Get Ahead, Learn Mandarin (News)
“Time Asia, June 19, 2006
China’s economic rise means the world has a new second language - and it isn’t English.
It’s Friday night in Ikebukuro, a Tokyo entertainment district full of cheap bars and pachinko parlors. As the office workers head to their favorite watering holes, three salarymen split from the crowd and enter a decrepit building that stands between a karaoke lounge and a tavern. Ignoring the sounds of sirens, drunken crooning and breaking glass outside, Hidetoshi Seki, Takashi Kudo and Yuji Yano huddle in a tiny room just big enough for a table for four, and open their Chinese textbooks. For the next 50 minutes the trio, all from a small trading company, practice describing their favorite foods and hobbies in Mandarin. Despite their crumpled shirts and five o’clock shadows, they are having a blast. The young female instructor at B-Chinese Language School indulges them as they crack jokes and make fun of each others’ muddled pronunciation. Their language classes are the first lessons that any of them have taken since childhood, says Yano, 39. “We sort of unanimously agreed that Chinese would be a useful skill to acquire.”…”
Complete article archived here in .pdf format. (To view, you can download Adobe Reader for free).
August 9th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
“New second language?”
I find that funny, seeing how, by raw numbers, Chinese is the most widely spoken in the WORLD… most definitely helped by the 1.3 BILLION people in China, where Mandarin is the official language. Not only that, it’s also the official language of Taiwan, and one of the official languages of Singapore. It’s the third most spoken language in the U.S. behind English and Spanish (according to the 2000 Census), as well as the third most spoken language in Canada (behind English and French). Plus, more people in the world speak Chinese natively than both English and Spanish combined.