- Move to Taiwan.
- Learn Chinese.
- ???
- Profit.
I’m at 2/3 in the illustrious process. Given the time its has taken, 'll have to live to 150 to make a ‘profit’.
Knowing Chinese can facilitate your other efforts at making profits, but unless you’re doing interpreting or translation, you generally need to have some other, non-Chinese-related direction going to make the actual profit --install satellite dishes, make excellent pizza, Mexican food, sausage or bread, open a school, act, etc… Find something you’re passionate about, and pursue it.
Yup. There’s a billion people who can speak Chinese better than you or I ever will, are dirt poor and always will be.
true that. but these people are not fluent in english.
i think being fluent in both english and chinese is a huge advantage.
There’s 100 million people who can speak both English and Chinese competently who are dirt poor and always will be.
True, but there are millions of Chinese with passable English and most of them get paid peanuts.
[quote=“blueeee11”]
I think being fluent in both english and Chinese is a huge advantage.[/quote]
I’m going to have to disagree with you. In my experience, anyone with skills / talent of the kind that attracts major income has assistants and translators. I have a lot of friends in China who work at very high levels in their industries and while many of them do speak Chinese well, they tend not to do so in their work, and in any case have assistants to handle translation any time it’s needed. Most them do not advertise the fact that they speak Chinese to their customers, clients, suppliers etc.
In my work I use both English and Chinese equally, but I am not a big fish by any measure. If I wasn’t bilingual a local would be doing my job. No budget for translators / assistants at my humble station.
Put another way, if being bilingual is your most noteworthy talent or skill, you aren’t going to be in a very highly paid job. Sure helps if you are running your own business, but no-one gets hired to high-level job just for speaking two languages.
true that. but these people are not fluent in english.
i think being fluent in both english and chinese is a huge advantage.[/quote]
I can do it, and other languages too. The Chinese is just irrelevant in my industry. Now Spanish … if I could summon up the will to do that, it would help me, but not as much as better project management experience, people management, research skills and a dozen other things would.
Learning languages is an interest of mine, but purely as a time to earning ratio, becoming fluently literate in Chinese, for an English L1 speaker just doesn’t add up. 10000 hours of active focused study is an unverifiable but anecdotally plausible investment of time.
Of course, if you were doing it anyway, or you enjoy it for its own sake, but as a career helper, it seems pretty pointless. Unless you are a pro translator or interpreter, it’s just a secretarial skill.
[quote=“redwagon”][quote=“blueeee11”]
true that. but these people are not fluent in english.
[/quote]
True, but there are millions of Chinese with passable English and most of them get paid peanuts.
[quote=“blueeee11”]
I think being fluent in both english and Chinese is a huge advantage.[/quote]
I’m going to have to disagree with you. In my experience, anyone with skills / talent of the kind that attracts major income has assistants and translators. I have a lot of friends in China who work at very high levels in their industries and while many of them do speak Chinese well, they tend not to do so in their work, and in any case have assistants to handle translation any time it’s needed. Most them do not advertise the fact that they speak Chinese to their customers, clients, suppliers etc.
In my work I use both English and Chinese equally, but I am not a big fish by any measure. If I wasn’t bilingual a local would be doing my job. No budget for translators / assistants at my humble station.
Put another way, if being bilingual is your most noteworthy talent or skill, you aren’t going to be in a very highly paid job. Sure helps if you are running your own business, but no-one gets hired to high-level job just for speaking two languages.[/quote]
i said it is a huge advatange never said it was the holy grail to becoming a multi millionaire ! it is especially true if you are interested in chinese markets.
I’m a former English teacher that made the switch to teaching Chinese on the internet. So yes it is possible. 加油！
I’ve found that NOT speaking CHineese means you can only get hired to teach, or tutor, or edit English.
If you are not interested in any of these, you won’t be taken seriously unless you’re fairly fluent in Chinese.
Those people who are bigshots in China, as you mentioned, they DO speak Chinese. They just have the position and dough to hire translators, as you mentioned.
I suppose you could sell arms and trade weapons; then it wouldn’t matter. :neutral:
The problem is the shift in work situations over the past few years.
In the past, if you did want to rely on solely Chinese skills to make a living (teaching/translation/interpreting), there was only the barrier of acquiring sufficient skills to be able to do that (which is already a big enough barrier if you think about pay per hour of preparation…let’s not think about that. :aiyo: )
But of late, it is more and more difficult to make a living as a Chinese-language professional because of the market being flooded with Chinese from China. Translation? Someone in China will do it for US$0.01 per word and anyway you can always just “fix” the English (so what if the translation is inaccurate, who knows anyway?) Interpretation? We’ll just get someone in from India over a VOIP connection. (This terrifies me even looking at the rates they pay for telephonic interpretation in the US – would you really want someone who’s worth no more than $12 an hour doing the communication when your elderly grandmother gets her lifesaving (or not) medical treatment?) Teach Chinese? Great, but if you wanted anything approaching even the hourly rate people get in Taiwan (let alone the US), you’ll be crushed again by the competition from Chinese in China, since they will work for almost nothing.
