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<td width=500 class=s07>OhMyNews</td>
<td width=70 class=s07 align=right>2007.1.18</td>
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<td width=550><b><FONT SIZE=+2>»</FONT> This article is that Francis Hult send to you.</b></td>
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<td class=s01><a class=s01 href='http://www.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=340261&rel_no=1'>Hey Brits, Learn Some Chinese</a></td>
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<td class=sub>Mandarin and Cantonese become more popular in U.K. classrooms</td>
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<td align=right class=writer>Max Lin </td>
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<td class=context>Nearly 10 Londoners of different ethnic backgrounds are gazing at a Chinese martial artist on the screen. They fix their ears on the Mandarin he is speaking, eyes on the subtitle of Chinese characters, giving every effort to grasp the story of this film. Learning a strange oriental language is no easy business.<br>
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This is an event held in a small auditorium of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, which has one of the largest Chinese classes in Britain. The number of Chinese learners in the U.K. is increasing rapidly, according to the National Centre for Languages, as the figure has more than doubled over the past six years. <br>
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Compared to the learners of other European languages, such as French and German, Chinese learners are still relatively few. But things are changing fast. Nearly one in five independent secondary schools in England now offer Chinese lessons, while the government promises that state schools will catch up soon. <br>
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Chancellor Gordon Brown has even said he wants every school, college and university to be twinned with an equivalent in China in the near future.<br>
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So what is this Chinese fuss about? Mainly it is because that China is the world's fastest growing major economy, and knowing Chinese could mean more business opportunities. Also, the Greater China area, including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore, generates a fortune of trillions of pounds annually and attracts loads of investment from British companies. U.K. exports to China are expected to quadruple by 2010.<br>
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But Britons do not learn this language only for business-related reasons. Angela Liang, a Chinese teacher of SOAS Language Centre, says: "It is true that many people learn Chinese for they want to work as traders in China. However, some students come here mostly because they hope to understand the culture or to talk to their relatives and friends in Chinese."<br>
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Charles Smith, a white Briton who has been learning Chinese for three years, says that in the beginning he just wanted to please his girlfriend from southern China and to talk to her in her mother tongue. It seems to work out pretty well for Smith, as his girlfriend then is his fiancee now.<br>
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He adds: "Learning Chinese helps me to communicate with my fiancee, and vice versa. Her English is much better than my Chinese, so we spend hours talking in her language. That improves our relationship as well as my Chinese."<br>
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"I enjoy the process [of learning], because it's not just about going to classes and memorizing vocabulary. I learn by absorbing in the culture, going to Chinese restaurants, seeing Chinese films with my Chinese fiancee. I hope one day I can talk to her family members in Cantonese, because it is the only language they know how to speak."<br>
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Smith is a rare case in that he learns Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese at the same time. Chinese is hard for many Westerners partly because it not only has two types of writing systems, both in ideograms, but also has tens of dialects. Mandarin is China's official language and spoken by most Chinese, but Cantonese and Hokkien, two dialects in southern China, are also in common use.<br>
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For Louise Yung, a Briton of Hong Kong origin, to learn Chinese is a matter of both tracing her parents' culture and exploring career opportunities. Yung says: "I moved from Hong Kong to Britain at a very young age, so I don't really remember how to speak the language. My parents used to try to talk to me in Cantonese, but I could only answer in English."<br>
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Language learners usually find writing and reading is rather more difficult than listening and speaking, and Yung is no exception. She finds the conversation skills are easy to pick up, because she has spoken with her parents in Chinese at home, but when writing she feels that Chinese characters all look "the same."<br>
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"They are composed of so many strange, twisting strokes. When I get one stroke wrong, the character could have a very different meaning. I will need to spend a lot of time on it."<br>
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Her family plans to move back to China in the future, and Yung has not decided on whether she will stay in Britain or not. Either way, she thinks these language skills can be useful, for they can help her "understand more about China and land better jobs" later on.<br>
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Indeed, improving job prospects is another strong reason for the British to spend a lot of time learning this difficult language. Many lawyers and diplomats need to study Mandarin nowadays, and professionals like them usually enroll in some intensive Chinese programmes.<br>
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In the SOAS Language Centre, they need to spend five hours a day and five days a week in classes. If these professionals do well, they usually will be competent in listening, speaking, reading and writing in one year's time. This means that they will have the necessary language skills to work in their multinational firms in China.<br>
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Normal students, if they just want to manage some Chinese conversation skills, do not need to work that hard. Charles Cheuk, another Chinese teacher of SOAS, says that if the students only want to know some Mandarin to backpack in China, they just need to take a two-hour lesson per week for six months, but "preparing schoolwork in advance is a must."<br>
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The difficult part comes from that, linguistically, Chinese and English have very little in common. Compared to English, Chinese has relatively loose grammar and its usage relies on conventions much more. Cheuk explains: "All Chinese words have only one grammatical form, so unlike English, you don't have to worry about conjugations."<br>
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"But because there are no specific rules, its syntax sometimes can be very complicated. Moreover, one Chinese character has four tones in Mandarin, six tones in Cantonese, and each tone represents an individual meaning originating from different cultural contexts. If you get it wrong, you could pronounce 'mother' as 'horse' or 'scold.'"<br>
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Johnny, a British Indian who began to learn Mandarin four months ago, also finds that the logic of Chinese is very different. "I can use Chinese to express things more directly than English," he claims. "One simple Chinese character can have several different meanings in English, so I don't have to say as many words."<br>
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But the hard part also lies there. Johnny learns Chinese through English, and he thinks it is very difficult for him to construct Chinese sentences, even simple ones. "I will view it as a cultural challenge I have to overcome," he says.<br>
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Johnny works as a software engineer, and he thinks his time and money spent on learning Chinese will pay off in the long run. "My company is expanding in China. I hope by talking the language of my potential client, I can capture more business opportunities."<br>
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According to David Graddol, a language researcher, Johnny is taking a step in the right direction. Graddol has said in several reports that employers in parts of Asia are already looking beyond English, and in the next decade, the most important language to learn for career opportunities is likely to be Mandarin.<br>
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His theory is that while Mandarin is the most common native tongue, it has relatively few second language speakers, compared to English. Therefore, as English has become basic literacy for students all over the world, managing Mandarin can put one at a competitive advantage.<br>
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Graddol also has anticipated that, in 2050, the share of native speakers of English will slip from 9 percent to 5 percent. And, although more and more people are learning it as a second language, English may still not be most widely spoken in the world, since more than 1 billion people are native Chinese speakers and many others are trying to manage Mandarin to make money in China.<br>
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In response to the scholar's call, Chinese learning resources in Britain are increasing. <br>
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The BBC is offering basic Chinese courses online; many universities are providing Chinese classes, some are even teaching dialects; the number of community schools giving Chinese lectures is also growing. However, some politicians are even willing to take it further.<br>
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Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, once told the press: "To try and learn Mandarin when you're 12 or 13 is not easy. We need Mandarin-speaking teachers in our primary schools for kids of six or seven." He plans to offer Mandarin lessons to children at primary schools, noting that it could help attract Chinese investors and tourists to the capital in the future.<br>
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It is not certain how good one's Chinese has to be to share in the country's economic growth. What is more certain, though, is that learning this language can help the British make more Chinese friends, and understand the Eastern world.
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<td align=right class=date><br>2007/01/16 p.m2:32 </td>
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<font color=#5A515A></font><b><font size='2'> © </font></b>2007 OhmyNews
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