On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 06:08 +0530, ss wrote: > 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?)
i first learnt mandarin for some months 16 years ago in delhi from a chinese teacher at JNU who, oddly, also spoke fluent tamil. i also learnt hebrew for over a year, at a course run by the israeli embassy (my coursemates were an esoteric bunch of language fans and mossad wannabes). i think it isn't that hard to find foreign language courses, at least in delhi (i don't know about elsewhere), if you look hard enough; in any case, i doubt that courses for hindi are widely available (or advertised) in chinese cities! that said, as the OP noted, chinese are crazily learning english despite 1/6 of the world population speaking chinese for the simple reason that almost the entire chinese speaking population is IN CHINA! the fact that english is mostly spoken as a _2nd_ language is what will give it a continuing advantage over chinese or anything else. language and english seems to be a recurrent meme on silk, and in a post some time ago i remember mentioning that native speakers of english are sometimes disadvantaged in an international context (e.g. european policy circles) since non-native speakers understand each other through the use of less precise definitions of english words, leaving native english speakers who don't have any foreign languages somewhat lost. -rishab
