Chinese may replace English in this century

[imron]

The rest of the world uses the thousand, million, billion system, for the sake of consistency, china outta hop on board.

In light of such logic, I only hope the US will shortly adopt metres, kilograms and litres

To be honest if you said two hundred and fifty hundred to a native English speaker they'd balk just as much as saying er shi wu qian to a Chinese speaker and it's nothing to do with the length, it's what you're used to hearing.

[Lugubert]

The rest of the world uses the thousand, million, billion system, for the sake of consistency, china outta hop on board.

Well, there's another billion of people, in India, who aren't on that board.

13 478 241 or 13.478.241 (both permitted in Swedish), US 13,478,241, is written in India 1,34,78,241, and read (approximate transcription) ek kroR, caumtis lakh, aThHattar hazar, do sau iktalis, i.e. kroR 10 million, lakh 100 thousand, hazar 1000.

[Guest realmayo]

The French can't count between 69 and 100 but they seem pretty good at maths too.

[Lawal]

Very Interesting argument - though since I want to learn Chinese it wont bother me much, It will be interesting to note, as few of us, many as we may be in this little minority are getting more and more interesred in mastering Chinese, English is getting more and more global acceptance. Everyone wants to speak fluent English, even scousers in Liverpool.. hehe not thats a joke...

Korean, Germans, Iranian, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, and finally Americans, all want to speak english, ofcourse together with the rest of the world, Italian andd their colonies, French and theirs and the Portuguese too, so just few of us want to learn chinese and that doesnt add much to the 1.6 billion already speaking. So how about China conquers and African country (mine for example) a south American country and Iceland and expand the language...

Chinese in 90years, its a shame I wont live to be 150 so see past the turn of the next century. So we can argue all we want but no one knows unless Greenpeace takes over and makes us healthy living vegans and environmentally friendly.

North korea will still be Korean though. That wont be a problem though cos after learning Chinese, Arabic and English... it'l be Korean next. China is number 1 already in many things not America so taking over tongues wont shock the world... Zhende!

[Daan]

Makes me wonder whether any research has been done to determine whether people who speak Wallonian French and standard French differ in their number-processing ability? This has been done for Chinese and English, and the result was that people who speak Chinese natively are at an advantage when it comes to processing numbers. Take a look at this excerpt from Stanislas Dehaene's The Number Sense, a fascinating book.

[Lugubert]

Makes me wonder whether any research has been done to determine whether people who speak Wallonian French and standard French differ in their number-processing ability?

For people not acquainted with the lingaedje walon, in my opinion a language in its own right and sufficiently different from general Belgian French, it deserves to be mentioned that it for example for 90 uses nonate, like the Swiss French nonante, but French has quatre-vingt-dix ("4 times 20 plus 10"). What about Danes and maths? Their 90 is halvfems, from older halvfemsindstyve, "(5 minus one half) times 20".

[chrix]

Coming in late to this debate, I just wanna make a point about Chinese becoming the lingua franca in Asia (by which I will mean East Asia and Southeast Asia):

The success of a langauge as a lingua franca is primarily due to politico-economic reasons rather than relative simplicity of the language, as many have pointed out correctly already. The Chinese influence is growing, but many countries are becoming wary of this. This doesn't just refer to Japan, but also to many countries in SE Asia, notably Vietnam, but also some smaller countries. In this environment, English is a more politically neutral language.

Also, as mentioned before, English is already deeply entrenched in the education systems of the countries, and whenever native speakers of two languages other than English meet for business, chances are that they both speak English.

[tanklao]

I was a volunteer in the 13th world lake conference from Nov 1st to 5th in Wuhan. During the conference I met hundreds of foreigners who speak all kinds of Englishes. What I have seen was that a professional translator who speak perfect American English had little idea when she talked to lots of Indians, Thai people, Sri Lankans, Africans, Pakistani, Japanese and some people from non-English speaking country or non-standard English speaking century who all spoke what they have considered as English. Englishes are really bad languages in the international communications. Since I have worked with an Indian for 1 year, I was always called to communicate with Indians, Pakistani, Sri Lankans etc. Althogh I can get the major points of what these people are talking about, I should admit that it's still hard for me to communicate with them freely.

For example one Indian saied: "[Ai gand re~d-ri~ve der fail]." Almost nobody understand that what he wanted to say is "I can't retrieve the file." [r] is pronounced totally in different way.

[xianhua]

Did the native English speaker really have difficulty in understanding those people from other countries?

Given that a Chinese friend of mine had real difficulty being understood whilst working in a town only 2 hours drive from his birthplace, I fail to see how Mandarin would provide the solution.

[doraemon]

Chinese...it's possible, but considering that a language as easy as Esperanto failed to deliver it's purpose, it's kinda hard to envisage another language replace English as the world's dominant language. The rapid spread of Chinese worldwide is an irrefutable fact, but I feel English is just too influential to be eclipsed by Chinese in a matter of a few decades. Plus, it's a really hard language, especially for westerners, deterring many foreigners from learning it unless they really like Chinese. I know a lot of overseas Chinese who still can't speak, read or write Chinese, let alone westerners...

