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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (5720)	5/6/2004 12:39:49 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

I think this must be some mistake unless whoever said it is a fool<g>, it is higher total GDP, might even be higher than the US's in another 50 years. go to Amazon and type "Investment Biker" in the books section. the author is enamored of China and has a ridiculous vision of Chinese becoming the highest per-capita GDP. of course this book is much more popular than sober studies of China by people who speak the language and actually know something. but if you are rich and drive around in a custom yellow Mercedes, people tell you nice things. As for whether American kids should learn Chinese or not, the only thing I can say, those who have enough brain power (means after learning what they have to) should Chinese will be the next major non-European language i study. i know Japanese so am familiar with the characters, though of course there are differences. also Korean, which actually makes more use of Chinese words than Japanese, even though most Koreans have very poor knowledge of the characters (the Koreans can get away with this because their sound system is more complex than Japanese; Japanese, with its simplistic phonological system similar to Spanish or Italian, does not have enough sound variation, so they will be forever dependent on having Chinese characters in their writing system). interestingly, there are many Chinese words which the Koreans pronounce as Chinese (Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters), but which in Japanese have been converted to native Japanese words (like saying something like "hand-script" instead of "manuscript" in English). i always thought they were original Japanese words until i studied Korean and realized they are Chinese. i have heard Japanese writing is actually more difficult to learn since there are multiple ways to read a character (some Chinese style reading, some Japanese style). for example, the character "sei" in "Sensei" (teacher) has 16 different readings. in contrast, Chinese has just one reading (so i am told). although the grammar is supposedly not difficult, i think the tonal system of Chinese must be especially challenging to those without experience in total languages. so this is my main interest. also, of course there is learning a language (to the point where you can have a basic conversation) and then there is learning a language (where you can have a learned and nuanced conversation). from what i hear, educated Chinese makes use of a lot of proverbs, idioms, and sayings which are probably beyond the scope of all but the most dedicated of foreign learners. maybe the way one would have had to know something of poetry, Greek, Latin and French to be considered an educated English speaker in Britain 100-150 years ago.