Chinese language catching on in U.S. classrooms

It makes far more sense to learn Chinese than German or French (though it's much harder). I'd be thrilled if my kids had the chance to learn it.

I also like some of the Chinese folk music that I have had to chance to hear. However,
they do sing in a totally different way than we Westerners do.

However its seems more likely that spanish would be more helpfull for the masses.

Then more English.

How can we learn Spanish, never mind Chinese?

And why Chinese at all? Do we need a nation of translators? And poorly trained ones if they can't even grasp English?

And why bother since translator computers are being made that helps eliminate the need for translators at all? (peak oil. Reducing the population is the issue. Everything else is tangential and divisive, to keep us from seeing the background moves.)

I live in China now, and having studied French for five years I can honestly say Chinese is easier. The grammar is ridiculously easy. No real verb tenses, conjugation, masculine/feminine, etc. Basically every word or concept can be summed up in two Chinese characters. The hard parts are learning a non-roman alphabet and the tones. Chinese use 4 tones when speaking. The same word with the same pronunciation has a different meaning depending on how you inflect your voice. For example while "baba" (fourth tone) means father, "baba" (first tone) means shit. Obviously things can get way out of hand if you mispronounce something in a sentence. I do it all the time...

I think learning Chinese in High School is a great idea, especially since my wife is Chinese and she needs a job! Although the 2nd language system in America is a joke, we cant make it better until we address the problem and at least OFFER the important languages.

Just so you all know, this ENTIRE COUNTRY is gnashing at the bit. They are hungry to be number one and they surely will be if we Americans dont get our shit together.

"Just so you all know, this ENTIRE COUNTRY is gnashing at the bit. They are hungry to be number one and they surely will be if we Americans dont get our shit together."

That's why I want to let my kids choose between Chinese and Spanish. I think they are the two most important languages to learn right now.

the tonal system completely throws me. As does the complete inability to sound a word phonetically.

I love the characters and know about a hundred. But I can't remember more than a handful of spoken words.

The Upper Class also needs Spanish to talk to the help. And quite a few of what you consider "the masses" already know Spanish. They'll be perfecting their English & (one hopes) becoming literate in Spanish. Let them learn Chinese, too. Since they became bilingual early, they will find learning other languages easier.

Surprise: Many people in other countries learn SEVERAL languages.

they'll be coming here to take over

We had Japanese, Chinese, German, French, and Spanish. In fact the same teacher taught the German, French, and Spanish classes, he also taught them for the local community college as well. I took the French class, so I have a one up, so to speak, if I wanted to actually be able to PRACTICE it, maybe I'll move to Canada. :) That teacher was called Mr. T, he was from Eastern Europe, lived here for 20 years or so, and was fluent in somewhere around 8 or 9 languages, he was also the coolest teacher at the school. :)

My Greek prof at university was fluent in ten ancient languages and a similar number of modern ones. It was terrifying and impressive all at once. (The fact that he was an Orthodox priest and looked the role helped.)

My high school only offered French, and the teacher was spectacularly, soulblightingly bad at it. I easily lost two years' worth of French in the semester I took with her. One of the other schools in town offered something like four or five, including odd stuff like Gaelic. I was jealous to say the least. ;P

Right now I'm working on a few European languages, but I've been considering picking up stuff from other parts of the world. Leaning towards Arabic at the moment, though.

He was a 45-50 year old(at the time) who acted more like his students than like his peers. Not to mention that, while he is a genius, he not one with a "big head" so to speak. He was cool, but I think by now he retired, don't really know though, one of the few teachers I liked, will tell you that much.

This guy just had the imposing appearance; he looks Ancient and Terrible, kind of in the Gandalfian sense of the term, but he was definately fun to study under.

He kept tripping up on which language he was teaching/writing at times, which probably makes sense considering how many languages were in his head. He'd start putting a Greek example on the board and realize he was writing it with Arabic characters, curse in Russian...

The class was definately fun though, if just because of the amount of stuff the prof brought into it. He didn't care much for slackers though; the class was whittled down to four(4) of us after the first month.

