Chinese Among High-School Seniors (and in the Movies)

There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as a subject among high-school seniors in England. (I would bet the same holds for California, but I don’t have the figures.) At “A-level” — the key determinant of eligibility for college, roughly like a U.S. high-school diploma — 3,334 students took Chinese this year (up 8.6 percent on last year), and only 3,058 took German (down 16.5 percent since 2017).

I did a brief interview about this on an evening-commute-time radio talk show, discussing why Chinese is a tough subject (answer: the extraordinarily complex writing system makes for a vast memory burden), and which language high-schoolers should be advised to learn (answer: the language of the people you most identify with — simply liking people enough to want to speak the way they do is the most powerful determinant of success in learning a foreign language really well).

But reflecting on the topic later, I decided that the news media should have done more research on the story. How many of the 3,334 students doing Chinese had a Chinese family of origin? Britain, like California, has been absorbing Chinese immigrants for more than a hundred years.

For purposes of high-school language lessons, “Chinese” means Mandarin Chinese, a standardized variant of the language of the Beijing area. The Independent stated that Mandarin is “the first language of over 1.25 billion people worldwide.” It isn’t. (The number of true native speakers is probably well below 500 million.) In the Hong Kong area, from which a huge proportion of the Chinese immigrants are drawn, Cantonese is the local language (despite government denials). Nonetheless, immigrants who had some schooling in China would generally have been taught at least some Mandarin in school. That would tend to make passing the 12th-grade Mandarin Chinese exam pretty easy for a teenage immigrant. And even children who left China too early to have learned much Mandarin might learn a bit from parents or grandparents, enough to give them a head start.

Nothing wrong with that: Immigrants face many problems in their new land, and if in this respect they get a small advantage from their bilingualism, so much the better. But how many takers were indeed in the position of studying Chinese as a heritage language? Maybe such data are not collected. They should be. From the newspaper accounts you might think that flocks of far-sighted English teenagers were gravitating toward the very difficult task of learning Chinese in order to reach out to a coming world economic superpower. The situation could be very different: English teenagers becoming even less interested in foreign languages than they used to be, while ethnic Chinese increasingly take up the study of their parents’ or grandparents’ native language. It would be interesting to know which picture is closer to the truth.

Another question is about the expectations of those learning Mandarin. Are the A-level takers making the assumption that they will be able to master enough characters to be fully literate, capable of reading (or even writing) business or political documents in Chinese? Or are they mainly interested in developing enough spoken Mandarin to permit a little polite conversation? Traditional ways of teaching Chinese, ignoring pinyin romanization, treat the learning of several hundred characters as a sine qua non, but Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has often expressed the view that the traditional methods represent a huge mistake: If taught without the character system, using pinyin for taking notes, he says spoken Chinese is actually very easy to learn.

I was mulling these things over after the early evening radio spot when I realized that I still had time to catch a movie,

so I went out to see The Meg, a creature feature about a team of marine scientists who discover in deep water off the Chinese coast that Carcharocles megalodon is not as extinct as they thought.

The film is much better than its initial reviews suggested. It turns out to be a very successful Chinese/American bilingual co-production (worldwide gross over $300 million and rising daily). The Chinese cast members sometimes speak to each other in Chinese with English subtitles. They include the distinguished leader of the scientific team, Dr. Minway Zhang (Winston Chao), and his oceanographer daughter Suyin Zhang (Bingbing Li, giving a lovely performance as the female romantic lead opposite Jason Statham, playing the heroic rescue diver Jonas Taylor).

Listed in the final credits, along with enough special-effects people to populate a medium-size town, are the names of dozens and dozens of translators. Solid evidence that, if nothing else turns up, there’s paid work in today’s film industry for those who command both English and Chinese.