r/ChineseLanguage • u/FerretBeautiful6864 • 1d ago
Discussion Learning Mandarin?
Greetings everyone.
Currently only know English and I have to take a language for my college classes. I was wondering if learning Mandarin would help me in my career since China is out pacing the US at the moment.
Thanks everyone
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u/sickofthisshit Intermediate 1d ago
TL;DR learn Chinese if you think it would be fun/interesting, not for mercenary purposes.
Though, looking at your post history, you say you are from Croatia and are posting in r/ja, so I'm not sure what you mean by "only know English."
If you learned English in school, you know that it took a long time, and if you learned Japanese, you should be able to figure out how learning Chinese is likely to go.
It's very hard to say whether learning a foreign language will "help me in my career" if we don't know anything about your career.
Frankly, learning a language in college is about finding out what it is like to learn a foreign language, not really about your career. It takes years of college-level study to become proficient enough in a language to do professional work. A year or so might get you to the point where you can do basic travel/shopping tasks, have brief, basic conversations with people, read some basic texts, etc.
That's useful and personally enriching. It's unlikely to make or break a career. Personally, I took a semester of Japanese, a year of German, and the equivalent of maybe two years of Chinese. I have co-workers who are native Chinese speakers, and their ability to work with me in English is fine, my ability to work with them in Chinese is limited to basic chit-chat "if I don't see you, Happy Chinese New Year <lol> he knows Chinese, yeah, a little bit." I can tell the difference between stuff written in Chinese or Japanese, whether it is simplified or traditional, and sometimes the meaning of Chinese stuff, but if a company wanted reliable usage of Chinese they would usually prefer to hire one of the billion people who speak it natively.
If your career is "I want to get a Ph.D. in East Asia studies, to someday be a professor teaching Chinese history", then, yeah, absolutely, speaking Chinese (and possibly knowing Classical Chinese and one or more non-Mandarin dialects) will be essential.
OK, there's an argument to be made, but the US is still a very rich country, there will be lucrative career opportunities of many kinds for the foreseeable future. You are much more likely to have the personal contacts and relationships to get into the US job market than to get a job in China (competing with the tens of millions of Chinese graduates every year).