Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

(I think I'll post this here too to compare discussions)

I suspect that a few things are going to happen in the next few years to shake things up here:

- By 2012 or so I predict that a study will come out showing that in spite of all the English teachers brought over here over the years that the average Korean will have a better command of Chinese than English. Maybe by as late as 2015.
- After this happens it'll be an issue for a while but it won't change policy for a while because English will still be by and far the most useful language on the planet. However:
- Pyeongchang failed to get the Olympics for 2014 while Incheon did get the Asian Games for the same year. That's going to make a huge difference from the way things might have gone if for example Pyeongchang had gotten the Olympics in 2010 or 2014 and Incheon didn't get anything.

There's a chart here on this site that evaluates languages based on their economic value:

http://www.steinke-institut.de/sprachenundwirtschaft.htm

You can see that in 2025 English will still be at #1 with no near competitors, but also note that Chinese will have grown by almost 200% in importance, up to second place. This alone won't cause Korea to abandon its dream of being fluent in English, but something else might: the point in which Chinese starts to be used as a language for business not just in between Korea and China, but other nations as well by default. I'm thinking Vietnam and Malaysa as an example.

Since China is right next door though there's no reason for Koreans to bring in Chinese teachers to live on one-year contracts; they'll just take the plane to Qingdao for example (50 minutes) and study there. I think the system of bringing English teachers over here will remain, but maybe with less emphasis on hagwons. And by that time China will have a much higher standard of income, will pay more for English teachers than now, and a lot of people will migrate over there while long-termers will stay in Korea and live it up. And maybe Korea will come to learn that it's much easier to just send people to a country to learn a language than try to get everybody to learn it without ever leaving the country, so we'll see a continued increase of them in the Philippines for example. And perhaps through that their English will actually continue to improve in spite of not worrying so much about it anymore.

[Fresh Prince]

Mandarin Chinese is really becoming a popular second language in many countries but what does the economic significance rating use to come up with it's future predictions? Are they suggesting that business people in the western countries will be learning Chinese in order to business with China, that migrant workers from less developed countries will be learning Chinese in hopes of earning higher wages in Chinese factories? Or is it that the population of China is expected to grow at a much higher rate as more people enjoy increased prosperity, therefore increasing the number of Chinese speakers?

[Zulu]

[LuckyNomad]

Well, if a businessman in Japan wants to learn a language in order to do business with many countries, he can A. Learn mandarin and only do business with China, or B. Learn English and be able to talk to many different countries as well as the Chinese businessmen who already learned English.
The problem with saying that Mandarin will eventually take over, is that it is localized and only useful in China. Learning Mandariin won't help you in Europe, India, the Middle East, or Japan. Also, if given a choice between learning English or learning the 4,000 chinese characters required for reading, I'd say that most people would choose to use English.

[twg]

A couple of years ago, I taught adults at a small company in Cheonan. While most of them wanted to study English, they had to focus on studying Chinese because that's where most of their business was.

Between that and noticeably declining enrollments in hagwons, I'm saying that we got maybe five more good years here.

[Ronald]

I agree with Zulu. Don't underestimate the power of Western power and influence. China is a market of cheap labor and investment. Koreans companies are sending major divisions over to China for that reason. However, Koreans are moving to Western countries for the universities and superior education and believe me, we should all know that it is Superior. The point is that Koreans are investing in China to make money, but they're spending it in Western countries.

[VanIslander]

where's the boldness?

the increased importance of economic and linguistic relations with China has been mentioned several times in the Korea Herald alone

though the mass transit of Koreans doing educational tourism in China is an interesting twist in the predictions

[Zulu]

[VanIslander]

[Zulu]

[Zulu]

[JongnoGuru]

For a period of several years back in the late '80s to early '90s, there was a fairly major push in Korea -- primarily by the government, but the chaebol were involved as well -- to cultivate cadres of fluent... wait for it now... Japanese speakers. It was all about trade and technology, the wave of the future. This was a time before America's dot-com craze really took off, a time when the West as a whole was looking pretty fat-assed and flat-footed to Asia's young and growing "little tigers", a time when China was only ever mentioned in the future tense. Whereas Japan (yes, the now much-hated, much-maligned Japan) was seen as this unstoppable world-beating export juggernaut that could do no wrong. And Koreans of that time were far more interested in learning, less so in crapping their pants about Dokdo. (goddamned if I know where that stupid non-issue was hiding all those years)

So now it's Mandarin. Ho-fukien-hum.

[Zulu]

[in_seoul_2003]

[eamo]

From what I can see the Chinese are also seeing English as the international language of business. Not Chinese. That's not to say that knowing Chinese won't be of a great help in China, but the Chinese themselves have accepted English as the number one language for business.

I don't see the growth of the Chinese economy changing the lingua franca in a short space of time.

Twg. Five years??!! You joking?