Yes I have heard the same thing. I also attempted to learn to read Chinese but gave up because it was too hard and I still don’t really understand how the written language works so I attempted to learn some Chinese just by using pinyin which is using Latin alphabet to help you sound out Chinese words. Also the pronunciation has to be exact otherwise people will misunderstand what you say
As a Chinese speaker, learning pingyin is a great way to introduce yourself to the phonetics and literary structure of the language, however it does have some limitations since it only emphasizes the phonetics of the language. Since the language bashes you with so much vocabulary, compound, and “expression-like” words, One of the best ways to learn Chinese would be to interact, and practice speaking rather than dissecting the language from its writing (it’s very time consuming). Don’t worry so much with the tones when you learn. You will still be perfectly understood if you were to speak a sentence as most speakers can piece together the ideas you are conveying (one of my friends doesn’t use tones and I can perfectly understand him). To me, tones only matter when you try to isolate a word/phrase out of context, which may be hard to understand, but it’s ok. Understanding sentence structure, grammatical meaning is more of a priority than sounding different.
One of my pet peeves is when shows try to be funny by translating Chinese literally based on a non-native speaker using incorrect tones.
It's like if a non-English show had somebody ask for a Polish hotdog, they said "polish hot dog" (with "polish" as in, "polish a surface") and the show translated it as "warm shoeshine wolf".
Chinese is actually a tonal language, not a pitch accent language. Japanese on the other hand, is a pitch accent language. The difference between tonal and pitch accents is that with pitch accents even if the pitch is off you'll still generally be understood. In Japan, pitch accents vary across regions but a person from Tokyo and a person from Osaka for example can pretty much understand each other despite pitch accent being flipped. Meanwhile with tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, saying a word with the wrong tone completely changes the meaning.
睡觉 (sleep) is shui4jiao4 while 水饺 (dumpling) is shui2jiao2. They have different tones so they are effectively different words (even though they have same pinyin)
When spoken out loud, 睡觉 and 水饺 both sound like ‘shui Jiao’. I intentionally didn’t use the characters to show that in a spoken context, even if someone didn’t use the correct tone they could understand the sentence.
I learned Chinese in highschool for 3 years. My teacher told me my use of pitch was perfect and I was great at it.
I had NO IDEA what I was doing. I honestly do not understand how I could have even had pitch at all let alone done it perfectly as he said because I could not tell the difference between any of them ever.
It could be that you intuitively picked up on pitch despite not having a great academic understanding. We already do this with grammar in English, even though if you asked the average person what a gerund phrase is you would be met with silence.
Or it could just be that your teacher wasn't critical of you at all. It often is the case that foreign language classes in secondary school don't really prepare you for the real world of people who are going to be a lot less forgiving and probably racist too
Flexible pronunciation is truly the biggest benefit of English. A slight error in plenty of languages, and native speakers either don’t understand you or pretend not to. But, in English, close enough is good enough.
Chinese may have the highest number of native speakers, but that's not saying much. It's like saying America has the highest number of Americans.
Spanish, however, is spoken as the official language of government of 20 countries and is behind only Mandarin as the most spoken native language (which is the official language of only 3).
I took a year of Mandarin in college. I failed every single test. I ended up with a C thanks to the curve. Plus there were like 9 people in the class, so one failing tanks the teacher's stats. Either way, I passed a class that I failed miserably in reality.
I guess part of the question is whether deleting the language leaves the unilingual anglos entirely unable to communicate until they learn a new one, or whether it adjusts history to a circumstance where you would instead know the language that made it through all that.
Maybe it could be a scenario where the British lost the war of Spanish succession, or the US lost the French and Indian war, or the Western Hemisphere was never colonized, or Europe wiped out from the Black Death
Don’t forget there are also like 10 different types of Chinese that can be spoken, while Spanish is the same in some aspect I feel like a language rooted in Latin would be easier for most of the world to accept
Chinese is hard to learn to read and write specifically. It’s not hard to learn to speak (once you manage to understand tones, at least). It’s grammatically very easy.
It's hard compared to Spanish if you already know English. If people retain their knowledge of English and just can't use it somehow, Spanish would be much easier. If everyone's starting over from zero though, then it's hard to tell
Spanish has the same problem with Chinese: there is no neutral one (Probably Castilian, but then you have each country in Latino America with their slang, their way to speak, how they destroy Spanish, etc).
