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Russian is past, Chinese is future? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7161 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 150 04 April 2005 at 5:48am | IP Logged | ||
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As I am finally beginning to see a bit of light at the end of the long tunnel of learning Russian, a thought came to me that Russian is perhaps more a language of the past and that Chinese is a language of the future.
By this I mean that Russia's influence seems to be on a long-term path towards decline, and that the use of Russian outside Russia is probably going to decrease in years to come. Once it was a might language, studied by people all over the world, but it no longer is. Whereas Chinese seems to have very promising future and there seems to be no limit to the progress of China's influence in politics, military and business matters. I don't mean to 'criticize' Russian and the language brings its own rewards, but from a strictly utilitarian perspective I wonder if I build my house in the right street. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6966 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 2 of 150 04 April 2005 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with you whole heartedly. When choosing a language to study I looked at politics, population, the amount of countries that speak the language and economics.
Chinese just seemed to have it all, nearly. The only problem with Mandarin is that it's not a language spoken in any great quantities outside China and especially not outside Asia. Still China is a monster of a country and Mandarin binds such diverse places as Tibet, Hong Kong and Beijing together. Coming to China with its phenomenal growth, you can feel the optimism in the air. There's a buzz about this place for sure. I think one of the best things parents can do is teach their children Chinese as it will easily rank close to English in importance, in the future. This is if the growth of the Chinese economy continues as it has. Still, the English language learning industry is huge here. It seems sometimes everyone wants to learn English even though most are bad at speaking. From what I've read on this website few Russians speak a foreign language. To compound Russian's demise China has switched all its educational efforts from teaching Russian to English! Russian is a language the old people know (grandparents). So this switch, came before the complete demise of the Soviet Union. Even in terms of learning a third language Russian seems behind French and Japanese. However as a contrast, in Hainan a tropical island in the south of China, there are so many Russians there, that they have shop signs in Russian. I found few English speakers there. Russian was more important. The same of course is more true in the very north of China. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Russia borders China as well as little Europe. There are also native speakers of Russian in the North of China such as Harbin who emigrated to the region when Manchuria was under Russian/USSR influence. Don't lose too much heart though. While Russia as a political power has declined it's economy is expected to grow. China, India, Russia and Brazil are all expected to be economies that become powerful in this century. When you look at the vastness of Russia in comparison to the size of it's population it's no wonder that the economy will grow. Its untapped resources are huge. Anyway, you could always take up Chinese. A huge mountain to climb I know but the sooner you start the sooner you finish. Also having both Chinese and Russian would make economical sense as the trade between the two countries is on the rise. Edited by administrator on 04 April 2005 at 11:26am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jradetzky Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom geocities.com/jradet Joined 6992 days ago 521 posts - 485 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, GermanB1 | Message 3 of 150 04 April 2005 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I was thinking the same the other day. I was looking at my Pimsleur Russian and my Pimsleur Chinese courses and started studying the Chinese one. However, I remember the good old days of the Soviet Union when they awarded many scholarships to foreign nationals (especially from developing countries) to complete undergraduate and graduate studies at top universities. They were taught Russian in the first 6 months or so and afterwards they went on to do their studies. In those days it really paid off to know Russian, but now I think Mandarin is even more important than Japanese. Edited by jradetzky on 04 April 2005 at 9:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Malcolm Triglot Retired Moderator Senior Member Korea, South Joined 7100 days ago 500 posts - 515 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 4 of 150 05 April 2005 at 12:29am | IP Logged | ||
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There's no question that Chinese is the more important of the two. However, Russian is also important in terms of land mass and population, as well as being incredibly chic. Speaking both Chinese and Russian as foreign languages is about as chic as it gets!
