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China Education

China is Losing Interest in English 78

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In preparation for the summer Olympics in 2008, the authorities in Beijing, the host city and China's capital, launched a campaign to teach English to residents likely to come in contact with foreign visitors. Police, transit workers and hotel staff were among those targeted. One aim was to have 80% of taxi drivers achieve a basic level of competency. Today, though, any foreigner visiting Beijing will notice that rather few people are able to speak English well.

The 80% target proved a fantasy: most drivers still speak nothing but Chinese. Even the public-facing staff at the city's main international airport struggle to communicate with foreigners. Immigration officers often resort to computer-translation systems. For much of the 40 years since China began opening up to the world, "English fever" was a common catchphrase. People were eager to learn foreign languages, English most of all. Many hoped the skill would lead to jobs with international firms. Others wanted to do business with foreign companies. Some dreamed of moving abroad. But enthusiasm for learning English has waned in recent years. According to one ranking, by EF Education First, an international language-training firm, China ranks 91st among 116 countries and regions in terms of English proficiency. Just four years ago it ranked 38th out of 100.

China is Losing Interest in English More | Reply

China is Losing Interest in English

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  • Of course (Score:3)

    by bjoast ( 1310293 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @04:25PM (#65023211)
    I lost interest in the English a long time ago. No one is impressed by a London bus these days!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Regarding the claim, though, IMO going from 38th to 91st in such a short time period seems more like a lot of lying going on within their survey. I'd bet there's just a lot of people who lie because of the sanctions placed on China during the Trump administration, and subsequently kept during the Biden administration.
      • I doubt it was a self-report questionnaire survey. More likely, the results of EF's own student performance data & (free) placement testing services (Free placement tests for prospective students is a typical marketing strategy). A lot of western companies make a lot of money out of helping Chinese people learn English including EF, Wall Street, & Disney. The biggest market is school children taking extra-curricular classes after school, next is business. Extra-curricular English classes are electiv
        • Also if you are an English teacher from a country that has some disputes with China, you run the risk of being arrested on trumped-up charges to be used as a diplomatic bargaining chip or a human shield. Australia has some experience with this.
    • I have switched to Internenglish

  • They stopped allowing online English tutoring... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GuitarNeophyte ( 636993 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @04:36PM (#65023249) Journal

    About 3 years ago, they imposed a rule that would forbid English tutoring by foreign teachers online. They said that the expectations for kids getting into better schools were getting so difficult that it was causing families to not be able to afford having multiple kids. So, the government just made the blanket statement that forbid that tutoring, so they could say, "There! Now, education is cheaper! We fixed the problem!"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      worse than that they made it illegal to teach English outside of schools for profit at all.
      All English training centers were forcibly changed to non profits with limits on fees and operating times.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      It was illegal to have more than one kid in China up until a few years ago.

    • Iinm, it isn't "foreign teachers" but teachers located outside China.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Iinm, it isn't "foreign teachers" but teachers located outside China.

        and teachers located inside China
        and requiring a relevant degree and not just "a native speaker"
        and forcing them to go non-profit
        and restricting their hours
        and restricting how much they can charge.

    • Chinese don't have logic. Or ethics. Or love. Just greed and rationalization. I was married to one for almost 20 years and lived in Singapore for two. I'mn't a racist. Now they're stupid enough to not want English? Crazy.

  • America (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Randseed ( 132501 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @04:37PM (#65023253)
    Judging from the pitiful grammar all over the Internet, in meatspace with signs, and the fact that every healthcare organization has to have a team of translators on contract, I'd say that Americans have lost interest in English.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Que?

    • The team of translators is there to accommodate all the illegals and would-be-illegals-if-not-for-Biden-granting-parole who have come over with the expectation of getting free medical care.

      The wife did her training at one of these charity hospitals where people would literally be getting off the plane from Haiti or whereever and going straight to that hospital to get "free" medical care paid for by every taxpayer and everyone bitching about why their insurance premiums are so high. And of course these peopl

  • How many citizens of the United States or of Great Britain are proficient in Mandarin? How interested are they usually in learning the languages of other cultures?
    Chinese and English are very far away in too many aspects, so it's a big effort for both groups to learn the other's language. Both cultures are mostly self-oriented, so the motivation is little anyway...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      "How many citizens of the United States or of Great Britain are proficient in Mandarin?"

      I don't have any interest in Mandarin, but Clementine is an excellent music player.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      When has China had an international empire where it was said that, "The sun never sets on the Chinese Empire"? Never. Because of the British Empire, it is now the case that you can go to most of the world and you'll be able to find an English speaker. Since WWII, English has taken off even more predominantly with America being the global leader. That's 300 years of it.
    • Not to mention the single country with the most English speakers in the world, India, is a lot closer to China than either the US or GB.

    • >"How many citizens of the United States or of Great Britain are proficient in Mandarin?"

      Probably not many

      >"How interested are they usually in learning the languages of other cultures?"

      Very, apparently. In the US, it has been a requirement to take courses in foreign languages for ages. I am not sure the CURRENT status, but when I went through school, you had to take 3 years of one language or 2 years of two different languages if you planned on getting a degree. And the advanced diploma in high sch

  • How many can say (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Pooh Bear?

