Is English or Mandarin the language of the future?
(Click on the above link to read the BBS News article and comments on it)
Below is my response to the above article and some comments on it . One comment says that Mandarin is too difficult to learn for it to become a world language, and I felt I had to respond.
*********
Mandarin Will Likely Rule the Future
未来很可能是普通话的天下
The argument that Mandarin is too hard to learn for it to become a language of the future misses the fact that children can learn any language regardless of it being difficult or not. (For children, one language is just as hard or easy as another anyways.)
The matter of the fact is that if a language becomes the first choice of a second language to learn throughout the world for whatever reason, as English is at the moment, it *will* replace English to become the future lingua franca of the world. Will parents send their children to English-as-a-second-language programs or Mandarin-as-a-second language programs? Will schools replace ESL programs with MSL programs? In other words, will Mandarin become the first choice of a second language to learn globally? I certainly would not rule out that possibility. In fact, I'd even venture to say that there is a high probability there given what we see at the moment: Mandarin as a second language teaching and learning is fastly gaining popularity in many parts of the world, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.
So, I'd say that unless the Rise of China is for some reason stopped or slowed down dramatically (due to large scale internal social upheavals, for instance), Mandarin is going to become a formidable global competition for English sooner than we think.
Lin, Hua, University of Victoria, Canada 加拿大
维多利亚大学林华
Originally posted on Language Teaching Professionals on Facebook on Feb. 24, 2012.
