Can Chinese be the lingua franca of Asia?
For me, as a Japanese, I really think Chinese will be easier than English.
We Japanese language has a lot of Chinese characters - That's a good advantage for our Japanese learning Japanese, but in comparison with Koreans, Chinese will be a little bit difficult.
Second, u guys know that we Japanese don't speak very perfect English., because there is no similiarity between English and Japanese, but it has some similarity between Japanese and Chinese, Kanji for instance, and some shared vocabularies between Japanese and Chinese.
<<We Japanese language has a lot of Chinese characters - That's a good advantage for our Japanese learning Japanese, but in comparison with Koreans, Chinese will be a little bit difficult.>>
And what about the other 70-75% who don't use ideograms/characters? Such as the Thais, Vietnamese and even Indians? I'm pretty sure they wouldn't find any advantage in learning over 1,000 Chinese characters. Characters are fun to write in calligraphy and stuff but in everyday life, it's way more complicated than it needs to be.
No, I believe the English language is a very interesting contrast to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. It is always good to learn a language completely different from your own so you can understand a new way of thinking.
I think the biggest plus for learning English is it's simple grammar, its use of a simple alphabet that can easily be extended with diacritics to represent sounds of any language, and the HUGE amount of reading material available in English.
No East Asian country should give up their native language. But English is probably the best second or third language to acquire.
I think the biggest plus for learning English is it's simple grammar
As for grammar I don't think the English grammar is easier than the Chinese one.
Quoted from a Hong Konger {{
>>Xie, thanks for the answer. But isn't Mandarin required in schools? Surely there must be a lot of Mandarin floating around in Hong Kong by TV and stuff?<<
Yep, Mandarin education has been extended somehow since my own days at the elementary school, but many guys of my age still can't hold a conversation and may have to resort to English with other Chinese...
most audiences can only watch the local channels with minimal Mandarin. I have satellite TV and I can watch CCTV and phoenix TV... most people here can't watch all these, since it's commercial. It's a norm that young Chinese who are now at least 18 "speak" Mandarin with a horrible accent like their counterparts (such as my cousin) in Guangzhou. Personally, I've picked up a lot of Mandarin through listening to chinesepod and cslpod in the past year, but I still can't claim advanced fluency very soon.
Mandarin still has little influence in the city life and in the media. }}
If a lot of people aren't mastering it even within Chinese territory, then it still has a ways to go before being a lingua franca outside China.