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Learning a new language can take months to years of solid efforts and hands on experience. For some of us, it can be a waste. For others, a good thing. Alas, it can be hard to know ahead of time whether to pursue this or not.
Kind to think of it, this applies to many studies too, like college, and learning programming languages.
the Indians are a more than a billion people too but no one is pushing to learn Hindi
the Arabs are close to half billion people and no one is pushing to learn Arabic and yet most oil come from them
why Chinese? if the the Indians reach 10t economy, does that mean we should learn HIndi too?
People interested in dethroning English, mostly guilt-stricken liberals, will always find some language that must be taught. Even if their children can't put together a grammatical sentence.
I see a lot of people nowadays who want to learn Chinese or want to teach their kids Chinese.
I don't understand the obsession.
Yes China has 1.5 billion people, but the languages is very focused mostly on China and not widespread like Spanish and French.
Also, the kids who have Chinese parents in America, most of them don't speak Mandarin fluently and almost none of them can write. The languages is so difficult that even many people from China cannot write that well.
And I don't think people really should worry about businesses with China because English will be just fine, just like businesses with any other countries.
The chances are, no matter how much you put your effort to learn Chinese, the Chinese people will probably speak English better than you speaking Mandarin.
I've seen many people who tried to learn Chinese and they all gave up relatively quick. All gave up on basic level. Only person I have seen who learned was my teacher from college (She studied for long years in Taiwan and China).
My opinion is that unless you are 100% sure that you will go all the way with Chinese, don't even bother learning it. Better to use that time on something else.
So yeah, many people seem to be very afraid of China's economy, but there's just no way in hell that Chinese will surpass English and it would just take too much time to even learn a little that it probably does not even worth trying it.
any langue is good for neural pathway forming exercise. I would do spanish first but chinese is ok.
People interested in dethroning English, mostly guilt-stricken liberals, will always find some language that must be taught. Even if their children can't put together a grammatical sentence.
What does it have to do with "dethroning" English? What does that even mean?
What does it have to do with "dethroning" English? What does that even mean?
What it means is the turning of the U.S. into a Tower of Babel where all kinds of languages' statuses are enhanced for political reasons. Or just wanting to seem to be sophisticated.
any langue is good for neural pathway forming exercise. I would do spanish first but chinese is ok.
Yes. That's why you should try learning Spanish, French or any Western languages first, and see if you can handle learning a much more difficult language like Chinese or Arabic.
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