Learn Chinese Or English?

I know you agree… English.

Approximately 300 million Chinese people are learning English. This is equivalent to the population of the USA.

The official language of aviation is English. The official language of maritime is English. International contracts are drawn up in English. International business is conducted in English. Is this gong to change? No.

Imagine a Greek person buys plastic bottles from China. Will they negotiate and draw up their contract in Chinese? Now imagine they put a load of Greek olive oil into their bottles and ship them over to Brazil to be sold. Will they negotiate and draw up a contract in Portuguese? Will the Chinese say, “sorry, Mr. Greek Person, you don’t speak Chinese… I couldn’t possibly sell you all my plastic bottles… I only sell my plastic bottles to people who speak Chinese.”

The sceptics among you may argue, “ah, but what if the world did learn Chinese? After all, Chinese nurseries are popping up all over the place… my child’s generation will surely speak Chinese as their second language.” Firstly, online English language schools are also popping up all over the place. Secondly, will China put on hold all negotiations until the world has got up to speed on its Chinese language skills and cannot only verbally thrash out a deal in the language but can also comprehend contracts in Chinese?

Who’s Learning?

According to the British Council, about 1.7 billion people were learning and using English worldwide in 2015. That number has since grown. David Graddol, a linguist and researcher, claims nearly one-third of the world’s population (2.5 billion) will soon be studying English. A majority of these 2.5 billion people will be from China and then India. After that, most students will come from countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Sudan. To put that into perspective, only 14,000 Indonesians are learning Chinese language and literature. And it seems that not only do the Indonesians prefer to learn English over Chinese, when they do learn Chinese, they include literature. This could imply that the reason for study is culture instead of business orientated.

Instruction of English as a second language (ESL) is a US$63 billion a year industry. The Chinese account for US$ 5 billion of that. And just to put that into context, annual revenue from the USA’s education industry is merely US$1.3 billion.

How Are the Chinese Doing It?

Most Chinese people prefer to study English online with native speakers. An English teacher in a small town in Illinois, USA, makes about US$2,000 a month from teaching English online to children in China. Teachers typically connect at 5am to teach the children when they get home from school.

And the industry is going from strength to strength…

It is anticipated that India and China are soon to have 276 million and 238 million Internet users respectively. Indonesia will probably boast 87 million Internet users. This all means more access to learning English online.

What’s more, David Graddol claims that 80% of the world’s electronically stored information is in English. Another recent study states that 51.2% of the world’s top 10 million websites is English. And Chinese doesn’t even come in second. Russian does, a tiny 6.8%.