Kenya Will Start Teaching Chinese To Elementary School Students From 2020 (qz.com) 161
Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China. From a report: The country's curriculum development institute (KICD) has said the design and scope of the mandarin syllabus have been completed and will be rolled out in 2020. Primary school pupils from grade four (aged 10) and onwards will be able to take the course, the head of the agency Julius Jwan told Xinhua news agency. Jwan said the language is being introduced given Mandarin's growing global rise, and the deepening political and economic connections between Kenya and China.
"The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin," Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.
"The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin," Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.
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It's a stupid, inefficient writing system and a terrible way to store information. Facilitating business deals doesn't make it a good language and frankly, it sounds gay AF, nasal and shrill.
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It's a stupid, inefficient writing system
Wrong. If you write the same text in English and Chinese, the Chinese will be significantly more compact.
Although Chinese is a bit slower to type, it is faster to read. Poor English readers sound out the letters phonetically. But proficient readers recognized the words visually. The difference is that Chinese, by its very nature, is read visually. So proficient readers can process it faster.
... and a terrible way to store information.
This is, of course, nonsense. But why do you think it is true?
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26 characters with mostly coherent rules is much easier to master than 5000+ symbols each requiring ridiculous cultural context to understand..
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While I think the AC you are responding to is wrong, I am not impressed with your arguments. Proficient readers of both languages can read the common words instantly and without effort.
What happens when you meet and uncommon word you are unsure about? In both cases, look at the pieces and guess. For English that is how the letters remind one of other words one knows. For Chinese, same idea except pictograms.
Both languages have their pros and cons. I suspect Chinese readers might be slightly faster unde
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Then you're not interested in doing business.
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Neither you nor I will be speaking in 100+ years.
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True, but the consequences of major changes in elementary school curriculum may well last that long. A 5-year-old Kenyan boy may be a CEO in 2069.
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Given the state of education, they'll be asking him, "Kenya do it?"
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Packaged in USA. Designed, engineered, manufactured and mined in China.
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Made in China. Sold in the US.
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If you say so, Chang. "Designed in China" is an oxymoron.
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By 2050 2 of the 3 most crowded countries will speak chinese ?
You think Kenya is crowded? It's less densely populated than Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
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You think Kenya is crowded? It's less densely populated than Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
China isn't very crowded either, on average. By population density, it is 88th.
Western China has some immense empty spaces.
List of countries by population density [wikipedia.org]
Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! (Score:5, Interesting)
The first step of many towards English losing it's place as the premier language in the world and the world's "second language". More countries will switch as China replaces US as biggest economic power. No surprise it's happening in Kenya as Africa is heavily invested in by China.
A better investment would be if the world adopted Esperanto; so much easier to learn than Mandarin. Based on European languages, so very easy for an English speaker to learn- especially since it was designed to be easy to learn (2 months to become low-level conversational)... and guess who else is a big believer in Esperanto? China. China already publishes all their official news in Mandarin AND Esperanto.
I bet if the EU committed to Esperanto as a universal second language, China would too- and the rest of the world would follow. Makes so much more sense than the world learning English or Mandarin, two of the hardest languages to learn as an adult.
Re: Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! (Score:1)
Who said they are learning Chinese instead of English, they are learning Chinese in addition to English.
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More countries will switch as China replaces US as biggest economic power. No surprise it's happening in Kenya as Africa is heavily invested in by China.
This. I've heard of it happening in other countries recently too.
Countries see what's up. The US is declining as world power, and China is the big rising star. It'll be the biggest economy, the most powerful nation, and it's splashing money around like mad to buy influence. It's locking up long term resources.
Long run, China replaces the US as top dog. People want to be on good terms with the new big dog in the yard.
That might be okay except they treat minorities much worse than USA does and has a shitty
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Countries see what's up. The US is declining as world power, and China is the big rising star.
Latin was the default international language for more than a millennium after the fall of Rome.
French remained the language of diplomacy for a century after Waterloo.
