I Do.


http://www.learnchinesewithyangyang.com/

Good luck with the Flied lice...

I will probably try to learn Mandarin at some point- mainly because I am interested in technology business.

There are enough reasons to at least entertain the idea that the world's technology and financial centers might end up in Asia within a few decades. What it comes down to is that there are over a billion of them to draw upon as a workforce. If the country gets modernized enough, that would be a huge economic engine- it already is!

The education (university) systems in China arent as cutting edge as ours or those in europe, but a larger proportion of Chinese college students (like 40%, as opposed to around 20% in the US) are getting degrees in science/engineering. In the next few decades it is quite possible we'll be outnumbered by Chinese/Asian engineers.

When they start developing more advanced weapons technology than us, that will be the day! It's not impossible to think of if there are eventually going to be way more scientists churning away out there when their economy is really strong.

I've been slightly fascinted by how the telecom in parts of Asia (Japan, Southeast Asia) has generally been way ahead of ours for the last 10-15 years. If you want to see what we'll have in a year or two, go to Japan or Hong Kong. It's possible that the cats who can throw around hundreds of billions setting up telecom infrastucture know where the most reasonable future investments will be.

Interestingly, outsourcing manufacturing is basically how technology transfered from the US to developing Asia. It wasnt that long ago that Asian countries didn't manufacture/export much, and when they did it was notoriously crappy. When we started outsourcing manufacturing, we incidentally trained their workforces, taught them how to construct modern plants, taugh them how to run them, gave them reason to develop workforce training programs, etc.

If you just eyeball things, there are these huge, dense, modern cities with awesome monolothich architecture/structures coming together in Southeast Asia. NYC (which has mainly been the world's financial center) is starting to look like a relic of the 19th-20th century. Just my opinion.

The news kind of leaves out the real news.

Who knows what else is going on though- natural resources, wars, global financial meltdown, Chinese democracy, 2012, etc.

At the very least there will be potential business opportunities for Chinese-speaking Americans.

I can understand the point, but...

First of all, the chineese language has +20,000 characters and they don't make desks big enough for keyboards that size.

Second, you'd be better off teaching them English, which is much easier. (because then the rest of us won't have to learn Chineese either)

Third, most tech-work is done in computer languages anyway (and seem to contain more English characters than Chineese characters).

Fourth, There are way more chineese restaurants in New York than burger joints in all of China.

Fifth, Florida oranges taste better than Mandarin oranges.

Sixth, Lemme Kilmeister would lose all his musical ability should he ever get his mole removed.

Seventh, the insectacons and dinobots were clearly a marketing ploy to re-inject interest into the original concept.

Eighth, wait what was this about again?

quote:

Lemme Kilmeister

Anyone ever get into "Hawkwind"?

Way more enjoyable than Motorhead in my opinion.

the 2008 nobel laureates. you think they need to pass us in science and technology still?

At least in mandurin you don't have to conjugate like spanish.