"China's rapid rise spurs Americans to learn Chinese"

[Bluebear]

I can hear it already. "If they want to do bussines with us they should learn to talk AMERICAN first!!!!!!!!!111111111"


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China is casting such a huge shadow on the United States that many Americans are scrambling to learn the Chinese language in a bid to retain their competitive edge.

"Interest in learning Chinese among American youth and their parents has grown dramatically in the past five years," said Vivien Stewart, vice president at the Asia Society, a US group trying to bridge the gap between Americans and the peoples of Asia and the Pacific.

China's dramatic rise to near superpower status and its telling effects politically, economically and culturally are driving the interest to learn the language, experts say.

From kindergartens to high schools, studies by the Asia Society show, there is a "rapid rise" in interest among pupils to study the Chinese language.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050731/lf_afp/uschinaeducation_050731221938&printer=1

[bballny]

1. If you don't hear the tones

by the time you are 2 you never really get it.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

10. That is NOT true... I had a college dorm-mate, white dude, who was an East

Asian Studies major, an outstanding student. He obviously spent a lot of time in language lab listening/practicing, because his pronunciation was flawless. I grew up hearing and speaking Mandarin in my home so I should know.

He surely "got it".

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. I assume they mean Mandarin when they say "the" Chinese language

China has something like 7 major language groups, with many dialects within each group, although Mandarin and Cantonese are the two major spoken languages.

[Bluebear]

3. "Same thing!"

At work once a colleague was saying "Arigato" to a group of Koreans. I pointed out that she should say "Kamsamnida" and that culturally, the Japanese and Korean have an unfortunate history... "Oh it's the same thing, they'll understand." :crazy:

[Swamp Rat]

6. Obrigado Bluebear!

:rofl:

[Bluebear]

7. Pas de quoi! :)

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Domo, that is a cute story

then they wonder why they call us Gaijin (Japan) I have no clue for the Korean term... but this is funny...

[Swamp Rat]

4. Yep

... and I just finished watching "Blade Runner." :D

[solinvictus]

5. We'll be at war with China within a few decades..

Thanks to Wal Mart and countless other retailers, we're feeding the beast that we will fight.

[Mr_Spock]

8. Tell me about it

We're fighting the wrong battle for sure. Let's beat up on haplass two-bit dictators while China signs oil deals negating any gains in our idiotic war and then steals all our low paying and now high paying technical jobs while the corporate run Republican party loves it. When we're all poor, they'll have a nice large source for soldiers fo fight their endless wars - the biggest of which will be with China - who they're helping to arm now.

[Matariki]

9. it's the really awesome movies

that have come out of hong kong the past decade or so!

[wli]

11. I should probably start learning Mandarin

OTOH I'll probably die before I finish.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. I've been through it all before

I was a Japanese instructor back when the Japanese were going to take over the world. (Don't count them out yet, actually. They've come back from far worse.)

All the business majors signed up for Japanese, and it was the worst thing that happened to my teaching career.

They had no interest in Japanese culture and resisted learning about it or meeting the Japanese students on campus. The whole idea was that major corporations would fall down and worship them if they could get two years of "A's" in Japanese on their college transcripts, preferably without learning anything. For the last few years of my teaching career, I had maybe 10% of each class actually interested in the language and culture.

The boom dwindled when students realized that Japanese is difficult, just as the Russian boom of the early 1960s dwindled when students realized that Russian is difficult.

Chinese is superficially easier than Japanese--until you get into it. We shall see how long the business majors last.