There are some big barriers to Chinese becoming the default international language:
1. English has a huge head start.
2. Chinese is very hard to learn as a second language if your first is atonal.
3. Chinese is the first language in only a handful of countries. 50 countries have English as a first or official language.
4. Even in China, Englis
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French is still the international language of diplomacy. For example, between my wife's British and Russian passports, the only language in common is French.
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English hard to learn? You must be joking, right?
No, I don't think he is. [idallen.com]
Although, considering Poe's law, I suppose you might be. So maybe my whoosh.
Spelling for one (Score:1)
English doesn't have one rule for spelling that'll work for all. In some languages they don't have spelling bees because nobody will miss a word. English is already the lingua franca for scientific communications but to truly be the global language, spelling must match the pronunciation. Currently system of memorizing exceptions to the rule is a barrier.
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You insensitive clod.
Those languages don't have spelling bees because of colony collapse disorder.
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you have to learn by heart the pronunciation of every character?
Actually, you don't. Many hanzi have both a "meaning" radical and a "pronunciation" radical.
Learning the 2-3 thousand hanzi needed to read a newspaper is hard, but not that hard. A billion people have done it.
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Learning the 2-3 thousand hanzi needed to read a newspaper is hard, but not that hard. A billion people have done it.
Thus my clarification a few posts up that Mandarin is hard to learn as an adult. With something like Esperanto you can learn it as a second language in months. Mandarin would take years to master. We're much harder to teach languages to as we get older. A complex language like Mandarin is very hard for older people- but obviously if you learn it as a kid it's not as hard.
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You don't. In Chinese you can often tell the pronunciation from one radical in the character. When you come across an unfamiliar character, you have a fairly good chance of guessing the pronunciation correctly. I thought this sounded ridiculous when a Chinese friend told me, but after a month in Shanghai, I was correctly reading street names with characters I didn't recognise. It actually isn't that hard.
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Well let's just say I'm so glad my mothertongue is almost German because learning that would have been a bitch.
Then there's French that has, I feel, no fewer exceptions than English.
The other latin languages aren't much better. Wanna talk about Scandinavian languages?
Also I don't think anyone would really consider a language mastered without being able to write and read. So basically any language using a different alphabet must be way tougher to learn right?
AFAIK Esperanto uses the same alphabet as English.
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The other latin languages aren't much better.
Spanish and Italian map directly from spelling to pronunciation.
So does Korean, and Japanese katakana/hiragana.
AFAIK Esperanto uses the same alphabet as English.
Correct, but Esperanto has standard pronunciation rules, and adds diacritic marks to some of the letters.
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Spanish and Italian map directly from spelling to pronunciation.
I thought French does, too? Just that in Italian it's both ways (if you know the rules, you can write any word that you can speak, and vice versa), while in French only the written-to-spoken is unambiguous?
Anyway, most Slavic languages also map directly, as do German, Albanian, and I believe also Hungarian. But the grammar in most of those is more complicated than Italian.
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I thought French does, too?
Not even close- it's worse than English. French standardized spelling so long ago and never updated it- nowadays many words are written completely different to how they are pronounced. Spanish is great- you know exactly how to pronounce a word. English, there are usually a few ways a given word could be pronounced based on phonetics... French is a complete minefield. The words are written as they were pronounced centuries ago which is often completely different to how they are pronounced today. Imagine
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Do you have any examples of French words where the pronunciation is different than how they are supposed to be pronounced? I can't think of any examples of this... all words I can think of are straightforward to pronounce if you know the rules.
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Well let's just say I'm so glad my mothertongue is almost German because learning that would have been a bitch.
Then there's French that has, I feel, no fewer exceptions than English.
The other latin languages aren't much better. Wanna talk about Scandinavian languages?
Also I don't think anyone would really consider a language mastered without being able to write and read. So basically any language using a different alphabet must be way tougher to learn right?
AFAIK Esperanto uses the same alphabet as English.
I'll grant you that I may have had a knack for English when I learnt it but that kinda feels arrogant.
