[quote]Expert: New ‘must learn’ language likely to be Mandarin
As of 1995, he reports, English was the second most-common native tongue in the world, trailing only Chinese.
By 2050, he says, Chinese will continue its predominance, with Hindi-Urdu of India and Arabic climbing past English among 15-to-24 year olds, and Spanish nearly equal to it. Graddol said he focused on the 15- to 24-year-old group in 2050 to give an indication of the future past that point.
Very well and good, however, English will remain the lingua franca of International Politics, Science and Technology, the Internet, and Trade and Commerce for many years to come. Unless of course, China acquires world dominance in those areas…:s
But it took 400 years for English to reach its profound dominance, with a massive boost in the Information Age.
English as an L1 or intranational language is one thing, English for international communication, is another.
Oh, no, not the Pennycook book again!
Alien is right: Intranational languages are the dominant ones, and in this respect the number of English speakers towers above all others, despite there being billions of Chinese L1 speakers.
Then there are all the arguments about power and control, and Pennycook is your man.
Plus you’re forgetting the basic fact that Chinese can never be a truly international language because only native Chinese speakers can speak it correctly. Unless you’ve been studying it for 10+ years, of course, and even then your tones are still a bit of a struggle. Even when China was the dominant world power, Chinese wasn’t used as an international language - traders in East Asia used Malay instead, because it was so much easier. The fact that English is one of the easiest Indo-European languages to learn (Spanish is easier, sure, but compared to German or French?) will ensure that it remains the lingua franca for plenty of years to come. Chinese, being 10x as difficult (especially trying to read any random article in a newspaper - it’s obscenely difficult, and not just because of the characters; even if you understand all the characters, the grammar or lack of grammar makes trying to find the logic in a sentence like pulling teeth) can never be an international language.
To be an international language don’t people have to speak it ? How many people in China speak it ? How many of those aren’t peasants ? How many people in Taiwan speak it ? No one at work, no one at home, and hardly anyone on TV. Yeah yeah, I know Taiwanese is more important and useful as a world language, even if it has no written form, and much easier to learn.
Agree with mod lang there, don’t forget about having 170 words pronouced ‘yi’ And the fact it’s impossible to write foreign words in Chinese.
I would guess Ironlady would have something to say on that subject. I know of several foreigners who can speak it correctly and have no trouble reading most things as well.
Mandarin (not “Chinese,” please) does not have 170 words pronounced yi.
I’ve said this before: Mandarin has no chance of becoming a real international language as long as the powers that be continue to insist that Chinese characters are the One Way to write the language. Characters are just too much trouble and take too much time to learn.
oops, delete me
I assumed it would be more fashionable nowadays to call it Chinese to emphase that is it a foreign language not to be spoken in Taiwan.
How how many meanings does ‘yi’ have then ? In the fourth tone it has 126 (I tried to look to up, doesn’t seem to be much information on this, 170 was just an educated guess) How about the other tones ? And in total ?
Mandarin (not “Chinese,” please) does not have 170 words pronounced yi.
I’ve said this before: Mandarin has no chance of becoming a real international language as long as the powers that be continue to insist that Chinese characters are the One Way to write the language. Characters are just too much trouble and take too much time to learn.[/quote]
are you suggesting that chinese should be written in pinyin?
just out of curiosity, is it me or is chinese really just more complicated even for native speakers. e.g. if we gave the “same” essay, one in chinese, one in english to 2 native speakers or 1 person with ‘equal’ fluency, which one, all things being equal, would finish reading faster and comprehend better. i have 2 observations from a ‘similar situation’:
Didn’t they have a problem when translating the laws in Hong Kong from English to Chinese for the handover (You should know more about this, Jack) ? It was hard to define terms precisely enough in Chinese, or the terms didn’t exist in Chinese or something ?
There are also a lot of words clustered on ‘ji’. But in practice, it doesn’t really matter. Context will tell you what word it is.