(Granted, that class size probably helped a lot..)

I worked for a man from S*udai Ar*abi*a. He had a better command of the English language than most natives. He habitually spoke Ar*abic, French and English all in one sentence.

Why're you asterisking up terms there? Last I heard, "Saudi Arabia" and "Arabic" are hardly obscenities.

:think:

Seriously, what's the problem with the words?

Did you read about the chick who was a specialist on Ir*q who had her resume' on monster, and they decided since it contained the word "Ir*q", they would not allow her to post it?

I don't want to give the search engines any fodder. Why do you think people type "*" instead of "George W. Bush"? That, at least, is my understanding of the reasoning behind it.

Welcome to DU :hi:

It's shorthand because he will always have an asterisk by his name in the history books due to the shenanigans around the 2000 election. (That, and Gary Trudeau....)

even tho ethnically chinese, all i learned were some good cuss words and i refused to take chinese language classes. so i took latin, french and spanish instead. . one of my friends, an ESL teacher, is struggling to learn chinese; it's rough!

who lost many collegues on a battlefield fighting chinese letters.

In korea, ironically enough. I had a big laugh, in learning
the korean lettering system, hangul, that the entire system are
pictographs of the mouth, cutaway. The sound for "r/l", looks
like a squiggly "s", representing the way your tongue is shaped
when you say "r". Koreans wanted a simpler, phoenetic way to
write "chinese" though there is still chinese characters used, however
different subtly than the mainland, i guess how canadian french varies
from parisian french.

I think chinese ideograms are a great way to learn about different
lingual systems, as in the system of symbols is multi-meaning, and
in the ambiguity, a poet can have great fun. The exactingness of
english has its boundaries in that respect, and the even more contextual
languages like germanic ones. I can see why, in the study of languages
noam choamsky becomes so smart.

that happened in the 70's and 80s with learning Japanese language.

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You realize the Chinese system of government is simply autocracy with a blended left/right economic policy, moving rightwards by the day?

You just keep on telling yourself that...

The USA learns oppression from the Chinese

The Chinese learn exploitation from the USA

It's kind of like the end of Animal House, when you can no longer tell the difference between the pigs and the humans

Also sorta like looking from George Orwell to John Belushi and not being able to tell the difference...

nt

The chinese capitalism is brutal, and USA is trying socialism.

Your comment almost sounds like a satire of those Far Leftists....

Didn't they stop mass-production of this model about 15 years ago?

I had a self-described Stalinist in one of my classes last year, who kept going on about how well-off states like North Korea or 1930s Russia really are/were. All the bad stuff we hear about them is capitalist propaganda, you see, and entirely false.

Or something.

And China under Mao was doing beautifully too. It was just that damn capitalist propaganda media that accidentally starved tens of millions of Chinese to death. And China's economy gained plenty between 1950 and 1975. It was just capitalist propagandists who make everyone (including the Chinese, and including the Chinese economy itself) believe that there were no significant gains in that period. You should read that rag the Revolutionary Communist Party publishes. It's a real laugh.

that Mandarin Chinese will be offered at our public high school beginning next year or the year after. We're psyched.

Kan zheiyang de xinwen rang wo feichang gaoxing. Xue hanyu de meiguoren yiding bugou. Keshi, shuo hanyu de meiguoren yue duo, gongzuo de jihui yue shao ba.

Ye rang wo feichang gaoxing. Ruguo women meiguoren xue zhongwen, women dou keyi yiqi jinbu. Dongfang Hong, ni zai nali a? Wo xianzai zhu zai Guizhou Guiyang, jiao yingyu. Ni zhu zai meiguo huozhe zhongguo?

I gather they're talking here about Mandarin, rather than Cantonese, Hakka, or the eight or so other major dialects spoken in China?

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cantonese3jan03,0,1859232.story?coll=la-home-headlines

....Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its ports to foreigners centuries ago.

It is also the chief language of Hong Kong, the vital trading and financial center that became China's link to the West.

But over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years....

