6 Reasons NOT to learn Chinese (and 6 alternatives)

Being bilingual can be a redundant waste of time in the extreme case that everyone you converse with also happen to be bilingual in the same two languages. This may seem obvious and not a case to worry about, but despite the “mental exercise” benefits of being bilingual, one could argue this is exactly the reason that so many schoolchildren stopped learning Latin (and even French or Esperanto) when English became the de facto global medium, as I implied in “The Importance of Speaking English“.

The one point I hope to make in this article: there are advantages to learning a language different from the one ones that all your classmates are learning, and this will let you explore and profit in the many different growth areas other than just Latin America and China (and in the case of Turkish, perhaps even within China!).

Reasons like “learning another language makes you smarter” seem just as redundantly mentioned in the article provocatively titled “17 Reasons every American should learn Spanish“. I would probably parody this title “N Reasons every Swede should learn Finnish” (reason #1: “To be able to speak to 0.21% of the world’s population instead of just 0.13%”) to show how limited and generic the reasons in that article are. That parody should show what a limited view that article takes on bilingualism in the world’s largest economy. If I were to recommend educational guidelines, I would probably suggest, of American school children proficient in English, that only about 30-50% would need to learn Spanish as a second language (Latin America, after all, is still bigger than China as a US trading partner), 15-25% could learn Chinese, and about half of the remaining 25-55% could learn one of the alternate languages I suggest below.

As much as a I am serial polyglot who loves learning languages, useful and obscure, largely for the sheer fun of it, and although I confess I do spend a large fraction of that time learning Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, calligraphy, and even classical), the title of this article promised you excuses to learn languages other than Chinese, which I hope the below points succeed at delivering:

Reason #1: Too much competition — as much as the number of users may seem like a strong reason to learn Chinese, it can also reduce the benefits of learning it. Every year, thousands of fresh graduates coming out the world’s top business, law, engineering, and other graduate schools are already native Chinese speakers, and the percentage of them is continuing to increase. I don’t know about you, but I do not expect to outdo any of these native speakers in Chinese proficiency, and find many of them speak English well that I would rather partner with than compete with them. I sat in my first graduate-level course “Statistical Thermodynamics” in 1996, and already then the class was made up of 6 Chinese, 6 Indians, and a Serbian, leaving me as the only native English speaker.  I sometimes say if I could spend one hour per week getting better at a language, it might be best spent staying further ahead in English than trying to narrow any gap versus a fluent speaker in any other language.

Reason #2: Learning to write and speak are almost twice the effort of learning the same in most other languages – Having discussed a limit to the benefits, I will also point out the obvious high cost, perhaps best described in an article I read 5 years ago titled “Why Chinese is so damn hard“. Simply put, for every Chinese word, you need to learn how to write and read it almost completely independently of learning how to pronounce it. Unlike Japanese or Korean, there is no phonetic alphabet or syllabary in the written language, or even a furigana to help on many publicly printed words that may be new to you. Pinyin does make learning Mandarin quite a bit easier, unless you get your books form Taiwan where they use bopomofo instead, or if you are trying to learn Cantonese where the Yale system is not as accurate or useful as pinyin. If you like the beauty of written Chinese characters, you might enjoy the shortcut of seeing how the style was imported by Korean and Vietnamese artists as well as something easier and more accessible.

Another measure of the difficulty of the Chinese writing system is the uniquely large number of different systems needed / available for entering Chinese into a phone or computer – by pronunciation, character shape, stroke order or handwriting recognition. A native speaker would be able to stick to the one of these most efficient for them, but a non-native like me often needs to switch, because there are some characters I know by pinyin better than by shape and vice versa. The below two photos show just the eight methods on my iPhone, which doesn’t even include one of my favorite techniques called the “four corner method” “四角號碼”:

 

Reason #3: Where you live matters too much – I live in Hong Kong, mainly so I could have a “front row seat” to China, and appreciate that I can be in Shenzhen in just over an hour almost anytime I wish. Living here though is almost no help to learning Mandarin or the simplified characters used on the mainland, because here south of the border we use Cantonese and traditional characters. Six weeks in mainland China was enough to get my Mandarin to the level of fluency I still haven’t reached in years of trying to learn Cantonese though, because when in Hong Kong English can get almost everything done, while in the mainland Mandarin is needed to get almost anything done. I think it might actually be easier to learn Cantonese in Canton / Guangzhou, where I might have met two Cantonese speakers for every one Mandarin speaker, and unlike here, they don’t prefer to do everything in English. Shanghai has more Mandarin now than it did 10 or 15 years ago, but the local dialect is still widely heard, and I find it unintelligible. I do agree anyone wanting to truly get fluent in Mandarin should probably live only in Beijing or Taipei.

