Ted’s final Essay

The Rising Dragon

Could Chinese become a new world leading language?

Introduction

This essay is about whether the Chinese will become a new world leading language. I will expound my opinion from two different points. Firstly I will talk from the history and development about the Chinese. Then in terms of advantages to prove Chinese will become a new world leading language, such as the population of Chinese speaker and Chinese economy and political status. Next I will illustrate the disadvantage of Chinese, like Chinese is the difficult learning language. In addition, at the end of this essay I will sum up my argument and topic, and then give my final conclusion.

Background

Chinese is the most populous used language, in the world about a quarter of the people speak Chinese, and about 40 million are learning Chinese. Now China is the third biggest economic entity in the world, and China is called “the world factory”. So with Chinese economic and cultural exchanges across the world is increasing, the Chinese is becoming more and more important now. More and more overseas Chinese is another power to promote it developing in the world. But compare with other world language such as English and French, Chinese is not used in many countries, and learning Chinese is very difficult even though now people know 2-3 foreign language is very common. So maybe in future we Chinese should change something by it-self to suit other country people’s habit. Only by doing so, the Chinese could become a new world language.

Part 1

Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world, and it has influences on many Asian languages and characters. In short, the Chinese character is a kind of symbol language, Oracle bone inscriptions is the earliest Chinese characters, and was found at the Neolithic site of Jiahu in Henan, dated to around 6,600–6,200 BC (Paul R,2003). With the progress of history, The Chinese is also developing. From the age of Oracle bone inscriptions, there are only about 5,400 characters (Qiu 2000). But until now, the Chinese characters have 106,230 words (include Mandarin and Cantonese) (YITIZI dictionary, 2004).

Part 2

As we known, there are more than one and a half billion people speaking Chinese on the earth, so knowing Chinese means you can talk with most of people on the earth. China has helped 60,000 teachers promote Chinese internationally, and an estimated 40 million people are now studying Chinese as a second language around the world. There are 256 Confucius Institutes (a Chinese language and culture school which is support by Chinese Gov) and 58 Confucius classrooms have been established in 81 countries (Xinhua news, 2009).In 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the Chinese Proficiency Test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004 (Xinhua news, 2006). So following this trend, maybe in future you will find everyone could speak some basic Chinese.
Secondly, China is the third biggest economic entity in the world, and China is called “the world factory”, during the past 30 years, almost 90% of the Fortune 500 companies have invested in China. Especially at this time of global economic crisis, although the whole earth is being affected by the influence of economic crisis, Chinese economy still grows quickly. Also Chinese is one of five official languages in the United Nations. So in aspects of economy and politics, Chinese will play greater role at the political and economic stages.

Part 3

For most people, whose native language is not Chinese, think Chinese is the most difficult language to learn. As a Chinese native speaker, I think they are right.

First is the character. The Chinese has more than 100,000 characters. Most of the characters contained archaic and obscure meaning. Also many characters are composed of different but similar other characters, be careful, these Chinese characters are not easy to constitute as English words left-right order, maybe they are up-down order or inside-outside order. So for most Chinese beginner, all Chinese characters look like complex symbols.

The second difficult to learn Chinese is the tones, Mandarin Chinese has five tones, the first (high level tone), second (high-rising tone), third (falling-rising tone), fourth (high-falling tone) and the fifth neutral tone. Even in Cantonese there are six tones. In most Western countries, tones are used to express emphasis or emotion. So many foreigners could not speak the right Chinese pronunciation.

The third problem is Homophones, in many languages there are homophones, but Standard Mandarin has a large number of homophones. Because the Chinese character is single syllable and caused every pronunciation has so many homophones. For example the pronunciation gao is associated with over 30 distinct morphemes, including 高 (high, good), 糕 (cake), 膏 (grease), 镐 (pickax), 羔 (fawn), and 篙 (barge pole) and so on.

Conclusion

Sum up, Chinese is a very useful and important language in the world, in future it will become a new world language but not right now. Now there are some constraints hindered the development of Chinese rapid pace. But with the development of globalization, people could use some advanced learning methods or technology to proficiency in more than one different languages, even one day Chinese will exceed English and become a new world leading language.

Reference:1: Lu, Dan Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Volume 18, Number 2, 2008, pp. 268-279(12), John Benjamin Publishing Company

2: G Hu, Review of Educational Research, 2008, rer.sagepub.com

3: Y Chen, Asian Social Science, 2009, ccsenet.org/journal.html

4: Paul Rincon (2003-04-17). BBC News

5: http://www.confuciusinstitute.net/

6: YITIZI dictionary, 2004, Taiwan (PRC) Ministry of Education

7: Qiu, Xigui (2000).Chinese Writing. Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

8: http://www.huaxia.com/ssjn/smxx/00197002.html