Promoting Chinese as a global language: thoughts and frustrations | Fili’s World

25 Nov, 2006 in China, Chinese Studies by Fili
Tags: Asia-Israel connections, China, Chinese Studies, chinese_culture

Promoting Chinese as a global language: thoughts and frustrations

This Wednesday, a representative from the Chinese embassy came to talk to the students of the Hebrew University about Chinese studies in China. Mr. Li requested that all the Hebrew University students who studied in China come and talk to him. Although I’ve studied in Taiwan and not China, and even that wasn’t for very long, I was extremely curious as to see how this meeting would go and try to understand why the Chinese embassy wants such to hold such a meeting.

I was surprised to see that quite a few students came to attend this meeting. Apparently we have fellow students who stayed in China for a while, with one 3rd year girl who lived in China for a few years speaking almost fluently, atleast as far as my non-Chinese hearing goes. The meeting started with handing out Chinese art calendar gifts, and was held in Chinese - which made it very difficult for most of the students, like myself, to follow all that was said.

The Chinese government’s goal, as I understand it, was to promote Chinese as a global language, trying to improve the Chinese-studies services offered in China and to encourage more people to come and study Chinese in China. The Chinese government has requested that all embassies meet with the leading local universities to work together in making this happen. Mr. Li wanted to hear every little detail about why people want to study Chinese, why people want to study Chinese in China, why people aren’t coming to China to study Chinese even if they want to study Chinese, starting from the structure of the classes and schools to the economical considerations.

He asked a few questions that I was curious about myself , like "Why did you start to study Chinese?" probably expecting answers about China being the next super-power and the next-economical center of the world, but getting weak responses about students wanting to translate Chinese texts and understand some Chinese they met on a train in China. He was direct enough to tackle the students with questions like "if China is so cheap, why do you need our scholarship? why not just come and study?" which was responded with a weak description of the financial miseries of the Israeli student. Although he occasionally commented that what we said "is very important, very important", I believe he was only trying to save our face and that we didn’t really offer any meaningful insights. I was especially interested in some of the side-statements he made about plans to promote Chinese studies into Israeli high-schools and some thoughts about "making Chinese be like English".

The Hebrew University goal, as I understand it, was to show that Israeli students are serious about China and for the Chinese government to invest more funds in the university and offer more scholarships. Mr. Li played along, bringing the message of a possible increase in Chinese scholarships offered for the Israeli students. Is receiving a few more scholarships a year the real accomplishment the Hebrew University should be looking for?

Something that’s been on my mind alot lately, celebrating my 1 year anniversary of studying Chinese, is that even students who’ve studied Chinese for years aren’t able to hold a decent conversation in Chinese. Never, in my darkest expectations, did I think that my level of Chinese would be this bad after a year. Never, did I imagine that I’ll meet East-Asia BA graduates who can’t pronounce tones and speak clear enough for a Chinese person to understand basic words. The meeting with Mr. Li and my occasional attempts at conversing in Chinese with the Chinese students at the Hebrew University really shook me up. It’s so frustrating and sad. True, it’s not in China or Taiwan, but if a person invests hours every day for 3 years studying Chinese and still can’t express basic thoughts in a casual meeting, then something’s wrong, and this is what Mr. Li should be interested in. Is it that the Chinese language is uniquely complicated or is it something about the mentality of studying Chinese outside China? in my personal opinion - I tend for the latter. I don’t think Chinese is much more complicated than English or Hebrew, especially when it comes to speaking, but there is some kind of barrier that makes studying Chinese outside Chinese speaking countries almost impossible. What makes the English so wide-spread and common is that the English culture is everywhere - available in everyday situations with real bridges into other nationalities. Is there no way to bridge between the Chinese culture-people and the students studying Chinese around the world?

What do you think?

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17 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Ems | November 27th, 2006 at 2:34 am #

As an English teacher, sort of linguist, and sometimes Chinese language student, doing it in China, where I am surrounded by Chinese (not English) every day, I am equally frustrated. It’s not a matter of being inside or outside China. It’s a matter that I have studied carefully. I come up with two answers- 1. Chinese are absolutely unwilling or unable to tolerate hearing any pronunciation other than what they consider absolutely perfect. They can’t wrap their head around an “accent”. Though they are often mutually unintelligible to each other’s accents! 2. They simply can’t believe real Chinese is coming out of the mouth of a laowai, so they simply don’t listen! Your utterance was never registered. So, you aren’t understood. Really.
Philip Sen | November 27th, 2006 at 1:57 pm #

Though it’s never nice to hear, there is only one viable global language right now - English. It’s spoken not only in the UK, US, Australia etc. but also in India and is the most widely-diffused language via the Internet, music and TV. Frankly, any ambition for Chinese to become a global language is inspired by nationalism and not practicality. South East Asians with similar tonal languages (eg. Thais) may be willing to have a go, but Indians, Europeans, South Americans etc. are not going to want to learn 2000 characters and attempt the tones. It’s just not realistic.
fiLi | November 27th, 2006 at 8:53 pm #

Hmmmm… interesting thoughts. But I”m still have some questions on those :

1. How would you explain Chinese songs, then? songs have no tones what so ever, yet Chinese understand everything from the context. Another example are dialects, which change the sound of the tones but are recognizable between different sub-groups.

