Why do you study English?

Guest   Fri Aug 10, 2007 11:47 am GMT
The litany of knowing English help you in the working world is a lie. In all countries they go on telling it, in my country too, but at the end if you know English or not it's exactly the same.
Travis   Fri Aug 10, 2007 1:11 pm GMT
What i meant is that everyday spoken English has to be learned purely as a spoken language independent of the written language, whose connection with the spoken language is rather loose in reality. I was furthermore saying that one may encounter things in dialects that simply do not exist as such in the written language, and thus require translation into the formal language before they can be written down (unless one is to use ad hoc informal writing conventions).
Jasper   Fri Aug 10, 2007 5:49 pm GMT
<<t's only a fashion, it doesn't last forever. Chinese is the language of the future>>

I doubt that VERY much. In China, as we speak, 200 million people are learning English.

Besides, Chinese is just too damned hard. I don't think more than 1% could master it.

I've heard that Chinese is the second- hardest language on the Earth to learn for an English-speaking person. (First is supposed to be Navajo.)

However, I agree that China will probably be the richest country in the world--perhaps in as little as 20 years.