I work in an ESL school and most are Mandarin speakers.

"Chinese," unless specifically declared otherwise, always refers to Mandarin.

should learn english first.

I would imagine it is a hell of a lot easier than learning Chinese.

While the kids also manage to learn their native language? Are US kids that much more stupid?

The future of America depends on an educated populace. Too bad that education is low on the priorities of the Republicans.

No reason a kid can't learn two languages at once growing up. I did, and I'm sure I'm in the company of hundreds of millions of others who did.

If anything, if someone doesn't start learning additional languages by the time they're very, very young, it screws them considerably for picking them up later in life because the areas of the brain dealing with language get hard-wired early on. If you start learning a second language by the time you're six or seven, you'll have a much easier time with any languages by the time you're twenty-five.

(That, and finding out early on that learning another language involves more than word-for-word vocabulary substitution would make intro-level university language courses muuuuuuuuch less aggravating.)

There will have to be a China and US for that to happen. Borders don't exist for corporations, and the nation-state is dying. The borders will still be there for people, but it'll be for nothing more than nationalistic control.

"The Woodstock class is on the front lines of a U.S. government-backed effort to get more students learning Mandarin, a nod to China's emergence as a global superpower of the unfolding century."

Was it Diebold?

...sort of like the Cheech and Chong bit where Mexican-Americans take Spanish in high school... and get a "B"...

My first college roomate (we were both from San Antonio) could speak Spanish fine (probably more 'spanglish,' to be fair) but couldn't read or write it; she would ask me to translate mail she received from her relatives.

Can't assume that because someone is a speaker of a particular language that they necessarily know the 'formal' structures of it or that they can read or write it.

Look at how many people in this country speak English but are functionally illiterate.

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The US should increase teaching of all languages & not wait until high school. Younger kids learn languages quickly.

What languages are popular in Australian schools? I'd think the Asian languages would be useful, given Australia's location.

japan has more of our debt than china by at least 3 fold. japan is the world's 2nd largest economy (china has quite a ways to go; and a lot to learn about sustainable industrialization, something japan already went through). japan's economic "crash" is hardly as bad as it is made out in america, also.

and being w/in spitting distance from nuclear submarines (or pretty much any other large military materiel), just in case, means that japan will be a force to contend with well into the future.

China is projected to jump from #7 to #4 in the G7 rankings this year. In a decade, they will have passed Japan, and most likely the U.S. They have a extremely large, modernizing military, they will be more than a match for us.

there's a lot of growing pains in the works for china. slave labor nations rarely survive the outrageous boom bust cycles they induce, and china is essentially working off of a slave labor pool. and to top it off there incredible deep fissures within the nation in terms of rural/urban divide and deep ethnic divides. china as we see it today is artificially larger than it should be historically, not just because of tibet, but because of the turks, uighurs, mongols, et al around them. i won't be surprised that they get divided up and lose their satellite territories like the soviet union before them within my lifetime.

remember, a lot of what you see of china is for show. it's a nation that's been doing things like this for generations, they know very well how to keep up appearances. but decay within is a monster than never lets up, and if lessons of modernization are not properly learned...

China's encouraging of ethnic Han settlement of minority areas like Tibet and Xinjiang is rapidly changing the demographic nature to the point where splitting may not be a demographic reality anymore. Keep in mind the Soviet Union also fell apart under an extreme economic recession. Unless that happens, China should easily hold these territories.

and there's plenty of other examples.

also, from my research about the silk road i came across many wonderful books and modern socio/political journals dealing with these regions in modern times. they are anything but what china is trying to report. there's some real fissures going on. all that han settlement policy is just ramping up the animosity. note how the xinjiang region (taklaman desert basin) is declared a semi-autonomous region already.

and, due to the boom-bust nature of slave labor nations i definitely see an extreme economic recession in china in my lifetime (roughly an additional 40-60 years). they have not laid a good foundation. remember, keeping up appearances....

