Happy New Year Everyone!

I would like to raise the topic of teaching Asian Languages
in our schools, and see what people think.

Most of our trade and commercial relationships are with
Asia - so doesn't it follow that we should focus quite
heavily on understanding our region and the countries in
our region better?

If we're going to teach foreign languages
in our schools shouldn't many of them be Asian languages?
Finally, is it not important for companies wanting to
do trade in China to know Mandarin?

This is after-all tied in with the future job prospects of our students.
Giving them an extra advantage.

What do you think?

Foxy,

See this ranking of the difficulty of learning different foreign languages (for a native English speaker) from the US Foreign Services Institute

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty

Most of the main Asian languages tend to be very difficult for English speakers to learn and require a great many hours for reasonable competence, hours that would have to be taken away from the rest of the curriculum. Yes, for people who are talented at languages and have good prospects for a career that might require one of them, but a waste of time to make Asian language learning compulsory for all.

Happy new year, Foxy,

Important or not, I oppose any compulsion - including the very demand to attend school.

But if someone wants to learn more language(s) - then let them, why not?

As for the future, neither of us can tell how it will be.

Will Asia and/or China and/or Australia still exist?
Will there still be trade?
Will people still be doing jobs?
Will there be people at all?

Perhaps the best is to allow the children to play and enjoy themselves because by the time they would be grown up the human race and/or its civilisation will be out of existence.

To illustrate, in the 1960's, during the cold war, American scientists developed the strongest ever computer, which was said to be able to answer any question. So president Johnson was invited to test it and typed his questions which were subsequently converted into punched cards and fed to the computer.

Question 1: Will the United States of America still exist in 2000?
Computer: Yes

Question 2: Will we have enough food to eat in 2000?
Computer: Yes

Question 3: How much will a loaf of bread cost in America in 2000?
Computer: 2.50 Rubles

All the Asians you'd need to talk to in order to do business can speak English or have interpreters at their side so learning a second language is just for fun or for the mental exercise, like when I was at school.
The problem is that schools will allow Chinese kids to take Chinese language classes as an instant pass, at my kid's high school the bias towards and favouritism shown to the Asian students is breathtaking.
My daughter put her name down for Italian for LOTE this year but was allocated to Chinese, literally nobody wants their kids in the Chinese classes so Italian was over-booked.
They will try to push kids who do well in Italian or who speak it at home out of that class because it's "not fair" but the Asians get an Automatic A in LOTE.
In the end my wife simply said "She's not doing Chinese, she got good marks in Italian last year and you're setting her up to fail LOTE, fix it please", and they did.

Foxy, "This is after-all tied in with the future job prospects of our students. Giving them an extra advantage."

Wherever did you get that idea?

Sometime in the past the Queensland government and education bureaucrats foisted Japanese and Chinese onto State primary and secondary schools, deliberately displacing and discontinuing what were insultingly referred to as 'traditional' languages. Out went the baby with the bathwater.

It was expensive chaos and wasteful. Just by way of example, our local primary had Japanese and the neighbouring secondary school, Japanese. Think about it.

What about FIRST and foremost institute an independent comprehensive audit, of the failed leftist Progressives' social (and educational) re-engineering experiments of the recent past?

What is it about the leftists that they cannot learn from their mistakes? Perhaps it is because they always refuse to be accountable for the unforeseen negative consequences of their idealism.

Foxy,

I am fluent in Hindi and Urdu (basically the same) and I can get by in some of the Hindi based languages, particularly Marathi, the language of Maharashtra state where I spend most of my time.

It's handy socially and people appreciate one speaking their language but mainly, having found a 'captive' English speaker they want to speak that language.

I first learned some Japanese in Japan as a soldier in the Occupation Forces and later I studied it at Sydney Uni.
Our lecturer stressed that we would only learn conversational Japanese as it took many years of study (and he had his PhD) to get a grasp of the subtle nuances of meaning in the language.
In short a Japanese businessman could appear to say one thing and in
fact mean something entirely different.
However if dealings were conducted in English or through an interpreter then what was said was what was meant.

Some other Asian languages are similar but not so nuanced.

In Japanese there are no 'cuss' words just almost imperceptible degrees of politeness until one descends to the equivalent of
"F---Off"

I'm also fairly good at French and use it a lot in India.

Just as an aside, my wife also speaks French and when we watch a French movie on SBS we find ourselves speaking French in the add breaks. Some of the sub-title translations are a hoot.

All in all, foreign languages are no burden to carry but the world of business uses English, you'll get a better deal buying things if you can haggle in the local lingo with shopkeepers, taxi drivers and stall holders etc.