Aremonus wrote:

Are we to decadent and assertive to accept that our native language isn’t necessarily the most important in the world?

The by far most important language in todays world is English, and I’m sure most people coming from whatever country do understand that. However, accepting that English is the most important language, doesn’t necessarily mean everyone needs to learn English.

On the other hand, there are certain groups here, who really should. Last week there was an article in our local newspaper, where the local tourism organization lamented on the low number of international visitors. The reality is, you can’t buy a train ticket at a German train station in a small town using English. You can’t order a meal using English in a restaurant. I have witnessed a lot of incredible situations here, a city of about 20,000 inhabitants, where tourism is considered a major part of the local industry.

Aremonus wrote:

If I have to write laws [...] in 20 different languages

My mother tongue is German, but I don’t understand German legal speak. I can’t see changing the court language from German to English would benefit me in any way, despite having a solid grasp of the English language.

Aremonus wrote:

… costs …

During the last 10 years, in Germany, 50% of all wage earners got their wage reduced, when adjusted for inflation. That is despite an economic growth. During the last 10 years we have seen so many increases of productivity, increased GDP, yet 50% of all workers have to accept wage reductions. I have a very hard time understanding this. Why should those people support the companies to save costs by learning a common European language. Why should these people do that, when the end result will be a reduction in wages. The problem is simple: If we all speak the same language, not only your company will benefit, all companies will benefit equally. As soon as one company decides to put that saved money into marketing, the others will follow to stay competitive, the workers would gain nothing. You can’t ask the common people to do something, when they have nothing to gain. In fact, they would be stupid if they did learn one common language, just to fill the manager’s pockets. Pay them to learn and they will learn. Or did I miss something?

Looking at the topic from a non-commercial perspective…
Looking at the topic from a non-commercial perspective there are reasons to keep different languages and there are reasons to switch to one single language. Everyone has reasons, and everyone will prefer different points of view. Anyone is free to speak English or Chinese in public or at home or with friends. I don’t see a need for any discussion of what is the best way. The decision is up to the people and they can make a democratic decision at any time. When enough people in Germany speak English in everyday situations, then English will become an official language.

Justrecently wrote:

If we harmonized Europe with some kind of putong-english or putong-esperanto, this continent would become culturally and economically weaker, rather than stronger.

I agree.

First, let’s look at the key points of the article “Kaum ein Schüler lernt Chinesisch”, which loosely translates to “Only very few school kids learn Chinese”. Here are the main points:

- At German public schools, in the academic year 2010/11, Aproximately 5570 school kids at 226 schools learnd Chinese. Either as part of the regular curriculum, or in voluntary after class lectures. The exact number is expected to be higher, because just about 50% of the schools with a Chinese program returned the questionnaire.

- In the academic year 2007/08 the number was at 3200.

- In an unspecified year, probably last year, 7,500,000 school kids learned English, 1,700,000 learned French, 56,000 learned Italian.

Interesting numbers. Let’s find out a bit more. Germany, Switzerland and Austria combined have about 5000 students of Chinese at the university level. Finally we have evening schools, independent students and others learning the language outside of school or university, for example myself. I couldn’t find any statistical numbers for this group, however I think there are not that many. When I was in evening school learning Chinese, there were rarely more than 10 students at my level in a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Given these numbers, I’d say less than 20,000 people in Germany are actively learning Chinese at this moment. How many of them will learn until they are fluent? I don’t know, but the number could be much less.

That being said, I think it might pay off eventually to keep on learning Chinese. I just checked monster.com. There are a lot of jobs posted with “Chinese nice to have”. But there are also a few jobs labeled “fluent Chinese and German required”. So far I have met few Chinese persons who are fluent in German.

In conclusion: Awesome!

The US politicians say, that the fixed exchange rate is unfair and that the market should decide about the value of the yuan. A fixed exchange rate supports exports from China to the USA, while products from the USA have a hard time finding their way into the Middle Kingdom. Well, not only the USA is crying about the exchange rate, also several other Western governments happily chime in.

As far as I can remember, prices are a question of supply and demand. Let’s assume the Chinese yuan is freely tradeable. Who is then going to stop the USA from printing money and increasing the supply of US-Dollars? It could be called currency manipulation as well. A lot of people around the world hold dollar assets at the moment. They will do something to prevent US-Dollar devaluation. However it won’t go on like this forever as the US-Dollar’s position as world-currency is weakening. The US government can just print money or remove money to control the value of the US-Dollar. That, at least to me, is similarly manipulative as a fixed exchange rate.

The US should rather improve their economy, the US people should work harder instead of spending time on crying about the Chinese Yuan. In fact the US people should be happy about China trying to move forward economically. Each Chinese person who leaves poverty behind and gets hold of some money is a potential buyer of Western luxury brands like Apple, Bentley or Luis Vitton.

