English or Chinese.Which is more useful?

Question

I would like to know that what is the most important language in the world of today as China has been improving quickly.

Answer 1

depends on where you live

Answer 2

I'd stick with English for the next few years. It's not just the number of speakers that is important, but how dispersed a particular language is, that determines how 'important' it is. Currently, English is the most popular international language and the fact that it is a member of the No. 1 language family - Indo-European - makes it relatively accessible to a large number of non-native speakers. Mandarin Chinese on the other hand, although boasting a larger number of speakers than English, is geographically in a large mass in part of China. It's a Sino-Tibetan language and therefore has nothing in common with Indonesian, Malay and other languages of its neighbours, apart from Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. Furthermore, because of the writing system, the written word is inaccessible to native speakers of most other languages, which use an alphabetical system to represent something close to the sounds of the words, and this is a further impediment to its universal adoption.

Answer 3

Probably English. There aren't many countries that don't teach it, but Chinese is only so well used cos China has like a fifth of the world living in it. More people will speak English as a second language around the world than Chinese e.g. More people speak English in China than the UK and US combined.

Answer 4

English, though it wouldn't hurt to learn Chinese on the side too.

Although there may be more people speaking Chinese in the world (more than 1.3 billion in Chinese vs 1 billion in English (as first and second language speakers) , the real reason behind more people speaking Chinese is because of the huge population of Chinese.

Chinese is spoken mostly by Chinese people in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and all over the world. It is also spoken by a good number but much fewer determined non-Chinese people. I wouldn't bet against Chinese gaining more importance in the world economy, but one thing to remember is that many Chinese people can speak English and a few other languages. Not that many English-speaking non-Chinese can speak, read or write Chinese though.

Because English uses an alphabetic system, it is considerably easier for Latin languages-speaking or European/Russian-speaking people to learn English instead of Chinese. Even if you learned Chinese via pin-yin (phonetic alphabets), to be effective in living in China you need to recognize a good number (a few thousands) of Chinese characters. If Chinese was easier to read and write than English, I'd say Chinese. But since that's not the case, English is more useful, more practical.

Answer 5

English as it is used throughout the world. Very few countries outside of China use chinese. English is accepted as the basic language for business throughout the world.

Answer 6

English obviously. Its spoken as the national and official language in 22 countries,unlike chinese. In china over 20 million people are learning english. How many americans are learning chinese? That's your answer in part. The other part is that chinese has over 2000 characters while english has 26. Who do you think would be inclined to even study chinese unless they planned to go there.

Answer 7

For me English because some Chinese people probably were speaks English than the Chinese and I guess that speaks English is a very important on how to communicate with the other people.

Answer 8

In China: Chinesse (mandarin?) no doubt of that, but outside China English is more important.

Took for example Japan who is located close to China, I bet more japanesse people undertand English than Chinesse.

Most world class businesses are carried in English.

Answer 9

CHina will be 100 years before it becomes a superpower. Would ve useful, but English is essential on the world stage

Answer 10

The remarks about the local take-away may go some to answering your question; in fact, the staff of take-away restaurants are more likely to be Cantonese speakers, whilst Mandarin is what most people understand by Chinese and is the language of the People's Republic. A language that fragmented is likely to be of limited currency in my opinion.

Answer 11

English because it's an international language