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The lucrative world of teaching Chinese If you can speak and write mandarin Chinese to the extent that you can also teach it, then chances are that this is going to be one hell of a lucrative career right now, according to this report.
I fear that this is a trend I am going to miss out on. Even if I had a flair for languages – and I speak French and German a bit – Chinese is a whole different ball game. And at my age – 42 – it would be probably far too late to start anyway. Mind you, an old colleague of mine who is in his 40s had been learning for several years and is how working in China, in the media business. So it is possible if one is determined enough, I guess.
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Not to be a spoilt-sport or anything, but I do remember when learning Japanese was necessary for the kids not to “fall behind” since Japan was the “the world’s fastest-growing economy.” You do not hear much about that nowadays.
The same thought struck me, Frederick. I read recently that there are reports from North Korea that English is creeping into everyday speech there in preference to Chinese. If that’s true, then a) Kim Il Jong is screwed, and b) so is Chinese.
On the other hand, Chinese has the numbers on its side that Japanese didn’t.
Older people can learn languages, and to be honest they don’t even have all that big of a disadvantage over college-age kids. The parts of your brain that allow very easy language learning in youth are more or less finished by the end of childhood.
It would be a challenge, but with a year or two of classes before spending some real time in China would have you fluent pretty quick.
I just got a new teapot for my new office. It’s made in China, and I thought it wouldn’t be a problem: ceramics is what Chinese have been traditionally good at. However, after the first use I found out that it’s impossible to pour tea without making a puddle on my desk…
Hell, China is not even capable to manufacture a teapot! These guys are producing tons of worthless junk. There’s not a single quality Chinese product with perhaps the exception of tea.
China as a new world’s superpower? Bullshit. It’s superpower of fake and junk. Forget Chinese. Learn Spanish or something useful.
Chinese (at least Mandarin) is actually a pretty easy language to learn to speak. The grammar is dead simple – no grammatical genders, no plurals, no verb conjugation, no declination, no articles, etc. It’s a highly analytic language, meaning that each morpheme only contains one idea – unlike other languages, where inherent in a word is the tense, number, gender, and who knows what else. The difficulty comes in writing. Even for Chinese, literacy levels are relatively low. And unlike most languages – which you learn to write in and never forget – Chinese requires constant writing (not just reading) to maintain, so literacy among the elderly is a lot lower than in other countries.
Mandarin may become an important language, but I can’t see teachers getting paid much for it, any more than they get paid much for teaching anything.
“It’s superpower of fake and junk.”
What kind of computer are you using and where was it made? China. You obviously haven’t been to China, Taiwan or Singapore. I lived there 25 years.
“Mandarin may become an important language, but I can’t see teachers getting paid much for it, any more than they get paid much for teaching anything.”
My wife makes anywhere from $60US to $300US an hour teaching Mandarin. That buys a lot of beer……..as well as a new Stag Arms STAG-15 M2T. :^)
Our PM, Kevin07, learnt Mandarin recently, and his wife learnt Womandarin. If you have an incentive you can do it. Since Krudd knew that Australia would need to kowtow to the Muddle Kingdom, he did his best, and can now kiss the pavement with the best of them!
That hasn’e stopped them editing his speeches, when he speaks Mandarin to them, and complains about their actions in Tibet.
How Irony!
They complain that Westerners don’t understand them, but when one does, they don’t want to listen to him!
You are quite right that Chinese grammar is surprisingly simple, and I agree that the script is a bitch. However, I don’t think it’s at all easy to speak, I could never get to grips with the different intonation of the same word sound, which completely change its meaning. If I remember rightly, each sound can have four intonations, and each intonation would be a different word in a western language. The possibilities for confusion are almost endless.
A friend of mine did mandarin Chinese at university at the end of the 80s, but then found it useless afterwards as all the Chinese doing business were Cantonese speakers. Has this changed?
Last time I looked, 1 to 1 tuition from a well-qualified native Mandarin or Cantonese speaker using VoIP came in at about US$8 per hour.
jd
A friend of mine did mandarin Chinese at university at the end of the 80s, but then found it useless afterwards as all the Chinese doing business were Cantonese speakers. Has this changed?
Yes. Two things have changed.
The PRC has opened up massively to business since the late 80s. And, Hong Kong has been sold up the river, so to speak, by the UK. So all those Hong Kong based Cantonese have been busy in the meantime learning Mandarin for business, both as the official language of their new overlords and the lingua france of the interior beyond Canton.
Overseas Chinese are still Hokkien and Cantonese speakers for the most part, tho’ as a minority doing buisiness in the non-Chinese languages of wherever they find themselves.
Learning “Chinese” is complicated by the fact that there are lots of Chinese dialects. Cantonese is the most widely-known non-Mandarin dialect, and it’s spoken in some of the bustling cities in the Southeast, like Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou (aka Canton), and Macau. Then there’s also Wu (aka Shanghainese), which is spoken in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou. The rest mostly speak Mandarin (including Taiwan), though each region has its own dialect. Outside of the Cantonese region, most business people also speak Mandarin, and even within the Cantonese region, more and more are learning to speak Mandarin.
But yeah – the cities other than Beijing that most people know are Hong Kong and Shanghai, and neither of those places as Mandarin as the local tongue.
They are more than capable of making quality teapots. The question is are you willing to pay for it? China’s boom has been because of their ability to leverage low cost manufacturing and sell to a global market that is most receptive to low price points. Consumers world wide, some cultures more than other, like cheap stuff.
So, out of curiosity, how much did you pay for the teapot?
I agree, Chinese language is extremely difficult
For those that want to learn a language Mandarin Chinese is ever so important especially if you want to make $$. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of PRC, Taiwan, and Singapore. There are large Chinese communities all over Asia and if you want to do business in Asia most likely you will be doing business with someone that is of Chinese heritage (except for Korea and Japan) regardless if you are in Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, PRC, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, or Indonesia because they own the economies of those countries.
Is there a good online course that can teach you chinese in a easy way? i was looking for a quite a while and haven’t found one.