Do Americans really take the time to learn Chinese?

From time to time, China’s mainstream media reports about the rise of “Chinese language craze” around the world. A few years ago, it was said that there were 30 million foreigners learning Chinese around the world. Recently, it has been naturally changed to say that there are 4,000. Thousands of foreigners are learning Chinese, and the increase is significant. However, I have always been a little skeptical about this kind of news, because China lacks modern scientific and technological theory with independent intellectual property rights. Learning Chinese cannot obtain useful knowledge like Chinese people learning English. How can so many foreigners learn Chinese? What to do? Besides, although it is not difficult to learn Chinese, it is not easy to listen, read and write to a level that can be communicated at work. It takes several times more effort than learning Pinyin. Therefore, before foreigners can learn Chinese, the impatient Chinese have already learned English. . Moreover, according to my incomplete experience (similar to the "incomplete statistics" of the Bureau of Statistics), among the 40 million foreigners learning Chinese, a considerable proportion are foreign children of Chinese descent, followed by China's neighboring countries Japan and South Korea, and others The proportion of foreigners studying Chinese in countries and regions is actually not large. Learning Chinese is definitely more popular than before, but it may be wishful thinking to think that foreigners are as hard-working as Chinese people in learning English. Recently, the New York Times website in the United States is also studying Will Americans Really Learn Chinese (Can Americans Really Learn Chinese)? and published an article by a group of American scholars around this issue to talk about their views on Americans learning Chinese. Female writer Susan Jacoby believes that the number of primary and secondary schools teaching Chinese in the United States has not statistically increased significantly, and some of them are low-paid Chinese teachers paid for by the Chinese government. Fundamentally speaking, in the minds of Americans, an educated person does not necessarily need to be able to speak a foreign language, which is very different from European culture. In Europe, 44% of Europeans can speak a foreign language, while in the United States this proportion is only 9%, and Spanish is mainly spoken. Her conclusion is that the so-called Chinese craze, just like the Russian craze and the Japanese craze, will cool down sooner or later, because We're a Know-As-Little-As-You Can-Get-Away-With Nation and proud of it (We are A nation that can make do with just knowing a little and is proud of it). Ms. Ingrid Pufahl, a linguist born in Germany, believes that the "Russian fever", "Japanese fever" and now the "Chinese fever" that have appeared and then disappeared in the United States prove that the American education system does not take language seriously and is just following the fashion. Just following the trend. In the American education system, foreign language cannot be compared with courses such as mathematics, physics, and English. Foreign language is a luxury subject. In many countries, learning foreign languages ??starts from childhood, but in the United States, most students only start to be exposed to foreign languages ??in high school. By then, students no longer have enough time to truly learn a foreign language. Brothers Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco, scholars at Princeton University, believe that the United States’ belief in Monolingualism (single language system) has its historical origins. As early as the beginning of independence, Franklin was worried about the German (and German) influence in Pennsylvania. Later Theodore Roosevelt also said: We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language (We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language) The space of a language, which is English). Therefore, some sociologists compare the United States to a "cemetery for languages" (U.S. is a cemetery for languages). Many immigrants' native languages ??(such as German, Italian, and Japanese) become R.I.P. (rest) after one or two generations. in peace, rest in peace). In this social atmosphere, Chinese craze will inevitably follow the same path as other languages. Of course, there are American scholars who hold different views.

Norman Matloff, a professor at the University of California, believes that it is unfair to compare the United States with Europe, because Europe is a small country with another language area hundreds of miles away, so Europeans learn one or two foreign languages ??out of necessity. ), and the United States is a great power and should only be compared with China. China's political and economic strength is increasing day by day, and Americans should also learn Chinese. The only question is: Can Americans learn Chinese? There are so many Chinese characters that need to be memorized, and there are also four elusive tones. How should Americans who are not good at "cramming" learn Chinese? I have to place an advertisement here: Professor Norman Matloff has developed a software for teaching Chinese (KuaiXue, a Chinese language software tool). No wonder he goes against all the opinions and believes that Chinese will not be as popular as other foreign languages. It turns out that the fever is reduced because of the benefits. However, Professor Norman Matloff noticed a seemingly strange phenomenon: Judging from the results of the SAT test for admission to American universities, the average Chinese score is 764, which is much higher than the average French score of 629. This is strange. Isn’t it true that Chinese is much more difficult than Pinyin? Why do American middle school students score higher on the SAT Chinese test than in French? The reason is very simple. Most of the American students who take the SAT Chinese test are of Chinese descent, and Chinese is almost their mother tongue. Their test scores are of course better than other American students who study French as a foreign language.