[crazy-meiguoren]

Canada is actively bridging the gap between English and Mandarin. They've already translated "吗" as "eh".

[Lusankya]

I'm not sure why so many people are saying that Chinese gets more complicated the more you learn. I find that you get to a stage where I already recognise the characters in any new word, and can recognise the meaning over 90% of the time, without ever seeing it before. Once I learnt the character 器, for example, I could immediately recognise 机器, 武器, 电器, etc. merely from recognising the component characters.

It also helped greatly when I was studying Japanese - even though I've let my Japanese stagnate, I can still understand about 80% of a Japanese newspaper, just by combining the remnants of my understanding of Japanese grammar with my understanding of the characters. The only problem is that sometimes I associate characters with Japanese first, so I have this rather unseemly desire to pronounce 降 as "fu".

I actually let my Chinese stagnate too: stopping for a while, then starting again, then stopping and starting (I had other issues going on in my life at the time). I find that it comes back fairly quickly, especially the "feeling" of how things are supposed to fit together.

As for the OP: whether or not Chinese manages to completely replace English as the world's dominant language remains to be seen. Certainly, however, it will not remain as neglected as it has been in recent years. Remember that for any given point since the beginning Han dynasty, China has by and ladge been arguably the most powerful and advanced nation in the world. It was really only with the advent of Qing isolationist policies (and later on misrule) coinciding with the renaissance and the advent of scientific thought in the west that caused it to fall so greatly. A powerful China is a fairly natural thing and somewhat inevitable, I think.

[chrix]

Most languages "plateau out" for the intermediate learner, and Chinese does so with a vengeance. Dare I say if you don't feel that way you're either an extremely talented learner or you're not there yet

[Lusankya]

I don't know why you wouldn't find that it got much easier after you knew a certain number of characters. Once you realise that the vast majority of Chinese words are a combination of concepts, with each character representing a concept, it's fairly easy to guess out what a word means just from the characters. This gets even easier when the word is given in context.

I guess that if you just learnt the different characters as though they were separate letters and didn't bother finding out the individual character's meaning outside the context of the word you learnt it in, it might be more difficult, but I don't know why anyone would want to do that.

I guess that once I get into properly learning chengyu it might become harder, but I find that chengyu are usually either reasonably obvious or have a story that becomes a great mnemonic. Usually if I hear the chengyu story, I can recognise the chengyu several months later, even if I haven't seen it once in the meantime.

I don't like to call "difficulty learning vocab" a reason that learning Chinese is difficult, though. Most of the relative ease with learning European languages comes from having related vocabulary. If I wrote the sentence "l'enfant c'est ennui"*, then someone with a good grasp of English could figure out the meaning of the sentence without knowing any French because the two key words "enfant" and "ennuie" both exist in English (as infant and ennui respectively). With Chinese, westerners can't use their mother tongue to help understand the language. However, with Chinese, the grammar is much simpler than in pretty much any European language, and unlike with European languages, it is very easy to use ones knowledge of Chinese to scaffold further understanding - for example, using ones knowledge of the meaning of characters to understand new vocabulary. If one wants to use the difficulty of learning vocab as an example of how Chinese is hard, one should really just say "This makes it harder for Europeans to learn Chinese", rather than claiming that it makes Chinese intrinsically hard.

Reading is a special skill, though: once you realise that you don't have to recognise every word to understand the paragraph (proof of this can be seen in exercises like the "fill in the character“ exercise in the HSK - the task wouldn't be possible if the text wasn't 100% comprehensible without the missing characters), and get over the idea that you must be able to pronounce every word (nice, desirable, but not actually necessary for comprehension), it becomes a lot easier, and you can figure out a lot of words from context. Of course, I taught myself to read (in English) before my third birthday, which I've been led to believe is earlier than most people, so it's likely that I have some natural aptitude in the area.

*There is a good chance that my French grammar is atrocious, but please don't let it overshadow my point.

[imron]

The problem is that when your level is such that you can understand say 90% of any given chunk of text, it gets very easy to coast. As you admitted yourself, it gets very easy just to guess the meaning - or skip over it and still get most of the meaning of the sentence. To get that last 10% the difficulty you have to overcome is not the difficulty of learning individual words/characters but the difficulty in finding motivation to overcome the law of diminishing returns. After all, to get that last 10% you'll need to put in just as much effort as you put in for the first 90% (if not more), however the benefit of doing so and the sense of reward/accomplishment is not nearly as great (and will only diminish the closer you approach 100%). When you can basically read most things, this is the point that many people give up at, and is why pushing through from upper-intermediate to truly advanced is so difficult.