2. Even my Chinese friends in Israel, who expect us Israelis to suck in Chinese and expect us to try and talk to them in Chinese - can’t understand what we’re saying. They listen, they try hard, but most of the times they fail to recognize and understand the slightest differences in tones. Yet, I think there is something to your point, they might connect between appearances and expectations unconsciencely - a self fulfilling prophecy, kind’o.

There might be something else to it, something we’re missing… I wonder what a Chinese would say about this.
fiLi | November 27th, 2006 at 9:02 pm #

Well, yeah, the western world as we know it is mostly about English, but looking at the bigger picture, Mandarin Chinese is by far the most widely spoken language in the world :
http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html (for example)

If you think most of the Internet is in English, then that’s not even entirely true, as it’s only about 30% the others being Japanese, Spanish and German, with Chinese in 2nd place gaining fast on English :
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

I’m not sure tones are such a big barrier, and that Chinese is much harder than English. It’s just the motivation, as Chinese are a lot more motivated to study English than the west is to study Chinese. But that might change soon, and it’s interesting to see the Chinese government thinking in this direction.
Philip Sen | November 27th, 2006 at 9:54 pm #

On the contrary, I think English has lots more to offer than Chinese as an international language:
1. The alphabetic system is easier to learn, especially if you have limited time and resources for education.
2. Some people, as you have pointed out yourself, just can’t do tones, but English doesn’t need tones.
3. English offers more grammatical nuances and a richness of vocabulary inspired by countless other languages.

English is simply more practical. Yes, it was imposed by the colonial system, I accept that, but it works. To adopt Chinese as a universal language would just be a kow tow to Chinese nationalism, and it would be a step backwards for many people. It just wouldn’t work.
Philip Sen | November 27th, 2006 at 9:56 pm #

Oh, and Chinese isn’t ‘widespread’ at all - it’s almost entirely concentrated in China. There’s just a lot of Chinese. English on the other hand is spoken not just in ‘Anglophone’ countries but as a second language all over Western Europe, Africa and Asia. Chinese is not.
fiLi | November 27th, 2006 at 10:08 pm #

It’s interesting that you feel so strongly about this. Having gone through learning both English, and now Chinese, I’m still not sure whether this is true or not.

Let me ask you this :

1. If all resources for studying English, in - say - Israel, were directed at Chinese, no more and no less, do you think the level of achievement wouldn’t be as good?

2. The question is - why can’t they do tones? I know quite a few Israelis and Chinese who can’t do basic English grammar. The question is - why can’t they do English grammar and how does that compare with tones in Chinese?

3. You call it richness, I call it complicated. Even my English teaching friends in Taiwan didn’t really know past perfect from past-perfect-progressive and how to explain why two word which sounds completely different are written in the same exact way. Richness is in the eye of the beholder.

(I think comments won’t nest under this one. You’re more than welcome to start a new comment threat.)
Philip Sen | November 27th, 2006 at 10:36 pm #

Replying to the comments one by one:
1. Yes, I honestly think that the level of Chinese wouldn’t be as good.
2. English grammar is admittedly quite complex sometimes, and is full of irregularities. Tones, on the other hand, is something that requires a different part of the brain altogether - trust me, I’ve actually read a report about scientific research on that. The problem is that if you get your grammar wrong, a sentence may still make some sense, but when tones go wrong it can be a different story. Think of the difference between ‘mai1′ (buy) and ‘mai2′ (sell): let me know if I got the tones wrong there!!.
3. I don’t know the difference between past-present-perfect etc. either. But it becomes intuitive. However, Chinese can lack the ability to make the subtle difference between “I went to school yesterday” and “I was going to school yesterday”.

