Don't Bother Learning Chinese, They're Going Nowhere

[SoDesuKa]

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger thinks there's no way the next century will belong to the Chinese. All the important technology comes from the United States, he says, and we have all the good universities. Besides, the Chinese language is way too difficult to learn.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/munk-debates/kissinger-the-us-holds-all-the-soft-power/article2066128/

Even people who grow up speaking Mandarin have difficulty with it.

"Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle."

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

The Chinese are also held back by their command economy. They're building ten new cities a year for people who can't afford to move into them. It's astounding how confident they are that a real estate bubble won't burst.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E



China no threat to U.S. dominance

[CreekDog]

1. i don't make decisions on Henry Kissinger's say so

:shrug:

[ClarkUSA]

2. Mandarin Chinese is alot easier to learn than English. There is only one tense, not dozens.

Since when do we listen to Henry Kissinger at DU? Hmm?? :wtf:

[Liquorice]

4. Mandarin Chinese is not at all easy to learn. I took it for a year in college. It's

a very difficult language. The tones are quite confusing and hard to even detect much less speak at first. It's a very complicated, complex language but I am glad that I studied it, even though there's probably no way in hell I could ever become fluent in it.

I really can't imagine that it's easier to learn than English.

[BlueJazz]

9. A former Girlfriend of mine worked for the State department and was..

... fluent in 7 (8?) languages. I remember her explaining how she tried to learn Mandarin for 9 months and finally told herself "Screw it". She thought I might find it easier because of my musical education and the fact I have perfect pitch. I told her " From what you've told me, I'll never find out" :)

[ClarkUSA]

11. She's right. Your musical abilities will make you a natural at learning Mandarin.

Having an artistic photographic memory will be even a better combination for character recognition and retention. Learning Chinese is like learning to "sing" a song, with each note representing a different Chinese character aka. "word".

[BlueJazz]

17. MMMM....I could probably do OK with it but then I'd have to get some practice and..

...here in Florida, there's few Chinese around...unless I want to move to China which would....pause...maybe with the way things are going here, that might not be a bad idea. :)

[socialist_n_TN]

20. Try Chinese resturants...........

Most of the workers know some Mandarin and, at least here in Nashville, they don't mind speaking to you. MOST of them appreciate you making the effort.

[socialist_n_TN]

19. If you've got perfect pitch, you won't have any trouble

with Mandarin. I'm also a musician and I DON'T have perfect pitch, but my pitch is pretty good. The tones are THE most difficult part of Mandarin. The syntax is pretty close to English and the words themselves are relatively simple. The tones are the most difficult part.

I've self studied Mandarin for several years now and I do OK, because of my musical training. I'm not fluent because I've never lived in China and I think that you have to live in a country to become fluent. But I DO have native Mandarin speakers to talk to. THAT'S what you need most of all to learn a language. Native speakers to converse with.

[ClarkUSA]

10. I have a different POV. Chinese is a tonal language so one has to be able to "sing" the language.

If one doesn't have an "ear" for tonal memorization, then it ain't going to work. Or it will work enough for communication purposes, but Chinese girls might giggle at you. :D

<< really can't imagine that it's easier to learn than English >>

That's what linguists believe. I tend to agree, after seeing many ESL adults struggle. English has its roots in German. Both languages are extremely difficult to learn as a second language for most adults because of the dozens of tenses, which native speakers take for granted... just as native Chinese speakers take for granted the tonal exactitude required for speaking proper Chinese.

[mzteris]

24. tones really don't matter all that much

it's all about context.

[SoDesuKa]

25. Perfect Pitch

A university study has discovered that speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese are nine times more likely to have absolute pitch. This leads to the possibility that absolute pitch is cultural rather than innate.

"The findings support the notion that babies can acquire perfect pitch as part of learning a language, which can later generalize to musical tones," Deutsch said. "Indeed, the results for acquisition of absolute pitch in tone and nontone language speakers reflect a very similar picture, in terms of timeframe, to the critical periods inferred by linguists for acquiring first and second languages."

