Why learning Chinese is important

I recently decided that I would like to learn to speak Chinese fluently. Mandarin, in fact. I came to this decision while reading many language tweets, Facebook posts and language learning articles (I spend the first 15 minutes of every morning posting about language news). Japanese will always my first love, but there is room for one more Asian language in my brain and heart, it seems.

I plan on going back to graduate school in 2012 and thought this was the perfect foray back into studying and getting that “mindset” on in advance.

In 2010, an estimated 509,965,013 people were using Chinese on the Internet (just under English at 565,004,126 and way above Spanish at 164,968,742, the first and third languages used on the Internet, respectively).

Many public schools in my area still offer the same choices as when I was in middle school-Spanish, French and German. I remember being immediately attracted to German because it is so different from English but decided on French instead (German looks absolutely nothing like English and is one of the particularly challenging languages to deal with in the localization industry due to its word length and complexity). I would have given up a kidney for a Chinese or Japanese language class offered to me as an option twenty-five years ago.

Here are just a few reasons why I think Chinese is an important language to learn:

1)      It’s good to challenge yourself and your brain: I can tell you after just a cursory look at what I will be studying, that Chinese is not easy. Even 1-10 is difficult to remember and pronounce, where I can blurt out 1-10 in about 5 languages after all these years that I do not even speak. The tones are harder to utter (it's difficult as a native English speaker to get the innotation correct; whereas Japanese was easier to learn.)

2)       The world is changing: Since China joined the WTO, it has become beneficial to all, globally, to interact with this country. How can we interact with a growing country without speaking their language? Of course, what Americans have done relied on in the past is the true notion that “they all speak English, anyway”. Isn't that the lazy way out?

3)      There are 1.3 billion Chinese speakers in the world: Think of all the people globally you can converse with and reach. Consider all the different job opportunities that will open to you.

One of the things adults in their 40s seem to say is, “Oh, I wish I had done that WHEN I WAS YOUNGER”. Guess what? It’s never too late to learn. College is not just for teenagers and young adults. The best time to recharge your brain and turn it back on is when you are in those middle years and you have children and responsibilities and life becomes more routine.

Instead, I say, “让我们学习中文!”