French is probably worse than English because they have never updated spelling even though pronunciation of some words is nothing like what is written. English has this too- but French is much worse. You can't always phonetically read English like you can Spanish, or Esperanto; but French is worse- the spelling of words is often completely different to the pronunciation.
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The spelling systems are much more regular. The verbs are a bastard though. Fuck knows how many tenses and subjunctives on top.
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The verbs are a bastard though. Fuck knows how many tenses and subjunctives on top.
In Chinese, all of this is drop dead simple. There are no irregular verbs, no gendered pronouns (at least when spoken), tenses are handled either by context or by appending a grammatical particle that sets the tense for the entire sentence, not the individual verb, which makes way more sense.
Re:Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! (Score:4, Informative)
The first step of many towards English losing it's place as the premier language in the world and the world's "second language". More countries will switch as China replaces US as biggest economic power.
It may be possible that China becomes the dominant economic power in the world. A path towards that possibility is entirely reasonable.
However, Chinese will never become a linga franca of choice. It's too hard to learn due to the lack of an in-band phonetic representation. To learn Chinese requires memorization of characters and a separate memorization of pronunciation. Furthermore, looking up words in a dictionary without a camera and optical character recognition is so frustrating that it's not practical for people learning Chinese as a second language. Learning English as one of the few non/loosely phonetic languages is already difficult, but Chinese is much, much harder.
Of course, this assumes that reading is important. If Chinese is used solely as a simple conversational language, it might not be so bad.
Re:Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! (Score:4, Interesting)
Memorization isn't that bad either, but Western education simultaneously loves and hates memorization and have forgotten how to teach memorization, but still assess students based on what amounts to memorization.
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Memorization is easy, especially if you start young. And that's exactly what this plan is about.
Memorization isn't that bad either, but Western education simultaneously loves and hates memorization and have forgotten how to teach memorization, but still assess students based on what amounts to memorization.
It's interesting to note that English in the US used to be largely taught based on memorization. The relatively recent change to learning based on phonics or phonetic rules and patterns is a shift from memorization that has arguably helped more people to read English. In my opinion, learning English has some similarities to learning chemistry rules, i.e., there are lots of patterns and rules mixed with a lot of exceptions. There are enough exceptions that that learning rules is not enough without memoriz
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It's a wonder why people still oppose memorization as though anyone who mentions it must be promoting memorization above all else.
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Phonetics are a good guide for when you meet words that you are unfamiliar with but it really isn't enough to be fully competent. Rules are important to be taught but it really isn't enough by itself.
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Memorization is easy, especially if you start young. And that's exactly what this plan is about.
Memorization isn't that bad either, but Western education simultaneously loves and hates memorization and have forgotten how to teach memorization, but still assess students based on what amounts to memorization.
Memorisation is a problem as it does not impart an understanding of the language. However the problem with Mandarin is its extreme inflexibility. The language is tone dependent which makes it incompatible with the way non-Mandarin speakers talk.
The reason English is the international language isn't due to the fact that the English spread it, the French and Spanish were trying to do the exact same thing. Hell, there are more native Spanish speakers than native English speakers... English is the larger lan
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Memorisation is a problem as it does not impart an understanding of the language
Absolutely NO ONE is saying "memorize and do nothing else". It's a key learning tool and helps with other things to gain an understanding of the language. You start of rambling about extreme inflexibility because of its tone dependence:
However the problem with Mandarin is its extreme inflexibility. The language is tone dependent which makes it incompatible with the way non-Mandarin speakers talk.
Then go off on a completely unrelated tangent about syntax:
The key is in the flexibility of English, English is a language that allows for a totally foreign syntax to be used and yet remains intelligible to the native speaker.
What has syntax got to do with tone dependence? Have you even learnt Chinese? Chinese grammar is very flexible as to be almost non-existent. In fact, Chinese grammar is very close to English because both languages de
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Very well presented and an exhaustive explanation of why Mandarin is the rarest language on the planet.
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Very well presented and an exhaustive explanation of why Mandarin is the rarest language on the planet.
As a secondary language of choice, absolutely. The adoption of a native, first language isn't affected by the ease of learning a language because the children have no choice.