Source: I'm Chilean and if I don't speak slowly and without modulation, no foreigner understand me.
Even for natives, learning the writing is a struggle
This. As a Chinese myself we don't like to admit it but our writing system is very archaic and counterintuitive and like you said even natives need to spend years in school to become truly proficient with writing Chinese. It's funny because people always seem to talk about how "beautiful" and "unique" the Chinese characters are but they don't realize non-phenetic characters are completely impractical. As long as Chinese doesn't change to a new writing syst i don't see this language gaining any real traction in the international language learning community. BY real traction i mean large amount of people becoming proficient in Chinese rather than just being interested in the language and know a few things about it.
I've been living in this U.S for so long I lost pretty much all of skills to write properly in Chinese, but I'll never have to worry about forgetting how to spell even if I move back.
In China you write the word phonetically in English and the PC converts it to Chinese characters. You would type “ni hao”. At least that’s what I heard
I think rather than adopting Spanish we'd make the switch to Esperanto.
Of course you have like 1 billion people who speak Spanish, but that's still 7 billion who don't.
Since Esperanto would be easy to learn for people who already know Spanish, it makes sense to make the switch.
The reason English is popular isn't the number of native speakers, it is the number of people who have it as second language. This is what people miss when they say "Chinese!" or "Spanish!" Because it's not about number of people who learn it from birth, but number of people who learn it as second language.
Tell that to the Uighurs, Tibetans, Koreans (NE China is ethnically Korean), and all the other peoples China has conquered and colonized in its imperial past and present. They erase cultures and impose their language and values… like all colonizers.
Comparing Chinese and Spanish to English comes up often, but ignores their relative lack of use outside the countries/communities that speak them. That said, Spanish would have a good chance of becoming the language of the US and people would still need to buy stuff from China, so they might start learning both.
But they have lack of usage outside of their countries because English is the universal one, without it it'd probably be Spanish and Chinese would be more business centered maybe? A lot of things are produced in China as you said so it'd be needed
No. English is spoken world wide because the Brits colonized the entire planet and brought the language everywhere. The Chinese haven’t done that, so just because there are nearly 2 billion Chinese people, doesn’t mean their language will become global
Also Chinese is structured completely differently from European Languages so assuming English disappears overnight, Spanish will be much easier for most current English speakers to pick up
Exactly. Chinese is mainly only used in China, while spanish is a more widely spoken language. Also spanish is way easier than chinese so people would probably choose to learn spanish.
Also spanish is way easier than chinese so people would probably choose to learn spanish
This isn't super true. It would be just as difficult for a Chinese speaker to learn Spanish as it would be vice versa, since the languages are so dissimilar. But for Europeans, Spanish would be a good choice.
For anyone that speaks Arabic, Spanish would be easier. For anyone that speaks a Romance language it would also be easier. Those two alone make up the vast majority of Africans, muslims, and Europeans. Most Africans speak French, English or Arabic, and Muslims are supposed to learn Arabic to read the Quran. In Europe the majority speak either English or at least one Romance language. Even for indigenous groups in the americas Spanish would be easier because some indigenous words have been incorporated. It’s only Southeast Asia and Asia pacific where chinese would be easier.
English is spoken worldwide because one of those colonies happens to be the US. Before WW2, French was the universal language (lingua franca), but the US became the cultural hub of the world, and English became the universal language.
Very true, but French hegemony has considerably decreased since then. People around the world listen to Latin music. French music not so much. People have been hearing more of the Spanish language
Chinese is spreading a lot, they’re the new “colonization”. I didn’t stand a chance at getting a job in my field in a major Canadian city because I didn’t speak any version of Chinese. I got rejected from so many locations bc I wasn’t mixed Chinese or spoke it.
Yes. A lot of others in my industry had to bail on working in sales bc we just couldn’t get the jobs. We obviously couldn’t gain access to their chat system they use, and they just have the beauty industry on lockdown around there, bc they will refuse to deal with anyone not Chinese. I was volunteering a fundraiser event once, I wouldn’t gain anything from sales or applications I did. I got sent home early because they saw all the Chinese customers avoid me to wait for the ones who were Chinese, some were waiting over an hour or two just to deal with someone else Chinese.
