Chinese may replace English in this century

[anonymoose]

Maybe you are right. I thought I read that somewhere on some character test material for Chinese speakers, but I could have remembered incorrectly. 4000 does seem rather few, come to think of it.

[renzhe]

However, with Chinese, the grammar is much simpler than in pretty much any European language

I don't agree with this.

Neither did John DeFrancis, one of the top authorities on the language in the West, who said that the Chinese grammar was slightly easier than French grammar, but that the writing system was 5x more difficult.

I sort of agree. Chinese grammar is slightly easier than that of many European languages. It is much easier in terms of morphology (declensions, conjugations, etc.), but it can get extremely tricky to know when exactly to use which complement, which aspect, when to use "guo", when to use "le", when to use "hui", "yao", "jiang" for future, etc. There are general rules, but many cases ask for a good deel of gut feeling that's hard to formulate in grammatical rules.

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.

This is exactly like in European languages, where many words are composed of simpler roots coming either from that language, or from Greek and Latin.

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.

There is nothing that makes Chinese intrinsically hard. It is much easier for Koreans, Vietnamese, etc. than it is for Germans, and this has a lot to do with what we already know and can leverage from our own language. Like shared vocabulary, shared grammatical concepts (cases, tenses, genders...)

But I'm always amazed that some people find it intrinsically easy.

[renzhe]

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.

I was told that you learn 2,500 by the end of middle school as a part of mandatory learning. After that, people don't do any rote memorisation, but one shouldn't ignore the effect of passive learning.

I've done this experiment with several university graduates who have read a lot: Take the list of the most common characters, and give them about a 100 random characters from the 4500-5000 range to read out loud.

I was surprised (as were they) that they knew pretty much all of them. A university graduate will know well over 5,000 characters passively, in my opinion.

[tanklao]

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.

I was told that you learn 2,500 by the end of middle school as a part of mandatory learning. After that, people don't do any rote memorisation, but one shouldn't ignore the effect of passive learning.

I've done this experiment with several university graduates who have read a lot: Take the list of the most common characters, and give them about a 100 random characters from the 4500-5000 range to read out loud.

I was surprised (as were they) that they knew pretty much all of them. A university graduate will know well over 5,000 characters passively, in my opinion.

500 characters are enough for one to express all his meaning. 3500 characters are absolutely enough to understand newspapers and novels and all kinds of ordinary readings. Among the 500 characters only 200 need rote memorization. Same are Xiangxingzi(象形字）that are very easy to memorize,for example wood(木), sun(日) and water (水). Some are huiyizi(会意字), like 森, 串.

Most importantly, most characters are xingshengzi（形声字）like 相，想，厢，箱，湘。They are counted as different characters but infact they are close related. So to memerized Character is not that difficult as long as you memorized the basic 200.

[mcgau]

When I was seeing the movie 2012 that the world starts from scratch on the Cape of Hope Good, I was quite wondering which language would be going to be a lingua franca in the arks?

Chinese, English, or Tibetan? (most construction workers seem to be Tibetans)

[tanklao]

It's a pity that Tibetans speak Chinese now, especially the young generation who can not speak pure Tibetan. It is really a pity, but it's true. The University of Tibet use Chinese as teaching language,not just because of the government, but of the reality as well. If you can't speak Chinese well, you lose lots of opportunity to find a good job.

[crazy-meiguoren]

Good question about the lingua franca of the post-2012 world. Perhaps the film left that question unanswered by having a highly diverse set of survivors. If most of Africa was spared, there will already be a lot of survivors there. If they are heading to the Cape of Good Hope, maybe the lingua franca will be Afrikaans.