The founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently gave a 20 minutes speech at School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, China and it was such a big deal.
- China has the second largest economy in the world.
- China is one of the world’s oldest, richest continuous cultures, and has the most populous nation in the world (over 1.3 billion people).
- Currently, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over 1 billion people around the world, which is about one-fifth of the global population.
- International businesses prefer to hire people who speak more than one language. China has become a huge market, and business leaders are looking for people who can speak Chinese and operate successfully in a Chinese cultural context.
- Being able to speak Chinese may give you an edge when competing for an important position, but considering the ban (or block) of Facebook in China, Zuckerberg may have to learn more than Mandarin Chinese to warm the heart of the Chinese government.
You should also know that the grammatical structure for Chinese does not follow the same rules as that of French’s or English’s. Chinese has no verb conjugation, no noun declension, gender and number distinctions. This means that you don’t have to learn to say “go, going, gone`’in Chinese like French.
However, you don’t have to go through the trouble of learning a new language (at your old age). Google Translate is making communication possible between two ‘linguistically’ different peoples.
Which will you go for – Chinese in school or Google Translate wherever you go?
This post first appeared on Idafrica.ng
