Complacency catching up?
According to the US Department of Education, over 200 million Chinese children are studying English, compared to 24,000 American children studying Chinese. Of course, the population difference between the two countries accounts for a little of the difference, but still, the discrepancy is huge.
In the same report, the Department of Education states that “critical need foreign language skills are necessary to advance national security and global competitiveness”, and proposes establishing grants and training teachers under President Bush’s “National Security Language Initiative”.
Complacency, it seems, has finally caught up with the US and other English-speaking countries, for whom the global dominance of the English language provided a competitive advantage for so long. In today’s increasingly globalised world, where the ability to answer the phone, write an email or negotiate in more than one language brings such obvious advantages, businesses with monolingual employees will surely lose out.
What do you think? Post a comment below…
December 11th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Yes it may be true that 200 million chinese children learn english today. But it is very difficult for them specially now that the locals are teaching chinese. They also speak chinese in an english class. Also their environment is a hindrance they do not speak the english language often, in school, at home english is not spoken.
They also do not watch english movies on t.v.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:53 am
I’m a little worried how not knowing Chinese is deemed as an issue to “national security” – what are they expecting from the Chinese?
I don’t think English speaking people not having a second language is going to be any kind of disadvantage to them, English is the number one default language so those who speak English will always be able to communicate.