The only way you can compete with China-based competitors is on quality, since they rarely emphasize that. But if you’re going to compete on quality, it means spending a looooong time working on your Chinese and any other skills needed, to make sure you can compete on quality instead of price.
But it is always amusing to stop by the local Mandarin language center and ask about people’s goals. “I’m going to spend this year really mastering Chinese and then get an MBA and I’ll be unbelievably employable.” :roflmao:
[quote=“ironlady”]The problem is the shift in work situations over the past few years.
In the past, if you did want to rely on solely Chinese skills to make a living (teaching/translation/interpreting), there was only the barrier of acquiring sufficient skills to be able to do that (which is already a big enough barrier if you think about pay per hour of preparation…let’s not think about that. :aiyo: )
But of late, it is more and more difficult to make a living as a Chinese-language professional because of the market being flooded with Chinese from China. Translation? Someone in China will do it for US$0.01 per word and anyway you can always just “fix” the English (so what if the translation is inaccurate, who knows anyway?) Interpretation? We’ll just get someone in from India over a VOIP connection. (This terrifies me even looking at the rates they pay for telephonic interpretation in the US – would you really want someone who’s worth no more than $12 an hour doing the communication when your elderly grandmother gets her lifesaving (or not) medical treatment?) Teach Chinese? Great, but if you wanted anything approaching even the hourly rate people get in Taiwan (let alone the US), you’ll be crushed again by the competition from Chinese in China, since they will work for almost nothing.
The only way you can compete with China-based competitors is on quality, since they rarely emphasize that. But if you’re going to compete on quality, it means spending a looooong time working on your Chinese and any other skills needed, to make sure you can compete on quality instead of price.
But it is always amusing to stop by the local Mandarin language center and ask about people’s goals. “I’m going to spend this year really mastering Chinese and then get an MBA and I’ll be unbelievably employable.” :roflmao:[/quote]
lets put it this way.
if you are the CEO of microsoft and you want to hire someone to take charge of the entire china market, would you hire someone who knows the culture and language, or someone who does not…you can get translators but if you are serious on the chinese market, it is still better to learn its culture and language.
that is if you are interested in the chinese market…if you are not …scrap all that…
Let’s put it this way – if you are the CEO of Microsoft, you hire a native Chinese speaker who has great or even just okay English, because he’s also a hotshot engineer or coder or whatever. The white guy had to spend too long learning Chinese, so he has no other skills. Or he did a year at the MTC and then went to a comp sci grad program, where he was a classmate of the Chinese speaker, who was already bilingual going in.
The lady is right. People vastly overestimate the value of speaking fluent Mandarin and dramatically underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to get fluent.
My experience has been that speaking Mandarin makes you a stronger candidate for certain specialized types of jobs, but it is about number 5 or 6 on the priority list of qualifications for those jobs.
My experience lines up quite well with those of Tomas and ironlady. When I was tentatively offered an expat job in Shanghai, it wasn’t for my Chinese. In fact, the executive who gave the initial go ahead never met me and didn’t even know I know Chinese and he didn’t care. He only found out after I took a trip to Shanghai and shook a few hands. He thought it was a bonus and from his tone of voice, it seemed like a rather small bonus, akin to finding a dollar stuck to the bottom of your shoe.
The other two expats at the Shanghai office don’t speak Chinese either but were “taking courses”.
If you are at a senior level and you speak an Asian language (any will suffice) it is enough to make you stand out from the pack who are applying for the same position. If you have delivered on projects in the market in question that also helps, generally the top job as pointed out here will now go to a Chinese (including Taiwan, Singapore, HK Chinese here) as it is felt they will find it easier to do a deal and they can always wheel in the foreign head honcho as and when needed.
In the office environment understanding what is going on when your colleagues switch to Chinese is invaluable for about a minute until they realise that you understand and switch to a neutral dialect.
I guess for me my conversational Chinese is worth a little more than an MBA because of the context. I don’t have the MBA so I’m glad I put a few hours into my Chinese studies. Fluency for me would be a family benefit far more than a work one.
the head of microsoft china wont be an engineer. he would be a management expert in charge of strategy and development, overall functioning of the company.
to do that well, you need to have knowledge of the 1.local culture - how are you going to market effectively without knowing the local culture and norms? 2.local language - how are you going to communicate with your staff or big business partners? how are you going to know the laws? how are you going to know how to optimize your supply chain?
even an engineer in china would have to know chinese. you dont suppose china writes its engineering codes,laws and parts in english do you…
Many companies use the language an culture as a buffer for applicants, but in reality almost all non-local hires don’t speak the lingo and in many cases English is still the lingua franca for most official business.
Top jobs will go to locals when they have the relevant experience and skills, not because of culture and language.
Blueeee11, please use proper capitalization. Thank you.
DB, Moderator