This is dedicated to Maddy, who got me started on several discussions with several different people by saying she was learning some Chinese for a Chinese History class.
Why You Don’t Want to Study Mandarin

As most of you are aware, I am fascinated with foreign languages. I keep learning new ones and try to make sure I maintain my proficiency in the ones that I already know. I enjoy learning languages for their own sake, and frequently with little or no regard for usefulness. Akkadian, for example, has no practical use for an amateur student aside from the ability to confound people (particularly at an antiquities museum).

However, I know that most people study languages because they want to receive some practical benefit. In this regard, one of the languages that everyone seems to agree will have practical benefit, without bothering to question the premise, is Mandarin Chinese.

At first blush, it seems obvious why someone would want to study Mandarin. Every sixth person on the planet, roughly, is purported to be able to speak it. Furthermore, the nation in which the vast majority of those people live, China, is the second largest world economy and continuing to grow at a breakneck pace. We trade with China, China represents a vast consumer market and, well, it’s a country with a rich and storied history and a culture vastly different from our own. In other words, what’s not to like?

Upon closer examination, many of these premises can be quickly and easily disproven, and the conclusion that nearly everyone should reach is a simple one: don’t waste your time with Mandarin. Sure, if you’re going you can learn some useful phrases and common characters, but spending the time to formally study it is, for the overwhelming majority of those already studying it as a foreign language, a complete waste of time.

First, let’s look at the demographic argument. Over a billion people speak Mandarin, say the statisticians. Well, yes and no. First of all, the Peoples’ Republic of China has made Mandarin, a northern dialect of China spoken in the area around Beijing (that’s Peking to you Orientalists), the national language for the entire country, thus making everyone learn it in the entire country. That doesn’t mean either (a) that everyone succeeds in being proficient in Mandarin or (b) that everyone in China speaks Mandarin predominantly, much less exclusively. If you look, you’ll see China is listed as having 292 living languages. Now that doesn’t even include the various dialects of the Chinese language other than Mandarin – they all get rolled into one with Mandarin and count as one of those 292 languages. Tibetan is spoken in Tibet (or Xizang, if you’re speaking Mandarin, which means the Western District – you can’t recognize a free Tibet). Uygur is spoken in Xinjiang (or Eastern Turkestan, if you’re a fan of Great Game histories). Mongolian has a foothold, as do other languages. Then, when you look at Chinese itself, you can see Cantonese, which has about 50 million speakers (or more – it’s easy to lose track) and dialects like Wu, which is spoken in Shanghai, and has about 70 million speakers.

Sure, you say, but they all understand Mandarin as a lingua franca, don’t they? Well, no. Many people in the non-Chinese areas of China will either not know how to speak Mandarin or not want to, on the same grounds that many French pretend not to know English (well, perhaps without the same level of entitled arrogance). In Hong Kong, which is now officially part of China, a lot of the older Cantonese speakers will not understand Mandarin, as I found out to my dismay when I was taking a taxi from the airport to Hong Kong University. Luckily for me, I learned traditional characters and was able to write the name of the place I was going, and standard written Chinese is mutually intelligible across dialects. That wouldn’t have helped me with a Tibetan, though, or an Uygur.

Even so, it is clear that there are a lot of people who speak Chinese, but they are all demographically located in one country. Ironically, because China has been so self-absorbed (narcissistic, even) and inward looking for so much of its history, and because the only people who really liked traveling by sea were Southern Chinese groups, almost all of the Chinese diaspora in other countries is comprised of people who never spoke Mandarin, and being outside China they don’t need to learn. 90% of the Chinese in the United States prior to World War II came from one small province in Guangdong province. Guangdong is often rendered as Canton, so guess what dialect they speak?

As a result, Mandarin is really only spoken in one country – China. Of course, if you recognize Taiwan or “Chinese Taipei” as they call it at the Olympics, you can bump that number up to two, and Singapore has encouraged it, so mark it as 2.1 countries to be safe. But that’s it. Unlike English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, or Swahili, Chinese is not an “international language”. If you’re doubling down on this language, you have to understand that you are talking about a lingua franca of one nation in which 291 other languages are spoken, and one dialect of that lingua franca that is the everyday language predominantly in the north.

Okay, so you’re still interested in learning Chinese. After all, it’s a world power and a growing nation. It’s going places. The Chinese own our debt and they’re going to own everything else pretty soon, aren’t they?

Let me ask you to do something. Go out and find a friend, or an uncle or a friend of your parents if you’re really young, who studied Japanese in the 1980s. Ask that friend what people were saying in the 1980s about Japan. Japan was growing at an impressive clip (over 10% in the 1960s, just like China now), and “Made in Japan” was on every cheap plastic thing in the 1960s, and then every TV and transistor radio and 8-track tape player in the 1970s (don’t ask what those last two things were; it doesn’t matter). By the 1980s, they bought Rockefeller Center in New York and were on their way to buying the rest of the United States according to popular opinion (read: crazy xenophobes comprising much of the nation). The fear and paranoia of a Japanese takeover led to the atrocious book-turned-movie, Rising Sun, as well as a lot of other low brow entertainment and even advertising.

Japan is still the world’s third largest economy and one of the major creditor nations. A quick look at their wikipedia page says that 68 of the Fortune 500 companies are Japanese, they have 13.7% of the world’s financial assets, the largest electronics industry, the third largest automobile industry and lots of other really impressive statistics.