In other words, Deutsch suggests, perfect musical pitch functions much like a second language to tone speakers: If you're fluent in Mandarin, learning the tones of Cantonese - and perfect pitch - will be much easier than if you're an English speaker.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041114235846.htm

One other corollary of the study is that if you're a typical Westerner, i.e., without absolute pitch, it's going to be tough to learn a tonal language.

[peace4ever]

22. speaking is one thing, reading and writing is entirely different

thats what makes it, and japanese very difficult.

[NotThisTime]

39. I have two kids taking it. My older one LOVES it, but then again he loved Latin too

I think he likes the challenge of it all.... my second child is a glutton for punishment and apparently liked the tedious writing of it... Both kids are working on two languages, Chinese is the primary though.

[Monk06]

3. This from the architect of 'trianguler' diplomacy who advised Nixon to suck Mao's dick

in order to drive a wedge between Russia and China.

Earth to Henry there was already a wedge between Russia
and China. It was called the Viet Nam war.

Plus Henry is a Nazi, War Criminal and a racist.

[Kolesar]

5. The Chinese reached out so that they could obtain technology to synthesize fertilzer from methane

The country was facing a food crisis because of overpopulation.
When Kissinger gets a painful and embarrassing terminal illness we will :toast:

[LooseWilly]

46. I'm waiting for Kissinger to learn to pronounce English before I take his language tips seriously...

I mean... Kissinger's gonna tell me what languages I can learn? Seriously?? (Speaking of "suck me"...)

[SoDesuKa]

51. No Chinese Equivalent

Foreign-born Henry Kissinger rose to become the American Secretary of State despite his heavy German accent. There's no possibility of another foreigner rising to an equivalent level of prominence anywhere else in the world, certainly not in ethnically homogeneous China.

Amy Chua's book Day of Empire argues that a distinguishing characteristic of the mighty empires of history is the ability to absorb foreigners, even admitting them into the highest levels of government. America's success as a great superpower is the result of that sort of openness. Chinese society is so closed that it even restricts its own film makers.

[malaise]

6. Kissinger should be locked up in a war crimes prison

somewhere on the planet.
For the record my brother speaks perfect Mandarin

[Dokkie]

36. But instead he gets to sit beside Obama

In his first Cabinet meeting. Apart from the war criminal and war mongering, he just gives me the creeps

[Ganja Ninja]

7. "It's astounding how confident they are that a real estate bubble won't burst."

Maybe that's the plan. Who are the investors behind all this? The Chinese might be planing on letting them take a bath. It's kind of hard to remove all those assets from the country when they're in the form of buildings.

[JVS]

14. Letting a rising wealthy class take a bath isn't an unheard of.

Americans don't really think this way because our state is the agent of the wealthy.

But there are examples of things like the North Korean currency reform that was really handy at neutering a class of businessmen who could have eventually threatened the party.

[CBGLuthier]

8. The only thing Kissinger knows about Asians is how to kill them

Fuck that relic.

[Johonny]

12. I'm learning Chinese right now

It's hard but not impossible.

[SoDesuKa]

18. Soft Power

Soft power, defined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye in his book Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics is "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion."

Soft power ... is cultivated through relations with allies, economic assistance and cultural exchanges with other countries, projecting a sense that U.S. behavior corresponds with rhetorical support for democracy and human rights and, more generally, maintaining favorable public opinion and credibility abroad.

http://www.amazon.com/Soft-Power-Means-Success-Politics/dp/1586482254

The difficulty foreigners have in learning the Chinese language is a formidable obstacle to those people's ability to be at the center of emerging thought regardless of the subject matter. The Chinese are always late in the game because of their non-participation except through the languages of other people, usually English-speaking people.

The Chinese "empire" is held back by the fact that only the elite of the elite can speak the imperial language. This is in sharp contrast that with English, which is spoken throughout the world. Traders who are hardly more cosmopolitan than peasants can at least make themselves understood in pidgin English.



Power through attraction, not coercion

[JVS]

13. I'm really not seeing the big problem with these ghost cities.

Yes, it's oversupply.
Yes, any private investor who has put money in these is going to be screwed.
On the other hand, what is it to the PRC and the CPC if those investors get screwed?
I doubt the PRC or the CPC has the fetishistic attitude toward the property rights that will keep them from allocating the space in these cities as they deem fit at some point, and when growth resumes it will be very handy for them to have these cities in place and ready to put online so to speak.