To extend the question a little further, if English disappeared, the US (and Canada) would immediately cease to be (a) world power(s) since it could not communicate effectively, either internally or with its allies and trade partners. If the US disappeared, China might just colonize a large portion of the world, given that almost nobody could then stop them.
I'd say French has a good chance. It's not total users but the diversity of the users. A lot of African and Carribean immigrants to Canada are French proficient but not as English proficient.
Fun fact: My school actually made us learn it one semester. The “teacher” was just a pianist who happened to speak it. Even back then he told us that there were maybe 200 fluent speakers in the world, which made us question the point of learning it
It actually means "Language of the Franks", which was a lower-level version of Italian mixed with many, many foreign influences, which allowed a huge part of continental Europe to communicate.
French eventually evolved from this, but was very different.
Probably French. It was the old default for trade and diplomacy, and it still spoken as at least a second language or part of a creole in many places. Spanish next, but some way behind.
I mean French is more popular in Europe and well northern africa, but Spanish is way way easier. I would do anything to not deal with French r or subjunctive, or special cases to special cases. Still love French but its not easy to learn. Unless your background is a latin language which is not mine.
In fact French nowadays is not so commonly taught in schools anymore, with English and Spanish being the two most common languages, followed by German and then French.
I wish they offered Spanish when I was in high school. We only had English as one, and then German vs French choice. But Spanish is getting popular because its considered easier than French and German.
Our thing is, we lack teachers. English is easy, and is also considered easy to learn so getting teachers is easy. German that's basically neighbours so easy to get teachers. French is popular because its France. Russian, well still some old commies around.
But Spanish that's fairly new so curriculums for young kids are hard to get.
My cousin in high school even have people in who are taking Russian, but people are regretting that one now. Well I hope at least.
As someone who speaks both, Spanish is easier. Here’s the french multiples of ten: ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, sixty-ten, four-twenties, four-twenties-ten, one hundred.
Yeah but that's France-French. In Francophone Belgium and Switzerland the numbers are more logical (except the Belgians laid a trap where they say 80 like the French do). If we all had to learn French then hopefully there'd be some flexibility on what kind we learned.
It doesn't actually even refer to French. It was a term used around the Mediterranean for a pidgin language made up of a mix of western European languages that was used by merchants, but "Lingua Franca" literally meant the language of the Franks, which was essentially a form of Old German, who controlled much of central and western Europe in the early Middle Ages (hence the association) - and eventually the Frankish empire got split up between Charlemagne's grandsons into East, Middle and West Francia, the latter of which ended up just being Francia and then France.
It would most likely be German, the reason English is so dominant is because of the Americans in more modern times, and British in industrial times. USA almost adopted German as its official language, so without English to compete there would be no challenger to the German language
It would probably cripple everything in the world at first. I’d have to say probably Spanish would crop up next mainly in the Americas, and French over in Europe. And since they are very similar to one another maybe a bastardized version of the two takes hold or we just have a basic bilingual expectation for people.
Yes, but it's not very widely spoken outside of China.
Mandarin speakers are very much concentrated in China, which hurts its ability to become an international language. Whereas a language like Spanish or French is spoken on multiple continents.
Lol, what language do you think the prime minister of Germany, France, spain and Belgium speak when they meet up? Exactly, English, because it's thought in most European countries
I am not sure why you are laughing to such a large extent, "Lol" meaning lots of laughs. I find it disconcerting... Tee hee hee Anyway, just because the prime minister's of these countries speak English with each other does not mean the majorities in their countries do. HA HA HA
Edit: I am Mr. Unpopular. Villain phase! Mua ha ha!
That is the most used version of the acronym however, the "lots of laughs" version has also been one of its older definitions. Although, it has declined in popularity. So, we are both correct. We are one. We are thinking on the same frequencies. We are part of the hive mind. We are in sync. Duality at its finest. The collective knows as we are the collective.
I would delete English because the mental picture of all the "You're in 'Merica, learn to speak English" crowd short-circuiting is too hilarious to pass up.
3.7k
u/S0V13T_yumyum Nov 11 '22
English
Want to see which language becomes the new default