Reason #4: Many Simplified characters are just ugly – but without them you’ll be limited to the tiny fraction of Chinese speakers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and abroad. Among the ones I most hate looking at are “头” and “兴”, which are simplified forms of “頭” and “興” respectively, but there are many other examples like this. There actually are several simplified characters which I do find more elegant than their traditional counterparts, and that sometimes leaves me having to mix simplified and traditional characters in the same sentence for aesthetic reasons, which isn’t always practical but fortunately is getting more and more acceptable it seems.

Reason #5: The materials available for learning Chinese are still nowhere near the selection and quality of those for learning Japanese – 16 years ago I bought what is still one of my favorite language-learning books: “Mangajin’s Basic Japanese through comics”. The book does a fantastic job walking the reader through each comic line-by-line with a detailed explanation of the meaning and pronunciation of each word, how the sentences are put together and what the politeness of that form of use is. As of 2013, I am still struggling to find a Chinese book half as good as this one, and in Tokyo earlier this year I was amazed at how much better most of the JLPT prep materials were compared to most of what I can find at any bookstore here, north or south of the border.

Reason #6: “Grammar” is about learning sentence patterns rather than about more elegant and satisfying grammatical rules and structures students of Sanskrit or Japanese might appreciate. Liberal arts education dating back to the middle ages highlighted grammar (along with logic and rhetoric), and specifically Latin grammar, as the way of learning about how to use language and shape the same word into different uses by changing the case endings or by verb conjugation. One often cited example of this when Sir Napier was able to send a message about his conquest of Sindh in just one word: “peccavi” (a pun which translates “I have sinned”), where the meaning, person, and tense all wrap nicely in one word. Classical Chinese does have some of the benefits of being this concise, but one can see looking at a classical chinese poem alongside a modern Chinese translation that Chinese grammar has changed far more in the past few hundred years than English has even since the times of Chaucer.

So, if any or all of these reasons are a good enough excuse not to learn Chinese, what would be a good language to learn instead? Here are a few ideas, in no particular order, although I try to refer to the reasons above:

Alternative #1: Burmese – The idea for this article actually started in a conversation with a friend of mine in Vietnam, where we mentioned the first reason above for not learning Chinese is that there are already so many alumni of top business schools who speak it natively. The opposite extreme I can think of is Burmese, where among the thousands of well-educated professionals I have met over about 15 years working in different industries, I have met only one native Burmese speaker outside of Burma, compared with more than one in almost any other significant Asian language I can think of. The adventurous student bullish on the prospect of what we might call the latest emerging / frontier market of 60 million people will probably not regret the decision to be one of the first few foreigners learning to deal natively there, and to show everyone back home how cool circle-like writing can look.

Alternative #2: Bahasa – It can be Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa Malaysia, but either way, this language is understood by over 200 million people on almost 1,000 populated islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Bahasa, like Swahili, is often considered one of the easiest languages to learn, using the simple Latin alphabet with no diacritics and a very simple grammar with no verb conjugations, and even simpler than Swahili, no noun classes! For anyone who fears getting bored with the Latin alphabet, there is also the opportunity to use the Arabic derived Jawi script to write Bahasa on your break to Brunei (unfortunately, the Cia-Cia abandoned the project of writing their language in Indonesia using Korean’s Hangul).

Alternative #3: Turkish – The introduction to my “Teach Yourself Turkish” book (I believe an earlier version of this one) said that in addition to the completely regular and elegant agglutinating grammar of Turkish, a major reason to learn it is that mastering of the contents of that book would be enough to make oneself understood all the way from Istanbul to Urumqi. Indeed, one of my main motivations to learn Turkish would be to make that trip overland through Baku, Turkmenbashi, and Almaty and see how far that one language takes me.

Alternative #4: Vietnamese – I already showed earlier that Vietnamese calligraphy is one area where Chinese style is made accessible even to those who prefer to write with the roman alphabet. I also like how the tones are marked as clearly as pinyin and fairly standardized compared with Chinese ones. Many of the words even sound familiar to someone with a Chinese background. Perhaps most importantly, compared with the competition from an increasing number of Chinese students, Vietnam is still a relatively “frontier” market of almost 90 million with a bright future.

Alternative #5: Urdu – I have so far avoided learning any Indian languages, and envy how Victorian literature referred to learning the simpler-sounding language of Hindustani. Hindi would be the obvious language to learn, perhaps understandable by half a billion people, but personally I think I might prefer the more poetic and calligraphic appeal of Urdu.

Alternative #6: Arabic – last, but certainly not least, I chose to list the language that will likely compete with Chinese as the link between Asia and Africa. Besides my own ancestral connection to the language, I am also very attracted to the “youth bulge” of speakers of Arabic, and believe this will make the region THE place to watch for growth around 2020-2030, as we saw with China over the past decade.

This whole article has gone against what my guidance counselor told me over 20 years ago, that the only four languages worth learning will be Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. I of course will probably continue learning those four, and carefully chose my time with the alternative six, and even then, there will be others I’m sure will be tempting for different reasons.