  • why would they (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Growlley ( 6732614 )
    as it appears their star is rising and the west is waning.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 )

      Because as horrible a language English is to learn, it is a hell of a lot better as a lingua franca than most alternatives.

    • Re:why would they (Score:5, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @05:49PM (#65023487)
      Too soon to throw in the towel. The US is doing quite well. China and most of Europe are both looking down the barrel of demographic collapse.

      • Ironic if Joe's lax borders are saving us from a demographic collapse.

        Prez #45 and #46 are both broken clocks that are right twice a day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        The world is looking down the barrel of a Trump presidency. The US can only hope to have it so good as a demographic collapse.

      • People have been saying such things for years...it's a common a claim as this year being the year of the Linux desktop, or viable fusion electricity generation being only a few years away.

        I suppose it could be true this time, but don't hold your breath...or feel free to...what do I care?

        • The only reason that people are still talking about "the year of Linux on the desktop" is because the meaning of the phrase has changed, and not for the better. When it was first coined, it referred to the year when Linux reached the point when average computer users could use it with no more hand holding than they'd need with Windows. Somehow, it morphed into looking forward to the day when Linux was more common than Windows, which may or may not ever happen.

    • Re:why would they (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @05:57PM (#65023513) Journal

      their star is rising and the west is waning.

      No, China's economy has been mostly stalled since the pandemic. This language hiccup is likely about Cold War II tensions rather than economic might. English is still the de-facto business language of the world, for good or bad. If you want to do world biz, then you still need to learn English.

      Xi also started regulating China's rich heavier after a couple of plutocrats got too comfortable and dabbled in China's politics. The crackdown is driving out investors.

      • "Mostly stalled" is an exaggeration.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          Unemployment is way up, especially among the young people. In fact it is so bad the CCP stopped keeping stats on that demographic. Plus there's the collapse of the real estate market with half-finished vacant apartment blocks (contractors not getting paid), and whole ghost cities. There's still an awful lot of action going on in China. It's a huge country with a population size that we can hardly comprehend here in the west. Things there could turn worse in a real hurry. I think Xi's tenuous hold over th

        • It's impossible to know how well the Chinese economy actually is doing.

    • Idunno. They're in the middle of a bursting real estate bubble and population crash right now. China will endure, but it's no sure bet it will outshine anyone.

  • Have you ever seen C++ or Rust, or Python, or Assembly written in Chinese? Yeah no...because they didn't invented anything of their own. Suck it China!

  • ... taxi drivers achieve a basic level ...

    I found most drivers couldn't read Pinyin, the computer-version of Chinese, that had been an official language for over 40 years, at the time. At the internet cafes, I saw teenagers using Pinyin on QQ.

    ... any foreigner visiting ...

    Chinese think most visitors are American. Although in the middle they thought I was French-Canadian, and going north, I was Russian, and going south, I was English-speaking.

    While English-speaking countries happily adopted Americanisms, (and in 2005, several Americanisms were forced onto other countries), A

  • English just isn't that important. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dwater ( 72834 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @06:30PM (#65023601)

    There's truth to this, but it's a reflection of several things, that boil down to English just not being that important any more - in China that is.

    It's perfectly possible to exist with minimal Chinese in China (I'm sure it varies).

    I've lived in China for most of the past 21 years and still have what must amount to negligible Chinese (though I don't recommend it).

    I moved to China from California to work at a school that was teaching English to people working to organise the Olympics...learning English was all the rage back then. These days, not so much. A lot of things have changed, including a lot of improvements in living standards, but also the USA (et al) has become much more aggressive against China, so there's not much point in learning English.

    Also, what's the problem? You go to a foreign country...you should expect to speak need to speak their language that's what phrase books are for...I guess apps do that now, but still.

  • If they don't want to learn English it will have no effect on me. I once dreamed of visiting China but no more.

  • If you travel in China you just get a translation app, most folks use one. The low number of English speakers, outside of Hong Kong, makes it a low value skill outside of international business. Our dev team in Beijing however definitely benefits from being fluent.

  • The planet needs a universal language. Keep the native languages as a backup if you want, but they are ultimately not important, or even culturally relevant, anymore. English is the closest we have to a universal language right now. Not saying it should continue to be that way or anything. But we do need to simplify to one main language planet-wide, eventually.

    • If you can't read/write/understand spoken English, the Internet has far less value. But someone just told me that Facebook doesn't moderate content in Russian, so opportunity exists there. I am starting to think that the American oligarchs all actually work for Putler, the richest person in the history of the world.
    • Modern translate tools have made it so that practically you can use whatever language you want to communicate with anyone, even Esperanto.
  • Maybe all traffic could route to a single LLM that crawls the real internet, rewrites and censors per CCP, and translates to Mandarin.

  • ... enthusiasm for learning English has waned in recent years. According to one ranking, by EF Education First, an international language-training firm, China ranks 91st among 116 countries and regions in terms of English proficiency. Just four years ago it ranked 38th out of 100

    I would think that it would mostly be younger people - ones looking forward to demanding careers, possibly abroad - who would be most interested in learning a foreign language. Especially an alphabet-based one. But demographic collapse probably means a shrinking economy, fewer career options, and more time spent caring for one's own elders because the infrastructure and services to take care of them at a societal and institutional level are shrinking.

    If demographic collapse isn't yet a contributing factor

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