There was some talk about shutting it down at the 10th of April, but now it already happened. Let’s see who shouts, cries and complains the loudest. Bye bye google.cn, bye bye censorship. I guess they’ll throw a big party in the Baidu headquarters. Who has Baidu shares?

For comparison purposes 2008′s values for a number of countries sorted by per capita GDP.

What’s more?

• The money in China is not equally distributed. Living standards in the coastal regions could reach western levels in 20 years.
• Once the current recession is over, China could see a few years of 10%+ growth.
• It’s obviously still worth learning Chinese.

My numbers are pretty simplified. I just took the 2008 numbers and then added 8% growth each year. Whatever your interpretation of these numbers is or whatever your conclusions are feel free to add a comment.

• 13. November: Tokyo, Japan
• 14. November: Tokyo, Japan
• 15. November: Singapore, Singapore
• 16. November: Shanghai, China
• 17. November: Beijing, China
• 18. November: Beijing, China
• 19. November: Seoul, South Korea

Besides his long term mission world peace, Obama will talk about a number of questions. I also want to give an overview about these.

US – China trade deficit

China exports much more goods to the USA than vice versa, therefore much more cash is flowing from the USA to China. The money is literally leaving the USA and the value of the dollar declines. While this shouldn’t be a problem for China it still is, because the USA is the main buyer of Chinese products. Furthermore China has huge money reserves in $US, therefore they are interested in a strong US-Dollar. Obama will try to solve this issue with Chinese leaders. Possible solutions include USA geting their household right and China. China on the other hand has to give up on the restrictions regarding its currency the Chinese yuan. The RMB is not freely convertible or tradeable and is subject to strict governmental controls, makeing exports from China to the world cheaper than they really are. The US – Chinese trade deficit is a serious problem for both nations and I’m sure Obama will spend a lot of time talking about this with Hu Jintao.

Looking for new allies

For a long time several countries of East Asia wanted to create an economical alliance, however they couldn’t agree on the terms. Especially Japan was leaning to the USA and keeping distance from China. But times change quickly and Japan is more and more accepting that USA is no longer the center of the world. It is clear that Asia will be the world-shaping global force at some point in the next few decades and an exclusive economical alliance within Asia is only the next logical step. Barack Obama wants to make sure, that the USA is not left behind in this restructuring process.

Human Rights

As part of his world peace task, Obama wants to promote human rights once again. With the influence of the USA fading and other problems on top I doubt his words about this will any weight, except if he can present some logical reasons. While it is clear that solid human rights are necessary for economic excellence, it is not clear why China with it’s economic growth should care about them. The growth keeps the people happy for now and ensures the top position of the party.

Afghanistan strategy, Iran, North Korea

Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan enjoy a walk in the sun. Picture: Wikipedia

When the Afghanistan war started I could read in the newspapers, it will be only for a few years until the NATO-troops move out again. The Afghanistan war started on October 7. 2001, lasting more then 8 years and still going on without an end coming into sight. Obama wants to exchange views with Asian leaders on Afghanistan, but also North Korea and Iran.

Good luck!

Barack, Obama, I wish you a great journey and good luck on your Asia tour. I guess all the political interested readers of my blog will also follow the events on TV and newspapers and also I’m looking forward for the outcome, however I doubt we will see any real surprises.

There is no date when the Chinese characters finally hit the domain names in practice, but I guess it might happen in less than one year. When this happens I might register the domain name 学中文吧.中国 additional to yolearnchinese.com. This also opens up for funny domain names like 我爱台湾和.中国. I guess other more creative people will come up with more exaggerated insensitive political incorrectness in Chinese domain names.

It seems like the Chinese are realising their own situation. If they let people just copy anything it will hurt their economy in the long run. Who wants to spend money and time into developing new products if they will be copied anyway? This is a serious threat to the Chinese employment market. Simply copying products doesn’t require high intellectual skills, actually it’s pretty easy I can tell you (although I never ever did that). Especially with digital goods this is easy. Anything sold on a old-fashioned CD or DVD can be copied on a cheap homecomputer by almost anyone with basic technical knowledge. But the results of this are severe. Highly educated people won’t find jobs. Noone needs them to develop anything.

As high skilled workers are not needed two things happen. First some of the more smarter Chinese just go abroad in search of their luck. The second group stays in China and accepts jobs below their skills, which leads to a certain frustration. While copying things allows people to buy quality goods for cheap prices it undermines the development of a high tech industry which is interested in researching new things.

With this sentence in the Microsoft case a new message has been given: It is no longer possible to get away for stealing other peoples intellectual property. The offenders have been given sentences of several years in prison, and they have to pay a 1.5 million 元 fine, which is small as they made gains of 1.9 million 元 by selling the software. Copyists take care! It still might take years before intellectual property rights are widely accepted within the Chinese society, however a first step has been taken. Maybe this is also a moment to get hope that not only intellectual property rights are respected in China, but also the people itself are respected. Something China is lacking currently.