Learn Chinese: The Language of the 21st Century
As I mentioned in a previous article I had wrote, the number of people learning Chinese in the United States still lags far behind French and Spanish. In sharp contrast, the study of Chinese has increased tremendously in Asian countries. Take Japan for an example, it ranks as the most studied language in schools, just second behind English. This could signal that Americans are still unreceptive to the idea of learning Chinese or fail to understand the importance of this language in helping them compete on the global economic stage. This dilemma has caught the attention of politicians in Washington. The US government responded that they provided millions in funding for schools to increase the number of Chinese classes being offered a few year ago by listing Chinese as a critical language. They also increased the number of teachers to help increase the number of people in the US to learn Chinese.
China currently has a population of over 1,3 billion people. While English is still the most widely used language in the world it is hard to ignore the fact that learning Chinese is the language of the future. It is ignorant to believe that we only need communicate in English and expect the rest of the world to follow us because China is the fastest growing economy in the world. If you fail to foresee the importance of learning Chinese, you would be shortchanging yourselves and possibly lose out on business opportunities.
So we are now beginning to see a trickle down effect. In the past few years, we mainly saw Chinese families taking their children to learn Chinese because they though it was a way to maintain their cultural heritage. Times are changing as more non-Chinese parents are enrolling their children in classes to learn Chinese. These countries believe that learning Chinese will increase the career opportunities for their children in the future. This realization has come to light because China continues to be the biggest trading partner of the United States. It will give a clear advantage in terms of economic opportunities to those who are interested in doing business in China by learning Chinese. Chinese is not only spoken in China but widely used in Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
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