FM: Taiwan independence types like to cal Mandarin ‘Beiijing hua’. Another alternative (that I prefer) is Hua2yu3. Cranky is correct in insisting that we say Mandarin when we are referring to Guoyu/ Putonghua. ‘Chinese’ refers to the written language ‘Zhongwen’.
Historically, Mandarin is an international language. It is a kind of simplified version of Sinitic languages like Cantonese or Minnanyu that Mongols and Manchus could learn to speak more easily.
I suspect that Chinese will become a more international language if China becomes more powerful. Languages are not ‘international’ because of their internal qualities, but rather because the power and wealth of those who speak them compel (or induce) others to learn.
[quote=“Feiren”]There are also a lot of words clustered on ‘ji’. But in practice, it doesn’t really matter.[/quote]But learning all these contexts is a problem. If you hear the word ‘chicken’ in English, you know what that word means, even if you don’t understand the rest of the sentence. If you hear the word ‘ji’ it could mean anything.
English has some difficult to understand parts too, irregular verbs and especially irregular pronouciation. But it has other things going for it instead.
How many people really speak standard-ish Mandarin, and how many of those are you likely to meet ?
I think this is an interesting topic - given the current dominance that English already holds, and its relative ease of written communication etc., I find it hard to believe that Mandarin will ever ‘overpower’ it as a means of international communication, at least not for a very long while.
However, I also think English has become the ‘international’ language for exactly the reasons that Feiren describes. If the situations had been reversed, and Chinese culture had become as dominant and widespread, I suspect Mandarin could just as easily have become the ‘international’ language and people would probably be complaining about the comparative shortcomings of English - its ugly, limited range of characters, its lack of face-saving ambiguity. OK, maybe that sounds unlikely, but I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine.
In less dominant countries, people mainly learn extra languages for advantage/survival (as opposed to ‘interest’). I just thought it interesting that in Hong Kong, Cantonese was almost universally regarded as ‘too hard’ by Westerners (and it is a hard language, granted), but I saw many Thai, Indians, Philipinos etc., often running their own establishments who somehow managed to speak their own language, English and Cantonese. I’m guessing they more or less had to learn to get by. If Mandarin speakers ran the world, and Mandarin became the language of cultural domination and power, I’m guessing its ‘shortcomings’ as a language wouldn’t stand in the way of people speaking/aspiring to speak it. Difficulty has little to do with it - Mandarin speakers would just get used to people murdering their tones.
Anyone noticed that the ‘other’ tourist language is often Japanese? Why? That’s a pretty nasty language, three character sets and all. But the mechanisms grew up to cater for the Japanese during their period of economic dominance - we wanted their money, we learned their language 
[quote=“Feiren”]
FM: Taiwan independence types like to cal Mandarin ‘Beiijing hua’. Another alternative (that I prefer) is Hua2yu3. Cranky is correct in insisting that we say Mandarin when we are referring to Guoyu/ Putonghua. ‘Chinese’ refers to the written language ‘Zhongwen’.[/quote]
I’m not sure what the Singapore or Malaysian education establishments call Mandarin in Chinese, but many Chinese Malaysians and Singaporeans use hua2yu3 to refer to any and all Chinese dialects. For meaning, I prefer “putonghua,” since as you describe, Mandarin is an “international” language. However, I get a little annoyed that someone would have the arrogance to refer to their language as “the common language.”
I don’t think there is a consensus for “Chinese” referring only to the written language. I know a few sholarly types, both Chinese and foreign, who think that “Chinese” should mean any Han dialect plus the written language. I have to restrain myself every time I hear a Taiwanese person refer to Mandarin as “Chinese” in English.
