It’s probably time to learn Chinese

I'm bearish on learning Chinese. Huawei is finally being blacklisted. Alibaba is getting nowhere in US tech as companies are being named and shamed for operating in China. Tencent owns lots of brands, but I suspect they're next for a big wave of backlash.

Quite bearish on learning Chinese; and bearish, too, on articles such as this one. These articles are a type. You would see similar articles in 1989 regarding Japanese. That was not a worthwhile investment for most people. Trends about a country being ‘the hot new thing’ rarely pan out. The author of this article should know: he’s the “founder of a crypto asset manager.”

Meteoric national growth curves don’t continue; and the closed nature of these societies tends to mean they get hamstrung by unpredictable things in the future. No one can say why China’s growth will slow (and it already is slowing dramatically), but we can say for sure that it will be because of a lack of willingness to change.

Learning Chinese will be a worthwhile activity for leading Western businesspeople when the Communist Party is abolished or faces strong open competition for power.

Why is Hong Kong (predominantly Cantonese speaking) used as the image for an article about the need to learn Mandarin? Most people in HK do not speak Mandarin natively (although English is spoken almost everywhere here).

I disagree with this article (and I've spent 8 years learning Mandarin part-time). English is far more valuable in business and scientific contexts, and the cost of becoming proficient in Mandarin is considerable (1000s of hours before it's useful in a non-trivial way). And I expect things to remain that way within the next 100 years.

Mandarin + English is not a very distinctive skillset: you're competing with millions of native Chinese who also speak English, plus millions of Chinese diaspora who learn Mandarin as a second language from a young age either through their parents or in a Chinese school.

Also, "fun point" 1 in the article is wrong. Chinese is hard. The hardest parts (for me) are memorizing characters and understanding colloquial speech (colloquial speech is very informal and different from written Chinese). Remembering tones is also hard for me, and some people also have trouble pronouncing tones and consonants (but I got that part pretty easily).

As an aside, why do I learn Mandarin, then? A few reasons:

- I think it's intellectually stimulating.

- I have a personal goal of learning a foreign language and I think Mandarin is one of the best to learn.

- It allows you to travel and experience Taiwan and China in a way that you otherwise couldn't.

- I might live abroad in Taiwan or China some day.

- Maybe I'm completely wrong and it will actually be economically valuable to me in some significant way in the future. It has been valuable in some ways since my company partners with Taiwanese and Chinese companies and I've used the language in to help me navigate business trips and also (very) occasionally for technical communication. But I think I could have been almost equally successful without knowing any Chinese.

50 years from now, Mandarin will be much more useful than Arabic or French, because it will be the largest market in the world. If you deal with China professionally, knowing Mandarin will be an advantage.