WHY LEARN CHINESE?

Mr. Rakesh Kumar Mishra, Assistant Professor, The Institute for Inventions, Innovations and Entrepreneurship, K.R. Mangalam University

Chinese is the most widely-spoken language in the world. Learn to speak Mandarin and you can speak with millions of people around the world. Besides, Chinese is also one of the world’s business languages. More reasons:

• Business – Business people who speak Mandarin have a huge advantage in tapping into the Chinese market. It is much easier to develop all-important relationships if you can speak Mandarin.
• Travel – China and Taiwan offer exciting travel opportunities. Getting around is much easier if you can speak Mandarin.
• Culture – With thousands of years of history, Chinese culture is endlessly fascinating. Whether your interests are in history, architecture, music, or cuisine, knowledge of Mandarin will enrich your understanding of Chinese culture.
• Chinese has no tenses, no cases, no genders and simple grammar
• When it comes to the issue of grammatical complexity, Chinese is really one of the easiest languages there is to learn.
• Unlike most European languages, it does not feature complicated constructs like cases and genders.
• It also treats tenses in a very simplistic way.
• Furthermore, unlike other East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, the language is free from complicated honorific grammar.
• When you consider how long learners of other languages focus on verb conjugation and genders, you will begin to understand that this is an area where Chinese learners can rapidly outpace learners of other languages.
• China is one of the BRICS countries with the most developed economy. Most of the world’s top companies are located in China. If you can speak Chinese, then you will have lots of job opportunities in any corner of the world.
• China has 5000 years of history, having many cultural, natural heritages and famous landscapes, more than forty natural and cultural sites and natural landscapes have been included in UNESCO’s world heritage list. Learning Chinese is preparing oneself to explore these sites and furthermore can do research on it.

The Chinese Diaspora is almost everywhere, and eager to help you learn

In connection with this last point, another great reason why you should learn Chinese is that China has a huge Diaspora found in almost every country in the world. This presents learners with a readily available pool of people with whom to practice their language skills without even leaving their country.

Furthermore, this community is often very eager to help you learn Chinese, and through engaging with them, you have the ability to make whole new groups of friends!

Gain access to a whole new world of Chinese online spaces

While much of the world shares a common online space, this is not the case for China. Due to government restrictions and the ever-present language barrier, China’s internet sites are effectively inaccessible to outsiders. The Chinese internet is full of its own unique multimedia, memes and other content virtually unknown to the rest of the world.

A good example of this is Chinese video-sharing sites Youku and Tudou, which effectively function as Chinese versions of YouTube. The key to accessing these spaces is Chinese fluency, yet another reward for learning the language.

India-China Relations

India and China are the two oldest civilizations of the world, moreover these two countries are the world’s most populous country, and the two fastest developing giant of Asia andIndia China are also the BRICS countries with the most developed economies. The relations between these two countries can be considered as the most important bilateral relations in the world. So being an Indian it is important for us to learn Chinese and give some contribution in the development of the relations of India and china.