Chinese specifically to be able to compete. Most Chinese kids start mandatory English classes in kindergarten. And Chinese is significantly more difficult to learn than English. (Yes, the grammar is simpler and there isn't as much vocabulary to learn, but the writing is a nightmare.) Basically, even though the Chinese education system is crap, we will never turn out a significant number of better English-Chinese translators than they will turn out Chinese-English translators. Everything in China is geared towards learning English. They have an English language channel on the basic television package. Most signs are bi-lingual and the subway has a thirty second "learn English" quickie spots. The US will never show that kind of commitment to learning a foreign language.

I think US students should absolutely take a foreign language. I only learned English grammar when I studied German and Latin. And I think the benefits in terms of cultural understanding and broadened horizons are enormous. But if you think speaking Chinese is going to give your kid an edge in the business world, I'm pretty doubtful. There are a lot of Chinese workers who speak much better English than your child will ever speak Mandarin.

customs, and culture with whom you are constantly dealing with. It is always a positive that can lead to opportunities. If we want to compete and be respected, we need to be more ambitious and not rely on people catering to us.

that Americans should learn other languages and be less arrogant towards foreigners. I think there are hundreds of good reasons to learn at least one foreign language. I just don't think learning Chinese is the magic bullet for success. For one thing, it's extremely, extremely difficult. It's consistantly ranked as the most difficult foreign language to learn. And Chinese is one of those languages where a little knowledge can get you into a lot of trouble. For example, I had dinner with some Chinese friends a few weeks ago. I was eager to show off my Chinese, so I tried to call the waitress over to the table to ask for the bill. I said "xiao jie" (which means "little sister" or "waitress") but I used the wrong tone. My companions (between sobs of laughter) explained I was saying "little chicken" or "hooker". I'd been going around insulting waitresses literally for months and wondering why they always looked either annoyed or about to start laughing.

So anyway, I'm all for studying language as a way to better understand another culture. And I think Chinese is a beautiful, rich and very interesting language to study. What I'm skeptical about is the practical value considering:

1.) I have never met a Chinese person who would let me practice Chinese with them. They always answer in English.

2.) The learning curve on Chinese (before you can say anything meaningful without pissing anyone off) is HUGE.

3.) There are a lot of politics associated with language. The best selling English language program in China is explicitly billed as a way for Chinese people to assert their superiority by demonstrating their mastery over the foreigner's language. I have met countless students who think the purpose of speaking English is to demonstrate their skill, not to actually communicate with anyone. And many students feel that everyone else in the world should be learning Chinese and that as soon as China has achieved a certain level of economic independance they will. It sounds ugly, but language is power. And I'm not sure we should be in such a hurry to cede our power to Chinese people for whom language is about dominance and not about communication. (Obviously, this is not all Chinese people, but it's a significant number of people I've met.) There's a famous story about Richard Attenborough (I think) filming a documentary somewhere in Africa. There was a large group of Kenyans(?) milling around and an assistant was trying to get them to move out of the way so they could bring some equipment into the center of the town. The assistant was speaking the native language in a broken, hesistant tone and being completely ignored. Suddenly, Attenborough got fed up, stood in a rock and said in normal English, "Excuse me please. We need to you to split up into two groups, half of you go that way, half go the other way and you four go and carry that over there." (Or some such complex instructions.) And they understood perfectly and did what he wanted. He told the assistant if you want results it's better to speak confidently in a language they don't understand than to speak hesitantly in their language (and lose face because of your poor speaking ability.) In my experience, this is very true in China. You get much better results speaking English that you do speaking Chinese badly. It puts you at a disadvantage and makes you lose face. So most businessmen here use translators instead of learning Chinese. And most of the translators are Chinese for the above mentioned reasons. I know it doesn't sound very politically correct- but I think it's pretty naive to hand over power before really understanding who you're handing it over to.

1. Get a tutor if you want to practice. Or, if it's to some vendor on the street or something, just continue speaking Chinese.

