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Few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published a rather provoking article about how China is struggling with the English language.

I’ve read the entire article, which sparked some rage, reading from the comments on it.

May be true that according to surveys (EF and other two language teaching companies) not enough Chinese speak English, and indeed of poor quality. However, as some of the people who left comments noted, it is hard to learn a foreign language and it is even harder when you come from a totally different culture, background and alphabet!

Also, I agree with one of the commenters who wrote that generally most English speaking countries are arrogant and presemptious and expect everyone to be able to speak fluent English, regardless of their country of origin.  Besides, China doesn’t need to speak English as much as the Western world is in need of learning Mandarin for the sake of future business relationships.

What do you think? I’d love to have a debate on this matter as it’s fascinating how one country wants to prevail on another even if just by imposing their own language.

Please do comment and more to read on this below (I recommend the article by the Economist)

Related articles

• Who speaks English? (economist.com)
• The India/China Language Proficiency Debate (kenfinity.wordpress.com)
• Learning English Correctly (socyberty.com)

I know you must think what does this have to do with HR? It does. HR is human resources, it’s people.

Twitter is connecting millions of people everyday and this news is particularly interesting as Oprah Winfrey, one eloquent American star, has been surpassed in the Twitter race for influence by a Chinese actress who doesn’t even use Twitter!

That’s funny, right?

Oprah was the tenth largest tweeter on Earth, and is now being replaced by Yao Chen, a Chinese actress who is the most followed person on Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter.

“This is the first time that the ten most followed microbloggers were not the ten most followed twitterers and is a great demonstration of both the size of China’s online population and the impressive growth of the Chinese platform” writes Thomas Crampton.

Weibo has around 50 million users while the US-based Twitter, which is blocked for use in China, is estimated to have over 200 million users.

Apparently, one of the main reasons why Oprah lost her place in the Top 10 is her lack of committment to tweeting (she only tweets few times a month) whereas Yao Chen is very active on Weibo, posting daily and including pictures in her messages (a feature that perhaps should be included in Twitter too).

Source of image Thomas Crampton post

First of all, my apologies for not posting much lately.

In my last post, I talked about how China could potentially be the world’s next leader.

Well, I’m back on this topic again. The New York Times, dedicated an article to China and the opening up of new opportunities for this country. Last November, a document called the “National Patent Development Strategy (2011-2020)” was published by the State Intellectual Property Office of China.

This document can bring along significant changes for the Chinese economy and its place in the world. China is known worldwide as the “low-cost” workshop, where computers and other products designed elsewhere are built.

This could change, and this documents sets a target: China’s goal for annual patent filings by 2015 is two million.

The publication of such document and the ambitious goal set in motion the process that could make China the new technology innovator and become the leader, to the detriment of the US and its prestigious Silicon Valley.

I’d say, let’s just wait and see. If you have any thoughts you’d care to share, leave a comment.

Well, no. Or perhaps, yes. Who knows. All we can say really, is what we read about. I just came across this article on Yahoo news! It’s quite an interesting read. Anyhow, China of course claims they like the way they are developing and growing as a country and they have no intention whatsoever to outgrow the States in their role of world power. I’d say, we should just wait and see what happens with this regard.

What do you think?