Chinese language?

6 Comments

1. Tyler says:

   May 20, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   Dont get me wrong ’cause I am learning Mandarin and love the sound of it.

   But- As an international language it has several important flaws.

   1) it doesnt have a good, widely used phonetic alphabet and this will kill it for sure as a multinational usage language. Pinyin, which I use since I cant do charecters is a very functional means to phoneticize mandarin but it is not easy to type.

   2. Its tonal and that will keep a lot of other nationals from ever learning it with any real ease. I am doing ok with it but it is absolutely a stumbling block for those who are not used to tonal languages, which is most other languages’ native speakers.

   3. The Chinese are attempting to learn English in droves. A lot of them might not be doing a great job of it, the schools’ fault not the Chinese students’ But there is a deff. movement to learn English all over China and this will make the learning of Chinese by people from other countries less important.

   These things taken together are in my opinion, more than enough reason for Chinese to NOT be adopted as the next main language, but there are still other reasons such as Chinese’s lack of specificity, the fact that "ta" means he she or it for example is just an example of the way that Chinese can be a very ambiguous language, this is nice for poetry and song but not so good for law, business contracts and other very important and specific areas which would need to be laid out in structured and understandable, simple terms. Also there are so many words that are the same phonetically but mean completely different things.

   Please don’t flame me over this, Im just trying to be honest. It so happens that I do love the language, it is truly beautiful when spoken by a woman with a feminine voice, and my spoken Mandarin is getting pretty good. I think it is and will continue to be important for those who will travel there first hand for business as I do, but as a major international language that will be used by nonChinese people to communicate with other nonChinese as their common tongue, I just dont see anything over throwing English for that. I believe English will become the global second language (or it is already) and the more new things are published in it, the less likely anything else will ever change that. It is quite possible that the form of International English will continue to evolve with more influence from Eastern languages. I truly believe that will happen, but at its root it will remain a variation of English with more and more borrowed vocabulary from around the world and maybe a bit of simplification as English’s grammatical and spelling rules ARE a bit ridiculous.
2. Annmaree says:

   May 20, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   No, I wouldn’t believe it.
3. cartier95 says:

   May 20, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语/漢語, pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) can be considered a language or language family[3]. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over 1 billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is controversial [4]. According to news reports in March 2007, 86 percent of people in the People’s Republic of China speak a variant of spoken Chinese.[5] As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicate 53 percent[6] of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua (commonly called "Mandarin"), outnumbering any other language in the world.

   Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, though all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous (by far) is Mandarin (c. 850 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), Min (c. 70 million) and Cantonese (c. 70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, though some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue.

   The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu), based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia and is known as Hokkien).
4. zj says:

   May 20, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   yes.1.it is chinese which language people use most in the world.
   2.china develops fast ,which play more and more important role in the world.
5. DRAMAchic says:

   May 20, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   yes it might happen but i don’t agree.. come to realize and imagine other people that don’t know the language. they’d be out of place. it takes time to study another language. why do we have to change English language as the main language when all of us have known it for so long? just a consideration for the people who found hard studying and learning English. and there’s also Spanish. a lot of people try to study Spanish up to now.
6. Witchy ✿ says:

   May 20, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   No…cause, I can’t think of one yet but i don’t think it’s the best language to learn. After English might be French, Spanish, Russian and others….Chinese is popular because it’s very old and the population of China.