2. I'm sorry, but Chinese is far, far easier to learn than English is. Honestly, after learning the radicals and the first 50 characters, I didn't have a problem. By the time I got to 500-1000 characters, I could write a character once and have it memorized. Now I'm batting about 90% for simply looking at a new character for a few seconds, though I'll write it once just to be safe. The writing is the easiest part of the language once you get into it. The grammar is a joke; the vocabulary is beautifully simple, and generally logical. I would say mastery of Chinese requires far less work than mastery of English. Just because Chinese are driven does not mean Americans cannot be. Many of us are driven. I speak Mandarin quite capably, and several of my American friends do as well. And if started at a young age, there is no reason why an American child should speak Chinese worse than a Chinese child speaks English.

And even if he doesn't speak as well as a Chinese translator, your kid will at least be able to function in China without need of one. And that will be an edge. Honestly, the only time you need to be able to speak better than the translator is if you're applying for his job.

Yes, you will not be able to talk to people meaningfully until the end of your first or second year of college Chinese, but all that means is that you should complete another few years before you head off to the middle kingdom. English also has a substantial learning curve; our grammar is atrociously difficult.

3. Learning Chinese will not help you negotiate officially, unless you take the full four years of college Chinese--and even then, spend significant time in China first. This does not mean it does not put you at an advantage. Even if your vocabulary is limited, if you speak what you know confidently and clearly, you will come off very well. And unless you're in Hong Kong, I can't see how you could
function on the street without a knowledge of the language. The freedom to be comfortable out and about is an advantage, pure and simple.

Next, most translators are Chinese because American instruction of Chinese has only taken off in the last five years. When I started learning Chinese, my high school was the only one in the state of Minnesota to teach it. There simply aren't nearly as many Chinese speakers, if only because there isn't as many students of the language. Any one American trained for four years will speak Chinese as well as any one Chinese trained in English for four years will speak that language.

Now the real point. The most interesting point you made was regarding power and language.

Refusal to speak a language on nationalist grounds is outright stupid. Language-learning is a symbol of power, not a cause of power. America is not dominant because everyone has to speak English; everyone speaks English because America is dominant. If we learn Chinese, it does not strengthen China. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that China is strong. Whether we acknowledge it or not does not change whether it is strong or not, and American study of Chinese gives no strength to China. Students dream of the day everyone has to learn Chinese because it will be a sign of strength, not a cause of strength.

They might also dream of a day a Red flag flies over Taiwan. But a strip of dyed cloth alone would not give China dominion over Taiwan, it would be a sign that they have already achieved it. A man might dream of the day he drives a BMW--not because the car would then give him lots of money, but because if he were to have such a car, it would be a sign that he already had lots of money. A student might dream of the day he is handed a Ph.D. in his field--not because the roll of paper would confer knowledge upon him, but because it is a sign that he is knowledgeable.

Imagine a Senator X. You may choose address him as Senator X, or you may choose to address him only by his name. Your choice does not alter whether he is a Senator or not!

Language is the same way. We give nothing to the Chinese by speaking their language. Their strength is achieved independently of whether we decide to learn their language.

French-Spanish-German-Italian-Russian-Japanese-Latin


I took Russian for 3 years and loved it :)

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and it was fun for us to pass noteS in English class..written in Russian.. the teacher would always get pissed when she intercepted one and could not read it :)

Spanish works pretty well there.

What the hell is a "money-power glorification cult"? Can you translate from the Australian?

http://zhongguoren-exchange.com/index.php

There are lots of good stuffs there if you can read chinese.

Bookmarked. :)

So blocky and blurry, so hard to read. Oh well. Nice site.

there are lots of soup recipes.

I kind of shocked him at Xmas after he told me and I spoke Japanese to him, he apparently didn't know I had spent a lot of time in Japan. :D

I'm currently a third year Chinese language student, a third year Japanese language student, and a third year Spanish student. Chinese is only going to get more important in the coming years, and I have potnetial employment on graduation doing anything from working for the CIA to teaching english in chinese classrooms to doing translation in the private sector. This isn't going away anytime soon, and more people in my age group are going to start studying because of the range of possibilities it brings. Being multilingual is an asset. Even if we can hold on to superpower status, it is good to know the languages of your competitors.