I agree with chrix:

if you don't feel that way you're either an extremely talented learner or you're not there yet

[chrix]

Lusankya, your post is actually quite illustrative of the situation of many intermediate learners. Reading is usually the best developed skill of most intermediate learners, but the problem lies in the three other skills of speaking, writing and listening. There, you can't keep guessing, but you have to use the correct vocabulary and know it (and for listening too, due to the high degree of homophony in Chinese it makes it hard to guess words you hear that you don't know).

Once you realise that the vast majority of Chinese words are a combination of concepts, with each character representing a concept, it's fairly easy to guess out what a word means just from the characters.

This is just not true. In language, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. There can be grammatical, semantic peculiarities you can't deduce from just looking at the characters. If you look at list of synonyms you'll see that there are tons of words that appear to have the same meaning as per their characters but nevertheless have some subtle difference in meaning and usage.

The same goes for chengyu. Granted, there's a lot of run-of-the-mill chengyu that aren't that tricky, but there's hundreds of chengyu that come with a twist (as many know on this forum, I've been concentrating on learning chengyu for the past few months - the number of complications and twists are mind-boggling).

[Lusankya]

The problem is that when your level is such that you can understand say 90% of any given chunk of text, it gets very easy to coast. As you admitted yourself, it gets very easy just to guess the meaning - or skip over it and still get most of the meaning of the sentence. To get that last 10% the difficulty you have to overcome is not the difficulty of learning individual words/characters but the difficulty in finding motivation to overcome the law of diminishing returns. After all, to get that last 10% you'll need to put in just as much effort as you put in for the first 90% (if not more), however the benefit of doing so and the sense of reward/accomplishment is not nearly as great (and will only diminish the closer you approach 100%). When you can basically read most things, this is the point that many people give up at, and is why pushing through from upper-intermediate to truly advanced is so difficult.

I'm not sure how "it's hard to find motivation" translates into "intrinsically difficult". I find it hard to find motivation to go to the gym too, but that doesn't mean that getting on a treadmill and running is actually that hard.

[imron]

Individually characters are not "intrinsically" difficult. It's tackling the sheer number of characters that is the difficult part. Taking the treadmill analogy further, it's not difficult to run on a treadmill for a short distance, but could you run until you've covered the equivalent distance of a marathon? After all, it's just putting one foot in front of the other - that's easy right? Well, yes for certain distances. For longer distances, then other factors come in to play that make it more difficult.

With Chinese, that factor is that beyond a certain point it takes a significant amount of effort to achieve a minimal increase in comprehension. Take for example character frequency lists for Chinese texts. For modern texts, the most frequent 1,000 characters cover 89.14% of all written material. The next most frequent 1,000 characters cover a further 7.99% of all material. The next 1,000 only an extra 2.05% and the next 1,000 only 0.56%.

Even accounting for the fact that it gets easier to learn characters as you go, how many people will put in the effort to learn that latter 1,000 for only a 0.56% increase in understanding? That is the difficult part, and it's intrinsic to Chinese because the nature of characters is that there are so many of them.

And that's still assuming that knowing the characters means you can figure out the words that are made up using those characters, which is not the case - yes there are many examples like the ones you listed, but there are also plenty that demonstrate the opposite. Take for example the phrase "背一千个字好容易". Going by the individual characters it would be very easy for a learner of Chinese to mistakenly understand that sentence.

But even if we discount that latter point and assume that knowing the characters means you'll be able to know (or at least figure out) the words, and we then assume that you go that extra length for that extra 0.56% and get at least 4,000 characters under your belt, you'll still be missing out approximately 1 in every 400 characters. If you were talking about English and not being able to understand 1 in every 400 words, that would be about 8 words on this page alone. Want to decrease that to only 3 words? Learn another 1,000 characters.

That is the difficult part.

[anonymoose]

But even if we discount that latter point and assume that knowing the characters means you'll be able to know (or at least figure out) the words, and we then assume that you go that extra length for that extra 0.56% and get at least 4,000 characters under your belt, you'll still be missing out approximately 1 in every 400 characters. If you were talking about English and not being able to understand 1 in every 400 words, that would be about 8 words on this page alone. Want to decrease that to only 3 words? Learn another 1,000 characters.

I agree with most of what Imron wrote, but I think this last part is a little misleading. Chinese people graduating from university (arguably the most literate Chinese people) are supposed to know about 3500 characters. I would guess that the majority of Chinese graduates actually know well over 4000, but for argument's sake, let's call it 4000. Does that mean, with the English analogy, Chinese graduates miss out approximately 1 in every 400 characters? I doubt it. And those that they do miss, I suspect are mainly names of people and places which are readily comprehended anyway (just as if you were to meet an unfamiliar name in English, you'd still understand what was being discussed).

Speaking from my own experience, I wouldn't say I really ever reached a plateau as such, but certainly the learning curve does become flatter are you get more advanced.

[imron]

I thought 3,500 was the figure for people graduating from middle school?

For university graduates I'd heard it was around 5,000-6,000.

But yeah, anyway like I said, the example is contrived (and it discounts a number of factors), but I still think it helps illustrate the point (that the reward/effort ratio tapers off pretty quickly once you know a few thousand characters).