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Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

economist.com

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Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#71

Post by yongjik »

jamesaurichs wrote: post #55
bohadi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound. I don't think this is a fair take for a couple of reasons. Mandarin is unlike other languages in that it's written form is famously ideographic. Phonetic translation is all that is done in any pair {L, M}. I assure you there is no such thing as…

English IS the global lingua franca TODAY, used by most travelers to navigate through an unknown environment. if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY, then there's no reason to go there TODAY.

> if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY

Could you give me an example? I just Googled "beijing airport sign" and everything seems translated as expected, e.g., Gates, Beijing Capital Airport, International Departure, Drinking Water, etc.

I assume you don't mean you want Beijing written as "North Capital"?

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#72

Post by parineum »

edgineer wrote: post #49
samcheng wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's about COVID now. The government has really ruined China's "brand" internationally. 1. You need an onerous-to-obtain visa to visit. There is no visa exemption. 2. Banking is a total pain for a foreigner. Many places only accept Alipay or Wechat, which require a Chinese bank account. Cash doesn't work well either, because the largest denomination is tiny. 3. Many US-China flights were canceled in the pande…

You can receive funds to an Alipay account in yuan without having a Chinese bank account. Thus services like Swapsy exist to coordinate pairs of private transactions, where the other party sends USD through Zelle or similar.

Sounds less than legal.

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#73

Post by tenpies »

samcheng wrote: post #29
jimbob45 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an explanation for China’s low tourism? Is it just latent fears of COVID?

I doubt it's about COVID now. The government has really ruined China's "brand" internationally. 1. You need an onerous-to-obtain visa to visit. There is no visa exemption. 2. Banking is a total pain for a foreigner. Many places only accept Alipay or Wechat, which require a Chinese bank account. Cash doesn't work well either, because the largest denomination is tiny. 3. Many US-China flights were canceled in the pande…

In Canada's case, you also had the CCP essentially kidnap two random Canadians who happened to be in China as retaliation for Canada's cooperation in exercising a US warrant against a Chinese national[1].

Good luck getting any Canadian that is not a dual citizen with China to visit, especially because CCP tyranny combined with Trudeau's incompetence cost these two people almost 3 years of their lives in Chinese detention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#74

Post by commandlinefan »

diego_moita wrote: post #8

Easy: 10 years ago Western companies though they could and should make businesses in China. Today, even many Chinese companies believe that China is not a good place for making business (e.g: AliBaba, Ever Grande, Country Garden, Tencent, etc). Slightly off-topic: about 15 years ago Golman Sachs would say that the BRICS were the next countries to become rich. Guess what... Brazil and South Africa reverted back to its…

> 10 years ago Western companies though they could and should make businesses in China

When I was in college in the late 80’s, I studied Japanese and even did a foreign exchange program there because OF COURSE I would be working with Japanese people after I graduated.

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#75

Post by MissingAFew »

jamesaurichs wrote: post #24
jimbob45 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an explanation for China’s low tourism? Is it just latent fears of COVID?

Here are some conjectures: 1.) There is a very high dislike of China across the world. Large majorities in most of the 19 countries surveyed have negative views of China https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/29/negative-views... 2.) No business need to travel there. Foreign investment is down 90% this year. Literally no US/europe presence in the trade fairs in China the summer. 3.) Flights are super expensive, b…

That's not even true anymore, I recently bought a ticket for 1100. They don't cost 5k to 10k.

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#76

Post by talloaktrees »

MaxwellKahn wrote: post #41

As an American born person with some Chinese heritage, it's interesting to see this trend play out in myself alongside wider society. When I was growing up, my parents and relatives would constantly try to convince me to learn my ethnic language, half to know my roots and half to catch the "China train". In university, I took it upon myself to take Mandarin courses for several years, but only got to middling competen…

I'm not ethnically Chinese but I studied Mandarin in college in the early 2000s then moved to Taiwan for almost a decade. I don't regret doing it, but it didn't provide me any sort of business or career advantage like everyone thought it would in the early 2000s

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#77

Post by aaron695 »

jamesaurichs wrote: post #11

There is 0 reason to learn mandarin if you're doing it for travel/business reasons In Taiwan street signs do mostly have English translations. A lot of citizens speak English, especially night market vendors. You'll also have a lot of native English speakers in Taipei due to expatriation from US and Canada. In Singapore signs officially are in English. And it's one of the four official languages, which means most peo…

[dead]

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#78

Post by tenpies »

Bjemslev wrote: post #45

I am going to climb onto the reasonal branch of "mfs still got multiple concentration camps in 2023" as a intuition for peeps not learning their language

Doesn't the US either? Or at least they were frequently called that and compared with Nazi concentration camps when Trump was president:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-co...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac...

Of course now that Biden took over, continued their operation, and quickly allowed them to overfill to the point that there's now a full blown border crisis, no one in mainstream media would dare call them that.

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#79

Post by jamesaurichs »

yongjik wrote: post #71
jamesaurichs wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English IS the global lingua franca TODAY, used by most travelers to navigate through an unknown environment. if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY, then there's no reason to go there TODAY.

> if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY Could you give me an example? I just Googled "beijing airport sign" and everything seems translated as expected, e.g., Gates, Beijing Capital Airport, International Departure, Drinking Water, etc. I assume you don't mean you want Beijing written as "North Capital"?

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/beijing-replaces-english-words-sub...

The English word “station” was replaced with “Zhan,” which is the pinyin or romanised version of the Chinese character.

In some places, station names such as Olympic Park and Terminal 2 of the Beijing airport were changed to “Aolinpike Gongyuan” and “2 Hao Hangzhanlou”.

https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/13/why-china-is-turn...

Why China is turning away from English

Re: Fewer university students are studying Mandarin

#80

Post by MissingAFew »

tjpnz wrote: post #38
jimbob45 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an explanation for China’s low tourism? Is it just latent fears of COVID?

Why would I want to travel somewhere where the government thinks I, as a person from "the west", am the literal embodiment of satan? On a more personal note I've had a family member recently return from living in China. Harassment from local law enforcement had a large part to play.

I'm sorry your family experienced that but that is not the norm, to be frank.

...Literal embodiment of Satan? What? You do realize they don't follow Christianity right? Nonsense. Overblown exaggeration.

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