Mandarin: the language of the future
Play
The People Republic of China currently boasts the fastest growing economy in the world, and is widely regarded as the potentially biggest untapped global market in the 21st century.
Since Chinese is the communicative language of approximately 15 per cent of the world’s population, proficient speakers of Mandarin should be able to find jobs in such competitive fields as business management, sales marketing, government, information technology, international relations, tourism, education, translation, hospitality and public relations. Of all foreign languages offered at North American colleges and universities, demand for Chinese shows the highest proportional increase in enrolment.
The grammatical structure of Chinese is not only logical, but pragmatic, related to the particular way of philosophical and socio-cultural thinking. Although most linguists agree that Chinese is one of the most difficult to gain fluency and master, the following features may help facilitate basic level acquisition:
no subject/verb agreement
no noun plurals
no irregular verbs
no conjugations
no tenses
simple word order
simple conditional sentences
simple prepositions
simple numbering system
simple dates and time expressions.
The Chinese writing system offers a long-term daunting challenge. There are thousands of characters or ideographs, but they are not phonics based, so must be memorised individually. Since many characters share the same sounds, four pitch tones are used to differentiate meanings. For example, first tone ma (mother), second tone ma (hemp), third tone ma (horse) and fourth tone ma (scold) are often confused by foreign tongues and untrained ears. In Chinese, stress and intonation contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the words chosen.
Spoken Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese are mutually unintelligible, even though they are often called dialects. However, all Chinese languages are written more or less the same, so if you can read one, you can read them all. Multilingualism is an enriching beneficial experience and the innovative “4 in 1” self-access individualised IT learning package will help reinforce the basics in neighbouring languages and encourage cross-cultural perspectives, tolerant understanding and friendly multiversity.
Charles Frederickson
Bangkok