So now ask your friend how much his Japanese has helped him. Choose a guy, by the way, because Japan is still a male-dominated society so you can be sure that there’s no sexism or wax-paper-ceiling at work if you ask a guy. The overwhelming majority of them will say that their Japanese helps them order sushi or sashimi at restaurants, or perhaps explain the meanings of words used at a martial arts dojo . The ones who spent a lot of time will also understand the writing, and some people like that because let’s face it, the Chinese writing system (which was adopted and expanded by the Japanese) looks cool.

Why, you might ask, did Japanese not become more useful? There are a lot of reasons. First, Japanese, like Mandarin, is largely confined to one country. No one ever adopted it as an international language for business because it, like Chinese, requires an incredible commitment of time and energy to learn, and also it requires a certain level of talent to really pick up correctly. Also, like the Chinese, the Japanese who went out to engage in international business learned the existing lingua franca for the world, English. Are they respectful of people who learn their language? Yes, but the level you need to learn to earn that respect is not four or five years of intensive study – it’s a few months. And even then, in their eyes you’ll always be gaijin, an outsider, a foreign devil. Even if you master Japanese and go over there to live, there are plenty of private clubs that you will never be admitted to. If you’re a Korean whose parents grew up in Japan and you speak flawless Japanese, you’re still gaijin because, well, that’s just how Japanese society is. It is changing a little, but don’t anticipate some massive shift in a nation that is as homogenous as Japan is.

But surely China can’t be like Japan, not with 292 languages and all those ethnic minorities, you say. Americans go over there and do business, don’t they? Yes, they do. I lived and worked in Hong Kong for a while, though Hong Kong is not China (even though China now owns it). I traveled to Beijing, to Shanghai, to Shenzhen, to some other godforsaken industrial hells, and it was helpful to know Chinese when I did. However, no matter how perfect I get my tones, I will never be Chinese, and there is a massive rise in nationalism in China at the moment (or “Han chauvinism” as Chairman Mao used to say – I at least agree with him on one point, and that’s that Han chauvinism is a bad thing, for China but more especially for its immediate neighbors). To explain all the nuances would take too much time in an essay that is already far too long, but allow me to provide the link to a great article on this particular point:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china/

Now the author of that article is about as pro-Chinese as you can get (even marrying a Chinese woman and having children with her, children that are probably also not accepted in the rising atmosphere of exclusion). As he points out, it wasn’t always this way. Back in 1997 when I went to Beijing, things were different. Of course, I’m sure people writing about Germany in the 1930s said, “It wasn’t always this way. Back in 1924 things were different.” I’ll let the reader determine how apt the parallels are, but suffice it to say I personally believe they are far closer than most people will admit.

But let’s go back to the Japan parallel for a moment. Japan had a 10% growth rate for most of the 1960s, which slowed to 5% in the 1970s and 4% in the 1980s. The paranoia in the US reached fever pitch in the late 1980s, and then fell off. Why? Because Japan’s economy crashed in 1990. Economists, who are as a profession about as useless as tits on a nun for people actually engaged in business (you know the old saying – those who can do, those who can’t become economists), will argue over the actual reasons for the collapse, but it is clear that the growth rate had been slowing for two decades, and part of the reason is because Japan’s population was aging. There is only so much space on a small set of islands, and the pressures of working more (sometimes hideous hours, for which the Japanese were known, to the point that “death by overwork” - karoshi - was first coined as a separate word in Japanese) worked with that overcrowding to drive down the birth rate, so Japan was becoming old as it was becoming rich. It’s still an important country, but people aren’t obsessed with it from a practical perspective (I am not going to say anything about anime, manga, martial arts, sushi or other bizarre and disturbing cultural phenomena emanating from Japan).

All of this applies to China. Its growth rate has been around 10% every year for the last decade, but started to drop, and is this year expected to be around 7.5%. Furthermore, the government has said that growth estimates need to be revised down for the foreseeable future. While this could mean a “soft landing” for China, whose population is set to peak around 2023 and whose workforce is ageing, there are a number of other factors that could lead to a messy level of civil unrest between now and then, as shortages of food and water, combined with an endemic 10% unemployment rate and an ethnically diverse populace dominated by one particular group (Han Chinese) could lead to some sort of collapse. There is a growing contingent of political scientists warning of a coming collapse of the Chinese “miracle”. Even if it doesn’t collapse, however, it’s set to deflate a bit, and when it does, increased spending on elder care is going to suck up a lot of money. After all, in a society that’s been a “one child only” model for several generations, one healthy middle aged worker might be the sole working relative for two parents who just retired and up to four grandparents who are still alive or, worse yet, if it’s a married man whose wife can only work part-time, he might be supporting two parents-in-law and up to four grandparents-in-law. Ouch.

Now obviously, even with all these factors built in, there are going to be people who think they want to learn Chinese because it is still a large economy and might help them get a job. On the other hand, Chinese is not for the person who had problems in high school Spanish class. While it has no verb conjugation, it has a complicated tonal system that is absent in all major European languages, and in place of an alphabet it uses about 7500 characters (people will tell you 30,000 characters, but plenty of those are place-names for obscure little hills, rivers and villages, and a more or less complete dictionary stops at about 7500). Due to the tonal system, a lot of the words would sound very similar (if not identical) to the Western ear until trained. Tone-deaf individuals will never hear the difference, either.

Certainly, if someone wants to learn Chinese on its own terms, I would never want to dissuade that person from doing something for pleasure that they profess to enjoy. However, people who study Chinese (or worse, force their children to waste time studying it) should be aware of the significant limitations on the usefulness of Chinese.