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Second place is about to move into first.
People embrace cultures that are affluent. The times, they are a-changing.
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Didn't I say you're rare?
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To learn Chinese requires memorization of characters and a separate memorization of pronunciation
As if in English you can infer pronunciation from spelling. In Spanish or German or Russian - you can. In English - you can't. You have to memorize
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To learn Chinese requires memorization of characters and a separate memorization of pronunciation
As if in English you can infer pronunciation from spelling. In Spanish or German or Russian - you can. In English - you can't. You have to memorize
English is a psuedo-phonetic language. That's why it's possible to teach phonics to kids to help them learn how to read. There are rules with lots of exceptions. In contrast, Chinese has a few patterns with no phonetic rules.
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As if in English you can infer pronunciation from spelling. In Spanish or German or Russian - you can. In English - you can't. You have to memorize
For many words yes, you're right. English is hard; but at least in English the spelling does give some sort of hint, even if it's frequently wrong.
Re:Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! (Score:5, Insightful)
That remains to be seen. GDP per capita basically measures how much productivity each citizen generates on average. The amount of inefficiency in a country's economy (due to corruption, lack of economic liquidity, and poor government policies) shows up as a lower GDP per capita.
The U.S. has a GDP per capita [wikipedia.org] of nearly $60,000. Most EU nations are between $40k-$60k. Japan is around $40k. Ireland is around $70k due to its tax policies causing most foreign businesses to set up EU HQ there. Norway's is around $75k due to its oil exports. And Switzerland and Luxembourg are higher yet due to their heavy presence in banking. Likewise, the city-states (Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc) are skewed high due to not having any low-income farmers in their stats.
Corruption or poor government policies limit the country's GDP per capita. South Korea and Taiwan's GDP per capita have stalled at around $25k-$30k for this reason. Despite both countries being capitalistic power houses, corruption and nepotism infest business practices there, and there's still a heavy stigma against women working (you cripple your productivity per capita when you discourage half of your able-bodied population from working).
Countries without a solid capitalistic base and with high corruption or poor government policies are usually mired at a GDP per capita of around $10k. Eastern Europe and much of Central and South America.
China is currently at $8k. If its Communist government and inherent corruption (you need to bribe people and officials to get any business done there) limits its GDP per capita to $10k, then the growth of its total GDP will stall at around $15 trillion. The U.S. and EU GDPs are already at $19 trillion each. So China would not surpass them in global economic influence. Even if China manages Taiwan-like levels of productivity (unlikely IMHO as long as its government remains Communist and insists on wasting capital on things like building empty cities), its total GDP would max out at around $35 trillion, giving it less economic influence than the U.S. and EU combined despite having twice the population.
China's heavy investment abroad has been fueled by its rapidly growing economy, which left it plenty of excess money to spend abroad. The signs are that growth is now slowing [assets.bwbx.io]. (Sorry the bottom of the graph is 6%, not 0%. Every graphic I could find online did that.)
At a 6.5% growth rate, it will take 4 years for China's GDP per capita to hit $10k, 10 years to hit $15k, and 20 years to hit $20k. So we will know in the next 10-15 years whether the Chinese economy will continue growing, or if it will stall.
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GDP per capita
I think there's the problem with your numbers. You are assuming that the goal is to make more people richer. However, I'm a pretty firm believer that the world is tending toward the complete opposite here as the endgame. The goal isn't to make everyone richer, it is to just simply be rich. Be that a nation takes 120 million, 1.2 billion, or somewhere in between to become rich, so be it.
Per capita only matters if you'd like to bring all the citizens in your nation along for the ride. It used to be wise
GDP per capita is useless (Score:2)
Not switch, English is offical (Score:5, Informative)
English is the (or a) official language of Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, the three countries mentioned in the summary. This is about adding Mandarin (as an elective) in schools, not replacing English.
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Have.....to......resist! I........must not....be........a grammar Nazi!
Whew, that was hard. OTOH, +1 informative.
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If you really believed that, your post would have been in Esperanto.
