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Tom,

Remember that Chinese speakers grow up learning a written language (Chinese) that has very little connection to the spoken language (Mandarin and local dialicts). Some characters contain hints to their Mandarin pronunciation but you can't count on it. It would be as if there was no written English and you learned to read and write Latin in school but spoke English everytime you opened your mouth. Under those circumstances, you might not think of the sounds a written language makes.

This would then influence how you learn other languages as well. It also influences the cultural assumption about what it means to "learn" a language. In some schools in China, English is taught entirely in Chinese, no spoken English whatsoever.

posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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This statement is not correct. I began studying Chinese in 1982 and have conducted academic research in urban and rural China for more than a decade. I have interviewed government officals and business people from the county level right up to the central government and find that very, very few of these leaders can speak English in any meaningful way. Some can corespond in email using English, but that is a different matter (see my last paragraph below). Once you are face to face with them, the interview has to be done in Mandarin.

Linguist researcher David Graddol estimates that about 175 million Chinese are studying English in school right now. Some percentage of those will actually become Englihs speakers, I would think no more than 25% but lets say 50%. That makes only about 90 million in the pipeline. Of the adult population, I doubt if mor than 5 percent speak english with any facility. That would be something like 50 million adults at present. So, within the next ten years, the Chinese population that can speak English may climb to 150 million but I would be surprised if it even gets that high.

If the commenter had said "there are more Chinese readers of English" it might be closer to the truth. Many highly educated Chinese read English fairly well without being able to speak more than a dozen words. As I said, it is frequently possible to set up an interview or follow up for a piece of information with an email in English.

posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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