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More and more people want to study Chinese. What do you think? Is it will substitute English?
Feb 15, 2011 2:00 PM
Answers · 3
English is the worlds most spoken language and Chinese Mandarin is the second most spoken. While the amount of Chinese speakers in the world continues to grow, I do not believe it will overtake English. Firstly, just because the amount of people who can understand Chinese is less than those able to understand English. English is taught in the majority of countries in school as a compulsory subject where as Chinese is not so widely taught. Also Chinese is a tonal language and for many foreigners this is almost impossible to master speaking using tones correctly, it also makes it a much more difficult language to listen and understand, with many foreigners even unable to hear the difference in the tones. In short the sheer difficulty in using tones puts people of learning it. It is also not written using romanised letters and han zi look very daunting to foreigners and many do not want to have to spend the time learning to read and write them. This is also true of a lot of self studying Chinese people, though I do not understand why, han zi is not a good way to try and read or write Chinese.
February 15, 2011
I don't think so, Chinese is way too hard to be a language that used widely all over the world. English is much more easier to spread, for example, Lots of European languages belong to the same language system with English ,so it is easy for English to spread over Europe ,while ,there is few lanauage being similar with Chinese, so it is hard for Chinese to substitute English, which is learned by so many people and used so widely.
February 15, 2011
Acccording to the speakers' population, Chinese is way more than English already, hells ago. I don't think so; too hard for all westerners to learn.
February 15, 2011
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