The reason for my passion is that I honestly believe that the Chinese language is part of the nationalist discourse - it is enforced in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the nationalists would love nothing better than seeing others learn it even if English is basically more popular and practical. To the British, however, English is no longer ‘owned’ by them and is instead accepted as the global lingua franca - simply because it’s there and it’s practical.
Ems | November 28th, 2006 at 1:50 am #

Hello, several more ideas following from the above. 1. about tones. In fact, in connected discourse, as opposed to words spoken carefully in soolation, tones do tend to change or reduce. Third tones, for example, are simple not spoke, reduced to a quick 4th tone (just the down part). That means you can get away with more fudge (”no tones”) more easily, but also means someone can choose not to get it if they think you’ve gone too far out of the careful pornunciation. This is the issue with songs, others’ dialects, not getting me, etc. 2. On Chinese as an international movement- it is definitely nationalistic and Chinese imperialistic. It is pure self-serving out here in Xinjiang to force minorities to speak the “dominant” (not really) language. It is strictly forbidden for teachers to speak anything else in class. Ditto in Tibet. Would we all progress if it was stressed as much as English? probably, but why? it’s ONLY spoken in China, and even they have to use pinyin to get into the computer world. I agree it’s not very efficient. They just imagine they can be a world language too by trying to foster it abroad with their national exam, etc. Dream on.
Daniel | November 29th, 2006 at 6:10 am #

As someone who is living in China, I can tell you that I rarely find a “native” Chinese in Southern or Eastern China who can really speak Mandarin. I have plenty of Chinese friends who simply struggle along in a way, with a very limited vocabulary. And these are quite educated.

Bottom line, Mandarin is an ARTIFICIAL language of a sort; the ONLY reason so many Chinese can still handle it, is because they can mix it with their true native language — their native dialect. They speak with “ideas” and “sentences” and thus can be understood by others (not always). But if they speak “word” by “word” they could not even tell you the correct tones. MANY are like this. Now, you want some Israeli to be able to speak Mandarin fluently after 3 years? No way. Only those who were born with the natural ability for languages can do that. Also, if your current teacher is not a Chinese from north of China with very clear tones, than forget about your tones unless you work on it yourself for 2-3 hours every day with audio. You can learn Italian, German, French and pronounce it “about right” or with bad accent and it will still be OK. With Mandarin it won’t work, also because the OTHER SIDE is not a TRUE NATIVE SPEAKER. I hope this point is clear enough… It’s not only YOU it’s also THEM.
Avi | February 20th, 2007 at 5:01 pm #

Well I’ve been in North-East China for seven years now, I have a degree in Chinese literature, wushu and HSK 6 , but there is no job market for me at all in Israel, Isnt easier and cheaper to employ a Chinese national who speaks English ?
fiLi | February 20th, 2007 at 5:05 pm #

You’re the 8th person to say this to me in the past week. I don’t get that. I really don’t.

I think we should open up an HR company for folks of your type (;)), since I’m absolutely sure that your skills are extremely valuable. Do you mind telling me what you do nowadays?
Avi | February 20th, 2007 at 6:46 pm #

I am teaching Kung-Fu to foreign students in China… But I want to know how one should go about finding a decent job in Israel. I was there a few weeks ago, I went to various five star hotels, Manpower, Tambor, Kung Fu schools..you name it… but to no avail.. They’re telling me that Chinese is useless
fiLi | February 20th, 2007 at 6:55 pm #

Amazing.

I opened an ads section on the Chinese Garden with a few jobs my teacher received for Israelis with Chinese in China. I’ll try and get more jobs and opportunities in there, and I’ll write something about it soon :
http://www.chinese-garden.net/index.php?searchadv=&catid=&type=7&Itemid=60&option=com_classifieds

One more small question - did you also try Israeli IT companies?
Avi | February 20th, 2007 at 7:08 pm #

Thankyou for your kind help.
And no, I didn’t try IT companies… My computer knowledge is very primitive.
supriya | July 25th, 2008 at 2:35 pm #

hi there

i am a graduate student from India and was quite fascinated by the discussion above. I have been very keen on learning Manadarin and did a two month course to understand the basic PINYIN (romanised mandarin). is it going to be worthwhile for me to do a one year chinese language certificate course from the university? and then i could probably brush it up by practicing it constantly
Chloris | July 28th, 2008 at 2:52 am #

hi Ems — 1. i think the reason is just because china/ chinese ‘people’ are simply not internationl/globalized enough, so they cant handle westernized accent. Think about it, in Europe a multi nation continent, most people can handle english in different accent and tell where they are from.. right? 2. you are right, the scene is not only not registered, when Laowhy talks to chinese, most of the time they (we)are in panic of ‘dont talk to me i dont understand English (laowhy=english)’, whatever you say wont make any difference than dog barking, unless you pull them out of that mood.

hello fili- 1. no we dont understand lyrics automatically, we still need to look for lyrics, especially when encounter those kind like Singer Jay Chou, who i doubt hiding an egg in mouth while singing, (purposely disable lyrics to be understood.)–> we look for lyrics.

2. -> Encourage your freinds close their eyes while talking to you

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