On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 6:31 AM, ss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > India (and other nations) need to start setting up the infrastructure to > learn > and communicate with the Chinese people. However - I admit that the English > speaking world will have one saving grace - an India that is hooked to > English.
I am going out on a limb here and assuming that English speakers of the world as a population are at least as many as the Chinese (Mandarin) speakers. If so, why should the English speakers fear erosion of the language? Rather, the only way it'll happen is if there are more people learning Chinese than English. I'd say given that the Chinese are so ambitious anyway, they are going to learn English faster than others can learn Mandarin. If so, will knowledge of Mandarin really give you a leg up in the world? The popular Chinese fanboyism of all things western is fairly well documented, so it's not like one needs to earn respect among the Chinese by knowing the language either. Again, assuming things here, but I believe that there is more human knowledge locked away in texts written in the English language than in any other, so would we want all of that to go to waste? Finally, learning to communicate in Chinese with the Chinese is as much about knowing the culture as it is about knowing the language. This is true for just about any language, but more so for Chinese than say a global language like English. Will an english speaker really pick up all the cultural nuances even when immersed in a Mandarin program from childhood? The benchmark of a language reaching critical mass is when it has people of other languages hooked onto entertainment in the language. Will we ever see a hollywood scale movie / TV business out of China. Among the most popular TV shows among urban Chinese is Friends, which almost everyone watches to be more Western. Just my two controversial bits... Cheeni P.S. I am throwing in what I know to be a radical counter argument here because I am not seeing anyone really questioning the assumption that it's unquestionably good to learn Chinese