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If you really believed that, your post would have been in Esperanto.
It would have taken me twice as long to write because I don't use my Esperanto very often so it's pretty rusty. I do speak/write basic Esperanto well enough that I've read a couple books written in it and had a couple of basic conversations in it; but I'm far from an expert due to little chance to use... and I learnt it in two months on a whim as a New Year's resolution to learn a new language one year.
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Yeah, it was a craze back in the early 60s and it's still there.
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The problem is that everyone wants to learn English so they can watch Hollywood movies and US/British TV shows. It's also very entrenched in a lot of countries where it's not the main language, e.g. in The Netherlands because there are a mixture of Dutch, German and French speakers they use English as a common language.
The wider EU is similar. Because we have freedom of movement it's trivial to work in a different country, and many people even commute over borders every day. The common working language is E
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The Netherlands because there are a mixture of Dutch, German and French speakers they use English as a common language
Simila in Belgium: you'e much better off speaking English than attempting the local languages because if you use the wrong one people ger REALLY pissed off and can be incedibly rude. But if you stick to English you just seem like a tourist and are generally OK.
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Constructed languages are all horrible. They all aim towards making a simple language, but there is a reason why no country has a simple language as the official one. However by reducing the complexity of a language, you gain precisely what you gain if a foreigner tries to speak basic English. Even if the vocabulary is good enough to say everything, the sentences becomes long and boring.
Esperanto is very flexible. All root words are infinitely mod-able and thus, even though there are fewer root words to learn the language is very expressive... AND the sentences are usually shorter than English. The flexibility of word order (far more flexible than English or most languages) allow for more creative expression whilst still being easy to understand.
I suspect you know nothing about constructed languages. :)
To put it short: constructed languages are the Stalinistic approach to languages.
Yes, very Stalinistic... that's probably why Stalin imprisoned anyone who spok
Good idea (Score:2)
It is bound to be a lot more useful to those kids in a global commerce environment than Swahili.
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Re:Good idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
It is bound to be a lot more useful to those kids in a global commerce environment than Swahili.
China is doing this because they own significant [standardmedia.co.ke] parts of Kenya along with their debt. Kenya is behind on payments too, bet you really haven't heard much on that.
Re: Good idea (Score:2)
Yes, I knew that. All the more reason for Kenyans to learn Mandarin.
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Yes, I knew that. All the more reason for Kenyans to learn Mandarin.
Not many people do especially since it doesn't get much play in western media. It'd be better for them to learn English as well, even in China they've made the same decision as Japan, S.Korea and Singapore to have dual-language classes fully through high school.
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The most useful language to learn is not the most common you do not already speak but the most common among people you do not already have a common language and are likely to encounter. What is the likelihood of someone from Kenya need to converse with someone who speaks Mandarin Chinese but not the English that Kenyan students already are taught?
While there are many people who speak Chinese as a first language, they are mainly in China. In addition, while Mandarin is the 4th most used L2 language, they mos
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Swahili itself is the 8th most used L2 language, and it developed as a lingua franca for... non-local commerce.
Indeed. Intra-African trade is very low by world standards. African countries would benefit far more by lowering trade barriers with each other than from mortgaging their assets to China.
Loss of influence. (Score:2)
The biggest problem is the US, and EU is loosing its global influence, and politically many of these countries, are moving to becoming more isolated. While China who had been historically the isolated country, is started to become more involved in world affairs and trade.
This is bad for US and the EU in general, because as we become more isolated, we cut off more and more potential customers. The growth of the US after WWII was in part mostly from rebuilding the rest of the world. The billions of dollars
Re:Loss of influence. (Score:5, Insightful)
The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.
I don't think it's that. Trying to get involved in Africa as a western company just gets a mountain of whinging twats complaining about colonialism on Twitter or other social media.
China doesn't give two fucks. They're rounding up religious minorities and sending them to reeducation camps [bbc.com]. They won't care about international criticism from those former groups on Twitter either.
China learning same lessons West did (Score:2)
The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.