I started learning Mandarin partly for its growing importance, partly out of cultural interest, and partly because Francois ranked it as the most difficult language ever on the old version of this website two years ago. I later learned that it's not really all that difficult, just time consuming. More and more westerners are starting to realize that the perceived difficulty of Chinese is mostly illusory, especially as they hear other non-Asians speak it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7008 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 5 of 150 11 April 2005 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Why, thank you :p Anyway, I don't like to attempt to predict the future, as we've all seen how quickly things can change. Russia does seem to be on the backburner of history right now, and even though it's certainly not a minor player on the stage of international affairs, I really don't think it's going to regain anything like it's former influence anytime in the near future. As for China, well, what is there to really say about China? On the one hand, it is unquestionably on the fast track to becoming a super-power, possibly surpassing anything the US could ever hope to become. 1.3 billion is a LOT of people. On the other hand, its development is dependent upon a bunch of highly undependable factors. I hardly need to go into China's ever-present threat of energy crisis, or ask just how long it's environment can sustain what they've been doing to it, or even their looming population imbalance, which is probably the greatest threat to China's continued development. That's not even getting into the giant question-mark over China's political system and the legitimacy of a communist dictatorship that is no longer communist by any recognizable definition of the word except the Chinese one. What I mean to say is that China's brilliant future is anything but certain. The whole house of cards they've built up could come crashing down at any time. Or then again maybe it won't; that's the thing about the future. Personally I suspect China will live up to its potential and become a/the dominant force in the world. The Russian language may have a fantastic literature and a fair number of people as far as languages go, but it cannot match the potential of Chinese. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6948 days ago 484 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 6 of 150 19 April 2005 at 5:53am | IP Logged | ||
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The more people learn chinese, the fewer will learn russian. So even if the utility of Russian relative to Chinese may decline, the 'rarety premium' on a foreign russian speaker seems likely to increase. Particularly if the media hype around china pushes many linguists towards chinese.
And Russian has the advantage of acting as official language/de facto first language/ lingua franca across many countries. Although they're closely linked, this spreads the risk a bit - with Chinese, your egg's pretty much in one economic/political basket (+ taiwan). And unlike central europe & the baltic states i'd guess inward investment into the russian-speaking bloc'll be muted for some time. (I'd guess property in Kiev's a fraction of the price of Prague for example.) As for Russia proper, despite Yukos etc my russian investment banker friend says she's been very busy... If you base a decision on the media, chinese would be the way to go. But they're slaves to fashion. Today's ugly ducklings could be tomorrow's swans ...and I love pickled fish ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jose.pm Newbie Joined 6948 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes | Message 7 of 150 20 April 2005 at 5:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese is the language of the future. They say China is going to become the second world power in a few years, even though its political system is not democratic.
Even here in Spain there has been a spectacular rise in the number of Chinese immigrants in the last few years. I think that speaking must not be excessively difficult, since grammar is easy. The problem is comprehension, even in Japanese there are a lot of English loanwords, in Chinese they usually invent words for the same concept, so it sounds so different. And then you have the writing system... at least, every character is read in one way (unlike in Japanese where the same character can be pronounced in different ways). If you don't like the writing, maybe you can try other South Asian languages like Vietnamese or Korean, which have an alphabetic system (although not the power, heritage and charm of the Chinese). Russian is in decadence because Russia is in decadence too, but anyway it is still one of the six UN official languages and the language of the largest country in the world. It acts as a lingua franca for the former Soviet republics, although that could last little time. Edited by Jose.pm on 20 April 2005 at 6:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6948 days ago 484 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 8 of 150 20 April 2005 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese economic migrants in Europe (and elsewhere) are a symptom of China's un/underemployment problem. I think they pose a threat to China's relations with foreign powers and consequently development.
My experience is that concentrating on spoken Chinese lets you get to a given profiency level in perhaps three times as long as a romance language. The grammar's fairly simple in terms of structure, but quite alien in overall outlook. But all the materials above intermediate level seem assume you can read & want to learn more characters. There may be some logic to this - I think it's (even) harder to aquire vocabulary without being able to recognize the characters. (especially multicharacter compounds) I stopped actively studying chinese about a year ago because of this problem. I read somewhere that the FSI was thinking about introducing an extra-hard category for korean, because it actually takes even longer to get people up to speed in that than chinese/japanese/arabic. so perhaps that's one to skip for now... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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