Given that 20 yrs from now CHINA will dominate economically politicallly should we all learn to speak chinese?

base on my standard of living here in china, everyone must need to learn how to speak chinese(mandarin-hardest,fookien/cantone...

u will need to learn chinese if u r planning to go in also if u weren't not planning to..cause my impression was that their are many chinese living in manila or other parts of the phils. right u need also to understand some of their language so u will not being just like nothing....

speaking was not that a real prob. in chinese language but the hardest thing to study was their writings! they got a lot of it!

base on politically,economically: china will be the center of tradings between the west countries to the east...(HK)

if ur planning to study chinese better study in china.

(currently living in china)
sorry for poor grammar and composition

No unless you are planning to go live there

Many schoolchildren are already learning Mandarin chinese in the UK

i love cultures, architecture and languages. so why not.

Yes.

they're all (well, the ones who are not slaving in the fields and the mines) furiously learning english, they'll catch us up

Not a bad idea. But based on their downturn in the market just the other day, because ours was off, shows they have catching up to do.

Yes they are kicking some big *** right now

First Chinese isn't a language, there is Cantonese and Mandarin. Second, English will be the International language of business for a long time, but it wouldn't hurt to know. Any language you learn would be an asset. Thirdly, your question doesn't even really make sense.

no because we are not all going to live there

love too

to Ron: there isn't just mandarin and cantonese, there's hokkien, fuchow, teochew, hakka etc. and cantonese isn't a language, it's a major dialect of mandarin. and it is not a stupid question by the poster.

it is a good question, because when england/US became major powers, everyone strove to learn english because it would help them to up their chances to "take a piece of the cake" that is a piece of the economy from the english-speaking world. now that china is fast becoming another major power soon, everyone's enrolling themselves and their kids to pick up mandarin (same logic as the english thing).

there are alot of chinese i know whom i've done businesses with, they don't bother entertaining non-chinese speaking potential clients because they already have so many chinese speaking clients in china and the rest of asia (malaysia, taiwan, singapore, etc) sufficient enough to help them become millionaires or billionaires or trillionaires. they have admitted that speaking/learning english would be an added advantage, but there's not a 100% necessary need to learn english.

however i think the luckiest ones are the bilingual people, i.e. the people in malaysia & singapore mainly, who are both fluent in english and mandarin, although malaysia is more fluent in cantonese and malay than english & mandarin, they still understand and are able to speak good-enough english to get them through.

Chinese is relatively a harder language than english. I still think English will still be the international language. But definitely more and more people will take up Chinese as a second language!

Hi, just would like to correct something said by someone above. Chinese is a language. Mandarin and Cantonese are the spoken language aka dialect. They have the same writing system. (everyone from different dialect background can understand each other through writing.).
In China, classes are all conducted in mandarin, so everyone from different dialect group is definitely able to communicate with each other in Mandarin. (except only for some elderly)

Sure, if you plan to go to China or HK, then go for it

Sure, go for it

no thanks

Who are the "we" in your question? Where are these "we" from?

Do you know how much effort you need to put in your daily life to learn to speak fluent Chinese as a second language?

If you're not very interested in this one of the most difficult languages in the world, you might give up right away because of all the hard works required.

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How illogical is Jorinetal's answer!!!!!!! How funny!!!!!

"The more economically wealthy, the more people go out to study abroad (and no return)."

People smell money and follow the flow, wherever there are opportunities to be rich, people will return and stay!

How can a nation can get strong by just exporting their young students to foreign countries and hoping them to bring their parents along with them later on then the nation would be built automatically and turned rich!

Where the hack on this planet would house millions of Chinese under the strict immigration policies.

It will help to speak Mandarin.

What for? There is already an International Language, it is called English

20 years??? It's more like 5 years. Learn chinese now because they're not likeley to be communicating in english anytime soon.

maybe,i think so
but i prefer to learn english hahaha

No.

1. Chinese learn more and more English.
2. Chinese is only spoken in 3 Countries, CN, SG and TW
3. Even 40% of Chinese don't speak (Mandarin)Chinese

Even China itself struggles to get more people to speak Mandarin.

However, it's fun to learn it anyway.

No. The more economically wealthy, the more people go out to study abroad (and no return).
English would be staying at the position of international language.