[Romulox]

15. "Every move, a right one!"

Almost as if by definition! :snort:

[a la izquierda]

16. War criminal Kissinger...

can kiss my Latin-American-studying-Spanish-speaking ass.

[KittyWampus]

21. Personally, I'm betting on India.

[Codeine]

27. +1

A motivated and energetic English-speaking workforce with a democratic underpinning will have a fantastic advantage.

[LooseWilly]

47. Have you been to India? It's a capitalist free-for-all that's ripe for unionizing/commie chaos...

When you have people building corrugated plastic huts in vacant lots next door to upscale restaurants... while communist guerillas control portions of the countryside and there's a militarist neighbor sponsoring terrorism with US Military Dollars... well there are some challenges.

The "democratic underpinning" is just another US catch phrase for "capitalist domination with a veneer of participation by members of the monied classes"... though child labor did do wonders for US development, so India might well develop nicely. (Either way, it's an interesting place... so interesting that I suspect achieving anything near the development of the "West" will allow it to do... things that the "West" can't begin to predict, or I.)

[riderinthestorm]

33. Beat me to it. More of India's population is educated too.

It will be a race between China and India on who's the next superpower. I believe it's going to be a tight race but I'll lay my bet on India by a head.

[KittyWampus]

34. India is already exporting their culture and it's catching on.

[riderinthestorm]

35. I agree. Their command and facility with English, and a greater percentage of educated populace

gives them the leading edge as well for me.

[Odin2005]

45. I'm trying to learn Hindi and it's hard, but not nearly as bad as Mandarin, though.

[aquart]

41. Which is why I want to stop doing India's dirty work in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Let them spend their own damn money murdering their neighbors.

[Odin2005]

43. Me too.

If India could eliminate some of it's inane bureaucracy issues and provide at least some assistance and protection to the poorest folks that are now supporting violent Maoist nutjobs because of that poverty India would boom faster than China.

[OwnedByFerrets]

23. American Dominance???? In what? Building a war machine?

[fascisthunter]

26. the Sociopath hasn't died yet?

[Distant Observer]

28. Which Kook believes that HK says in public. His business is diplomacy.

[Distant Observer]

29. And "bubbles bursting" is a capitalist economy thing that is irrelevant to a Communist Planned Econ

model

[Odin2005]

30. I'd rather learn Spanish and Hindi.

[Fool Count]

31. 1.3 Billion Chinese learned it with near 100% literacy.

And not all of them are geniuses. How hard can that be?

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

32. Oh sure, THAT is somebody to trust for advice. Henry Kissinger.

If Henry Kissinger tells you 2+2=4, check with a calculator. Twice.

[Canuckistanian]

37. I heard the CBC breathlessly repeat Kissinger's words

And I thought, "why are they giving this war criminal ANY credence at all?"

[Lydia Leftcoast]

38. Once you get the hang of the tones

(and their contours, not absolute pitches)*, Chinese is easier to speak than Japanese. When I took Chinese, the tones took about two weeks of practice. After that, the problem was not producing or hearing the tones; it was remembering which words took which tones.

There are no verb endings, no levels of politeness, and the word order is closer to English than Japanese is.

However, there's the writing system...

You can learn spoken Chinese in the pinyin alphabet, the one with all those "q's" (sort of a "ch" sound) and "x's" (sort of an "sh" sound), but unlike Japanese, where you can always fake it with hiragana if you forget a character, Chinese has only characters. If you want to read and write on an adult level, you have to learn those characters.

*The four tones are

1. Straight intonation
2. A questioning intonation
3. A low dipping intonation
4. A downward intonation

[SoDesuKa]

42. Amy Chua's "Day of Empire"

According to Prof. Amy Chua's book Day of Empire, the kind of power it takes to define a century, e.g. the "British Century" or the "American Century," a hyperpower is able to incorporate conquered people into itself. The British were a hyperpower, the Romans were a hyperpower. The Germans and the Japanese, with their overly rigid definitions of who could become citizens of their respective empires, were not hyperpowers.

