It is, but it’s interesting to note that in Chinese, tones can be mangled or nonexistent and you can still be understood – IF your word choice and sentence structure are decent. It’s like you need two out of three, and the two had better be pretty good.
This is opinion, not science, but here goes. The day that China becomes the lingua franca will never come, at least not in the world as we see it today. There are many reasons, but I’ll just pick out a few:
[ul]1: Latin letters are used by the vast majority of countries on every continent except Asia, and even Vietnamese, Arabic, and Korean speakers are more accustomed to alphabets or syllabaries than character-based scripts. Asking non Sinitic-language speakers to navigate the labyrinth of Hanzi just to learn a lingua franca doesn’t make sense. It takes years just to be able to decode a few paragraphs of Chinese characters; I can’t imagine the day that the most accomplished academics from all seven continents are writing their papers predominantly in Chinese. If the current system isn’t broken…[/ul]
[ul]2: The Chinese language is at this point in history still very uninternationalized. There are a lot of words that are difficult to put into Chinese if they have not been previously translated, and foreign names are always an interesting endeavor. Taiwan and China typically end up with separate transliterations (歐巴馬 vs 奧巴馬); it would only get more complicated with billions of people doing the same. But there are also so many phrases and concepts in the language that are so linked to Chinese culture and history; I simply can’t imagine a Paraguayan and a Nigerian laughing off a missed business deal by saying 塞翁失馬，焉知非福 to each other. And can you imagine highschoolers worldwide struggling to imagine the Chinese landscapes of 唐詩三百首 and the monsters of 聊齋誌異 instead of Blake and Mary Shelley?[/ul]
[ul]3: English is the official language of at least one country on every continent. Chinese is official only in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, and while there are 1.3 billion Chinese people, many of them never get a chance to leave the country. It makes more sense for (again) a Paraguayan and a Nigerian to speak to each other in English, which they are much more likely to have extensive experience in, than in Chinese.[/ul]
[ul]4: The last point I’ll make here: The world’s education systems are already biased toward English. It would take years to replace all of the English curriculums (curricula?) with Chinese ones, and there would most assuredly be a shortage of qualified teachers and proven learning materials. This won’t be fixed any time soon.[/ul]
I could go on, but I think you get the picture.[/quote]
I would add to that Chinese is pretty crap at organizing data and for abbreviated nomenclature. Who would ever have an English dictionary with hard to find words at the start.
While I agree with you, Elegua, that can easily be changed. (Maniland) Chinese dictionaries I believe organize words by their pinyin initial letter.
Zuck’s Chinese actually isn’t too bad considering he’s only studied the language for four years, and as we all know, there were other things going on in his life that trumped Chinese language acquisition. Sure his tones are shite and his pronunciation isn’t great, but he’s totally understandable, which is all that really matters. He speaks Chinese better than many expats I know who have lived in Taiwan 20+ years, so cut dude some slack.
When I was in Taiwan, I came across a Japanese and Taiwanese man trying to communicate with each other in English. One of them gave me a pained look. English wins.