[quote="“Feiren”]
I suspect that Chinese will become a more international language if China becomes more powerful. Languages are not ‘international’ because of their internal qualities, but rather because the power and wealth of those who speak them compel (or induce) others to learn.[/quote]
I would also add that people will probably see Chinese as a little less difficult once the field of teaching/studying Chinese as a second language builds a critical mass and really starts to enjoy some economies of scale. If I had an NT$ for every time a Chinese person or a foreigner told me how good my Chinese is and then how smart I must be to have learned such a “hard language,” I’d be a rich man. Such comments often lead into the typical conversation about “how difficult Chinese is for foreigners.” I always reply that if we just consider the inherent aspects of the languages, English is just about as hard for Chinese people to learn as Chinese is for a foreigner. That’s like telling a Chinese person that the earth is flat or that Taiwan isn’t part of China. Their received wisdom is that English is much easier than Chinese; they can’t believe otherwise.
I’m not saying that the Chinese langauge is as easy as English, but it is not as difficult as we are always told. These assertions are mostly based on anecdotal and correlative evidence. The fact that more Chinese people speak English than foreigners speak Chinese is more because China hasn’t been influential enough for foreigners to want to learn Chinese, and because the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language is at a very low stage of development compared to TEFL. If a mainlander tells me that few foreigners speak Chinese because Chinese is so difficult, I reply “no, it’s more because China is a piss weak, fucked up country; the reason that more foreigners are learning Chinese is because China is starting to develop economically, not because the langauge has suddenly become easier.” Someone once posted a link to a site comparing the time it takes to become proficient in a few different foreign languages. Chinese was considered one of, if not the most difficult language for a native English speaker. We should remember that these sorts of comparisons don’t just tell us about the relative difficulty of languages, but also about the quality of teaching for those languages.
are you suggesting that Chinese should be written in pinyin?[/quote]
Mandarin can be written in pinyin. Whether it should be is a different matter, though I believe the advantages of pinyin far outweigh those of Chinese characters. I think the government should give pinyin documents full legal status.
[quote]the Chinese language lends itself to multiple interpretations and variation and is generally less “precise”. i realise this happens in any language, but English at least generally can be more precise than Chinese. (which might make Chinese a wonderfully rich, deep language for metaphors, poetry, etc, but not say for a scientific document).
btw, this is a generalization but I think it does have some merit.[/quote]
No language is inherently more scientific, poetic, etc. than any other. It’s a matter of vocabulary and usage. But when I mention vocabulary, keep in mind that languages can have any words that people want them to have; if speakers of Hakka, for example, found it important to discuss quantum theory, they could find a way to do so in their own language, just as speakers of English have found a way to do so in their own language.
You’re thinking about syllables; I’m talking about words. Chinese people don’t go around saying “Yi yi yi yi yi yi yi.” If they did, no one – not even other native speakers of Mandarin – would have any idea what the hell they were talking about.
I’m sorry, the thought of this just made me roll around laughing (and me without my emoticons). Monty Python, Chinese style… they can be the Natives that say ‘yi’!
It’s not so simple.
To take your example, which of the following does “chicken” mean?
[ul][li]the common domestic fowl (Gallus gallus) especially when young[/li]
[li]the flesh of the chicken used as food[/li]
[li]any of various birds or their young[/li]
[li]a young woman[/li]
[li]COWARD[/li]
[li]any of various contests in which the participants risk personal safety in order to see which one will give up first[/li]
[li][short for chickenshit] slang : petty details[/li]
[li]a young male homosexual[/li]
[li]SCARED[/li]
[li]TIMID, COWARDLY[/li]
[li]insistent on petty details of duty or discipline[/li]
[li]PETTY, UNIMPORTANT[/li]
[li]to lose one’s nerve[/li][/ul]
That’s thirteen different meanings – and I didn’t even get to pick the example!
Context: It matters in Mandarin, and it matters in English, too.
I see 1 real meaning, and 1 slang repeated lots of times in your list. Guess which one I was thinking of.
No, you’re right, Chinese has a lot less homophones and a lot more variety in sounds than English, and is much simpler to write. Hell, even dictionaries are easier to use in the rare case you don’t know a word. And Taiwanese TV has never needed to explain how to pronouce the primer’s name. must be my fault for not being fluent in Chinese and Taiwanese and every aboriginal language, both written and spoken.
