American Families Are Now Packing Up And Moving To China So Their Kids Can Learn To Speak Mandarin

[Spider Jerusalem]

14. Well no, that's not really true at all

English speakers have a less difficult time learning Germanic and Romance languages. I can read, more or less, a newspaper in Spanish, or French, or Portuguese, or Italian, or Romanian, well enough to get most of the sense out of it, despite never having studied one of those languages, thanks to four years of Latin in school. Given application and an environment that encouraged me to actually read AND speak one of those languages on a daily basis, I could probably become fluent, or at least fluent enough to get by. So, probably, could most people; but the thing is, most English speakers don't HAVE to. There's not really any incentive for language learning when English is the lingua franca of international business, diplomacy, aviation, and science; a native-born English speaker today is in more or less the same situation as a Roman in AD 100.

Also, translation of written materials is probably a better goal given the difficulties of learning to read Chinese (if you'd read the article I linked you'd see that even native speakers who are students attending a top university can't say what the character for a specific word is in some instances).