It's like everything, if you dare to challenge, people will throw it completely out of context. I for one am certainly not referring to tourists.
Good look with Mandarin, they have 1000s of characters to understand, and when you add them together a single character change will alter the word
It’s a more complicated language for sure. Learning to read it would definitely be a challenge due to the number of characters. But learning from a young age would make it easier. I’ve got some very basic Chinese, I can count, say hello, thank you, be rude and ask for noodles/rice in very broken language that is sometimes understood and sometimes not! In terms of written I can do some numbers and a few characters from Mah Jong. I picked these few bits up from friends so I imagine being taught properly would be capable of getting the basics. Definitely harder than learning another Latin based language for sure but entirely possible if we had enough teachers and it’s more useful than plenty of other languages.
I get why you think that, but when are you going to use Chinese, except if you go to China or know Chinese people here.
Depends on what you do. Just speaking it fluently as a native English speaker can get you far in certain businesses here and it’s only going to grow in importance.
Try Korean alphabet has only characters, I can speak a bit of that I just say meow for hello in Chinese "Ni hao" it seem to work
Probably would/will be useful for business, as it's an economic giant. But in general, well from my experiences, you are not gonna get chit chatting to often with Chinese people around the world.
Given the size of the population of China, the growing middle class there leading to more travel, the growing economy and strategic investment in other countries leading to higher Chinese emigration and international involvement, I’d say it’s a language that will have an increasing usefulness as time goes on. Far more than most languages. The point about when will you use a language other than when visiting is something which can be applied to most languages except those where colonialism has lead to multiple countries speaking the same language such as Spanish. Which is why those languages should be near the top of the list as well when looking at what languages we should teach.
Korean is crazy difficult. When I was in Seoul I tried to learn some basics to be polite and failed miserably much to the amusement of the locals! They are such friendly people though and even with no verbal communication went out of there way to try and be helpful! I got approached while looking at a subway map by someone wanting to help me figure out what I was doing, he didn’t speak a word of English and when he didn’t know how to get where I wanted to go started calling over random people walking by! Before I knew it there was about 6 people all trying to explain what I should be doing without being able to actually speak the same language.
Well yeah it depends where you go but when 15% of the world or whatever it is is from there it’s a safe enough bet.
