There was an interesting article in the Chicago Tribune today about Chinese being the new "It Language" in the U.S. The Advanced Placement SAT exam drew interest from about 2,400 of the 14,000 high schools polled, compared to only 300 schools being interested in Japanese, Russian or Italian. In our own area high school, enrollment in the last 2 years in Chinese has tripled, with 120 students studying it.

The article was talking about how hard Chinese is to learn because the same word can have 4 meanings, depending on the pitch used, either a "flat, up, down-and-up or down tone." For example, they say that "ma" spoken with a high, flat tone means mother. With a down pitch, though, it's a derogatory term.

Wow! Do other languages have those subtleties?

Since much of US manufacturing has now been outsourced to China, I can understand the need for people to learn Chinese!

Many syllables in Mandarin Chinese can have even more than four meanings based on the tone. It is not unique in this phonological feature. English uses tone, too, but we use it to indicate things other than lexical difference. For instance we use a raising tone at the end of a sentence to indicate that it's a question. (we also use word order for such things.) Many South-east Asian languages are tone languages (like Chinese): some have 5, 6, or 7 tones: e.g., Hmong, Vietnamese, Cantonese Chinese (which is really not a dialect of Chinese but a separate language), Thai, Khmer / Cambodian, Laotian, and many more. This linguistic feature seems weird and subtle because English doesn't use tone in the same way. OTOH, the form of Chinese syllables / words is simple compared with many European languages: CV, CVn, or CVng. The writing system is much more difficult than our alphabetic one. You need a vocabulary of about 3000 signs to read at a simple level. The morphology on the other hand is rather simple. Words do not change based on inflection like in European languages. For the most part, no endings, suffixes, case, number, tense, etc. A word can easily be an adjective, verb, or noun with no change in its form, by just being used differently.

There are languages in Europe that use tone to differentiate words to some extent, but not as much as Chinese: Swedish and Lithuanian. Ma with a rising tone is used as a sentence particle that indicates a question. I'd say the toughest thing in Chinese is that non of the vocabulary would be recognizable to a persons who speaks a European language. No friends, false or otherwise.

Interesting, Zmj. While I have always picked up languages fairly easily, I think I'd be much worse at a language that doesn't have our alphabet. It may be easier to learn these Asian languages by speaking them, rather than by reading or writing them.

Richard, China is a country that all nations are going to need to be familiar with in the very near future...not just the U.S.

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Richard, China is a country that all nations are going to need to be familiar with in the very near future...not just the U.S.

Indeed. I suspect, though, that Sino-American trade relations have gone from zero to huge very quickly compared with the UK's. We have always had a strong trade relationship with China but the USA went through a period of not having any relationship, China being a communist country, to having a massive trade relationship (with China being the supplier).

Kaleh, there are a number of transliteration schemes for Chinese (Pinyin and Bopomofo are the two I'm most familiar with) that allow for the teaching of Chinese without learning their writing system. They are used in monolingual dictionaries to indicate pronuciation of a word (which is not always obvious from its written form).

In Natural Language Processing, that is, teaching computers to understand spoken and written language, Arabic is a hot topic, for somewhat obvious reasons...