Chua argues that the Chinese are too ethnically homogeneous to become a hyperpower. They can attract foreigners to live in Beijing, but these foreigners remain foreigners; that is, they don't become Chinese in the sense that peoples conquered by Rome became Romans or peoples conquered by Great Britain became British. America's ability to remain a hyperpower is challenged by our policies towards foreigners in the wake of September 11th, Chua says at 50:00 and subsequently in this video with Harry Kreisler of the University of California: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QenLlFx4cCQ

The ability to "become Chinese" is negatively impacted by foreigners' difficulty with learning the language. Tonal languages are best learned at a very young age, and the window of opportunity closes rapidly after that time. Yes, people do learn to get by in Mandarin, but they acquire only the ability to understand and be understood, not to become equal to people who speak that language is their first and primary language.



Amy Chua

[Lydia Leftcoast]

44. But a lot of people have been absorbed by the Chinese in the past:

The Manchus conquered China, but now most of them are culturally and linguistically Chinese. Even now, the Chinese are far from homogenous. Look at Tibet, Inner Mongolia, the tribes of Yunnan, the Uighurs. All these groups are being educated in Chinese.

When my college delegation visited a university in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, one of the Australian English teachers showed us his album of students, with their names, hometowns, and ethnic groups. About 75% were Han (mainstream Chinese), but the rest were an assortment of other ethnic groups.

It's too soon to tell what will happen with China. Both Britain and Rome had existed for a long time before they began assimilating people, and even then, they didn't assimilate everyone, only the elites. The elites in India learned English and cricket and studied at Oxford and Cambridge, but the peasants lived as they always had.

China has been fully a part of the world economy for only about 35 years. Anything could happen. It could collapse in on itself or break apart or become the next superpower.

[SoDesuKa]

50. No "Chinese Century"

There's not going to be any role reversal with the Chinese replacing us as the world's sole superpower. The term that people are trying to avoid is that the Chinese are just too foreign to assert American-style dominance over rest of the world. The spoken language is too hard to learn; and the written language is too hard to learn. Culturally, the Chinese are way out on a limb.

Here and there there are individual success stories of people who've been able to acquire enough Mandarin to get by. But it's really very hit-or-miss, and we're told these stories because they're so unusual. In order for there to be any real chance of a "Chinese Century" there has to be a lot more interest in learning Chinese and becoming familiar with Chinese history and culture. As things stand, there's very little.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

40. Henry's voice got like that from gargling human blood

from all around the world.

[dorkulon]

48. I took Mandarin for 5 years and it was among the most rewarding experiences of my life.

After 3 or 4 years, I would sometimes catch myself thinking in Chinese. I never recognized that I thought in English until that happened to me. Of course, by now it's mostly gone, sadly. But if anyone out there truly wants to understand their culture, there is no better way.

It's nothing like taking, say, French or German--more like taking Martian, in that it is totally unrelated to English and so much more is lost in translation. There are things about it that are easier--no verb conjugation, for instance, and turning a sentence into a question or making it past or future tense is as easy as adding a certain syllable. But the lack of an alphabet (although there are romanization systems) does indeed make reading and writing much more difficult. One thing that makes it very different is that you can't really use your tone of voice to express emotions in the way we do, because changing the tone of a word makes it a different word.

Learning Chinese is definitely worthwhile--it's a truly mind-expanding experience that I would recommend to anyone. In the vast differences between Chinese and English, there is something very profound to be learned about the versatility of the human brain and the way language and culture both define and confine the way we think. There's a learning curve, but if you can get to a point where you're not trying to translate in your head, it becomes immeasurably enjoyable. I guess Kissinger just doesn't like feeling stupid.

[SoDesuKa]

49. Lost in Translation

What you're saying implies that Chinese thought processes are very different from ours. It reinforces the thesis that there's a great distance between our cultures. That's a liability for them so long as we're the source of all the important new technology and that nearly all the world's great universities are, if not American, are at least Western.

It isn't necessary to accept Henry Kissinger as an authority on China's prospects in the 21st Century. He's just extrapolating from what Harvard professor Joseph Nye says about soft power, the ability to attract people to do what you want them to do.