're trying to communicate with are capable of or willing to speak to you in English, or if the things you're trying to read/watch/listen to are in English. This is unlikely to remain the case in perpetuity, to put it mildly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4903 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 11 of 23 18 January 2011 at 7:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I suppose it depends on what you consider China. I don't like to think of the Tibet Autonomous Region as China. This is a digression though, I don't think that English is going anywhere soon either, but I think the reasons I would state are different. It's already just easier to learn English to communicate than learn Chinese. I am working in Singapore right now and have asked people about this. If you are Malay and have your choice which language would you rather learn if your livelyhood depends on it? I have an ethnic Chinese friend here now into his sixties who bemones the difficulties of the Chinese writing system and even the intelligebility of various Mandarin Dialects, if thats the right word. Chinese is just hard. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5844 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 12 of 23 18 January 2011 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The article is a total embarrassment if the author is really a native speaker. He's trying to convince us English is trivial and Mandarin is devilishly hard. Ok, fair enough. Perhaps the latter is true, I'm not an expert in Mandarin. But it's hard to believe his claims about English, given his usage of phrases like those:
I find his style very odd, and I definitely don't believe him English is easy. Edited by Sennin on 18 January 2011 at 1:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7033 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 13 of 23 18 January 2011 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I was as surprised as anyone, but as it turns out the Dalai Lama isn't from the TAR either; the area of Qinghai Province (I believe it was part of Xikang Province when he was born, though I could be mistaken) where he was born and raised was conquered by China in the early 18th-century; Tibet had lost control of it long before. Of course, none of this is in any way intended as an endorsement of the PRC's position in Tibet. Chinese is certainly hard, but English isn't exactly a walk in the park either; people will learn what they have to. For example, one of the reasons why so many people have to learn English is that the huge amount of scholarly material written in it on nearly every topic makes it a sine qua non for higher education in much of the world. Before you know it the amount of scholarly materials written in Chinese will catch up with and then dwarf that produced in English, so then what? If people have to either learn Chinese or risk getting left behind, they'll learn Chinese. I've heard (Often on this very board) that people frequently said similar things about Japan and Japanese in the 80's, but that was different; then Japan was rising up as economic competition for the United States and other English-speaking countries. With China, frankly, the challenge isn't merely economic, and there really is no competition. I'm confident that English will lose a lot of ground to Chinese in my lifetime. Of course, the author of the article and all the people here who agree with him are just as confident (Perhaps even more confident) that it's not going to happen. As fun as speculation is, we'll all find out soon enough. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5083 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 14 of 23 18 January 2011 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What you say about modern Chinese civilization is true. It is not particularly inventive, pioneering, etc., particularly when we consider its population size. This has often been attributed to culturally engrained collectivism and undue respect to authority. However, you may want to look into deeper history, where you would see that China has indeed been a remarkably inventive society. Gunpowder (and all that entails, including rockets, guns, etc.), paper, the magnetic compass, and the printing press are not inventions to sneeze at. Those four inventions are more important for human civilization than the works of all the Nobel laureates in the world combined! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Martin M Newbie United States Joined 5065 days ago 20 posts - 26 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 23 18 January 2011 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am corrected. And I'll even correct myself more insofar as I know that the Chinese created a version of Pascal's triangle centuries before Pascal (a version of the binomial theorem).
Mandarin will grow in importance. I just think another language would likely overtake English in the number one spot before Mandarin would. What that language is, I'm not sure. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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