No, the US and EU has learned from experience that Africa is a hard place to do business for a lot of reasons (corruption, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc.), which has made them cautious. The Chinese don't have experience with this, but they're quickly re-learning the colonial / imperial lessons that Western nations have learned. As the Chinese dump money into the continent, they're starting to learn that these projects aren't as simple [reuters.com] or profitable. Raises the question of what happen
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always a good idea to learn the language of the master class that bought your country.
I object to cultural appropriation of Mandarin (Score:4, Funny)
Good luck (Score:2)
Pros of English:
No grammatical cases (except for a few pronouns).
Roman alphabet widely known in the world.
No gender for words. Nouns aren't masculine, feminine or neuter.
Co
Firefly called it (Score:5, Insightful)
In the short-lived series, Firefly, Mandarin Chinese was a common second language [wikipedia.org]. So... a good prediction, or life imitating art?
Re:Firefly called it (Score:5, Insightful)
a good prediction, or life imitating art?
Third option: Firefly was just that awesome.
And you americans worry about a few... (Score:3, Insightful)
And you americans worry about a few thousand spanish speaking illegals entering your country from the southern border... Your turn will come soon enough.
And what about all those whiny canadian anglos bitching because the big bad federal governement forces them to learn french in school. Try to avoid hearing mandarin or cantoneese anywhere in Vancouver these days. You too will be forced to jump on the chineese band wagon.
China doesn't need nuclear weapons. All it needs is to move five hundred million chinese along the border of the country they want to invade, and have them yell "BANG !" all together.
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And it was 300,000+ [washingtonpost.com] who tried to enter in 2017 alone. That's millions over a few years, that we know about.
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Found the trumptard.
Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm an American who has been to Kenya recently.
For English not familiar with the national language (Swahili), you see some Swahili words in The Lion King (simba, rafiki, hakuna matata).
Everyone is multi-lingual. You start with your local/regional/tribe language (20-60 of them?). You then learn swahili when you go to school or travel. As you progress and want to start interacting with foreigners, you learn English. Kenya was a British colony in the early 20th century. The capital Nairobi was founded as an British railway town, and people learned English.
China just funded and operates the new Nairobi/Mombasa railroad that's key to getting goods to and from the shipyards in Mombasa inland to other parts of Africa through Nairobi.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funded-railway-in-kenya-sparks-debt-trap-fears
New road construction has chinese-sounding names on the green tractors, not American Caterpillar or .Japanese Komatsu.
Kenya Airways has flights from China. I saw many Chinese tourists.
Managers of Chinese-owned operations would benefit from having more Kenyans know Chinese rather than possibly double-translating through English.
If you want to be successful working with the new Chinese money and management, it helps to speak Chinese, right?
Wake up western colonizers. China is learning from the IMF and World Bank of the last century.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Wake up western colonizers. China is learning from the IMF and World Bank of the last century.
The Irony of this statement cannot be overlooked. China is engaged in the second wave of colonization of the third world. They are exporting millions of Chinese citizens to countries like Kenya as part of their Road and Belt initiative. The countries involved are tolerant of this just like they were the Europeans because the Chinese are paying off all the right people right now to keep this suppressed. At some point down the road the populace will figure out what's going on and it'll end up just like European colonialism.
What China is doing is just a reshoe of European Colonialism. The first thing the European colonizers did was build infrastructure funded by their own government. They also used the current Chinese practice of giving loans to the countries they couldn't afford and then seized the product afterwards.
You might think the Chinese would be smarter than the Europeans had been but they are just as racist and just as entitled and will abuse these undeveloped countries just like the Europeans did. If you supported these countries you would realize they are being abused.
Just switching one colonial master for a new one. (Score:2)
Outstanding (Score:2)
Perhaps China will start getting their fair share of the Nigerian Prince email scams too :D
africa will be owned by china (Score:2)
obviously, china is investing heavily in china, it makes sense for them to do this;
https://youtu.be/zQV_DKQkT8o [youtu.be]
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They're investing in Kenya to get a monopoly on Tantalum, Niobium, and other rare elements for capacitors.
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