It’s more about the North/South divide. The people of the North and South come from different places, and speak languages that are from completely different language families. They are also politically divided and the South is somewhat resentful of the politically and culturally powerful North.
Because India is home to so many languages, they need a second language to conduct business, politics, etc. Many South Indians feel that English is a more politically and culturally neutral option, since Hindi is tied to a specific group.
If you want to do business in Asia, I’d strongly recommend Mandarin. Given the immense and growing influence of China in the region and the world, and the vast numbers of Chinese immigrants throughout many Asian countries I’d say it’s a safe bet.
I concur. My mother’s company employs one from time to time, and he asks them for a whopping 30 cents (of a Euro) per word. While I was studying, this sounded like such a great job : 3000 words a day is a very comfortable rate that allows one to do some research and take the time to really do some good work, and at 30 cents/word it’d net me a great 18k a month. I figured I’d stumbled upon the secret golden goose.
And then I graduated… To find out I’m being paid 5 cents a word for 6-8000 words a day :smack:. I still like what I do, but it does feel assembly-linish sometimes. That’s for written word though. Live oral translation is a goldmine, although it’s really hard work. We did some at school, and your brain is mush after a mere 20 minutes. Also, you have to wear a suit :D.
Aaaanyway, these days I’d say Chinese (Mandarin) is your best bet. The Chinese market is growing huge, and China is very much the modern El Dorado. I’m considering learning it myself - I hear it’s not a very complicated language (excpet the writing part, obviously)
Depends on what kind of work you want to do and where. My husband uses one Chinese dialect or another everyday- he sells building materials, tools, paint , etc to hardware stores in NYC, and is apparently the only salesman in the area who speaks any Chinese dialects. Spanish is perhaps the least useful language to learn for a sales job in NYC- lots of people speak both Spanish and English fluently.
I wouldn’t overstate the prominence of English in India. Where I was living in the Hindi belt, yes, English is everpresent in the media and in upper echelons of society, but the average person does not speak English very well or at all. For interacting with people from the lower or middle classes (aka the vast majority), knowing the local language ranged from helpful to necessary. Sure, most people know a few relevant phrases in English, but that doesn’t mean they can have a legitimate conversation. I always get the sense that when people say “everyone” in Northern India speaks English, they’re subtly implying that the upper classes are the only people you’d ever want/need to interact with. I don’t have any experience with the South and I get the impression English is much more common there (not to mention that education rates and other development factors in general are higher).
It’s not THAT hard. You just have to have a good ear for music, a teacher with the patience of a saint, and lots and lots and LOTS of practice.
Chinese grammar is fairly simple as far as verbs go - you don’t have to conjugate anything. The downside to this is that everything’s based on context and the sentence structure as a whole is completely different from English.
Learning to read and write would take a whole other level of dedication. I grew up Chinese and I haven’t bothered to really learn how to write without a dictionary on hand - it’s a lot easier to just type out the pronunciation and let my reading comprehension skills pick out the right character.
I will have to disagree. The amount of pictograms, and that’s what they are essentially, you would need to know in order to read a newspaper varies between 1000 and 5000, depending on who you ask.
Here’s an interesting article on learning Chinese for an English speaker:
I grew up learning it too, and what they don’t tell you is that no matter how much Chinese you think you know, there will always be areas of which you would be totally foreign to. And unlike English or any of the languages with an alphabet, you will forget a lot in your quest. In English, say I forget the what the word “government” means. I can still sound it out, I can find it easily in a dictionary, and I can still write it. If you forget a word in Chinese, its like you never learned it. As the article mentions and I’ve personally seen, there are graduate level Chinese students who would forget simple everyday words like “sneeze”, or in my Chinese teacher’s case, “thank you”. No amount of convincing would be enough for me to attempt to learn more Chinese
I’ve learned Chinese to a reasonable fluency level (HSK 8 - a bad test, but you get the idea) as a completely foreign language. Reading and writing is hard (hell I think I even started a Pit thread about it), but it definitely starts snowballing once you get a good base of 1000-1500 characters. I now look at characters as collections of radicals and/or sub-characters, and can often guess the general pronunciation or vague meaning of a new character by using them, plus context. If you forget a character, it’s not totally lost. There’s an impression of it somewhere in your head, and the next time you encounter it, it’ll ring some sort of bell; you may not know how to pronounce it or what it means, but it at least has some aura of familiarity. The third time comes, then the fourth, fifth, sixth and pretty soon, you’ll at least be able to recognize it. And you don’t need to know all of them; hell, I’ve met Chinese college professors who didn’t recognize a character or two in their colleagues’ names. Writing is still a hopeless cause, though. I use the computer to write all my Chinese, and I’m happy to leave it at that.
As for speaking, I find the basic grammar to be much easier than Romance languages, though the advanced, nitpicky stuff can get really, really annoying. Lack of conjugations is a real saving grace that should not be underestimated. The main problem is that there are less than 0.1% cognates between English and Mandarin, which makes learning everything take much, much longer.
It ain’t impossible, but you have to really want it. Even living in a Chinese city for a few years won’t really do all that much for you unless you’re actively studying it or speaking a lot with locals. You won’t get that passive learning you get with, say, Romance languages. For example, I’ve met many foreigners living in China who’ve been there for 5+ years without picking up much more than basic shopping/taxi Chinese.
Also, as a random note, I’ve been studying Spanish for about 3.5 months now, and my reading and writing in español are already better than in Chinese (I lived in China for 3+ years and actively studied for 2 of those years).
