On Friday 02 May 2008 8:46:07 pm Udhay Shankar N wrote: > There's always a problem with generalizing from a small sample[1].
No Udhay. These one off examples also fall into the category of generalizing from a small sample. The question is, can you live in Bangalore, or Delhi or Mumbai, in any place in India and say "I want to learn Chinese" or "I want my son to learn Chinese" and find the infrastructure to do that? That is possible for French and German and almost any Indian language. But Chinese? (Or for that matter a whole lot of other languages?) This is not just a problem of the Chinese language, it is yet another example of the decrepit state of higher education in India, apart from a similar state of basic education. Active foreign language departments just do not exist, along with courses that offer them. shiv
