The future of English

300 million chinese may read and write english but out of this group how many can only say 'hello'. If the paper is classifying chinese of foreign residence in here then I can believe this figure, but if the authors are postulating that there are this many english users in China proper then I would argue not likely. This would be 1 in 4 users of english here and I find myself very lucky if I meet 1 in 25 that have conversational level english.

Yeah, I was wondering about how they classify "English speakers," because that definition would have a huge effect on the number of people that article is talking about. Personally, I would only count people who spend a significant portion of their day actually using English, not people who took high school English but who would actually be lost in a real English speaking environment. I wouldn't say my husband is a English speaker any more than I'd say I'm a Spanish speaker, even though I took Spanish in school and could probably still cobble together enough Spanish to order a meal or ask for directions without making a fool of myself.

I once had a fairly heated argument with other teachers over tag questions. Students were Singaporean, inclined to come up with things like "You would like a coffee, isn't it?"

Lots of languages have a universal tag -- Chinese ma, Japanese ka, French n'est-ce pas, ... English doesn't; there's quite a bit of grammar you can teach about tags. There are exceptions to the general rules too, as in "You think I'm stupid, do you?" with a rather different meaning than the same sentence with "don't you?" as the tag..

I just avoided all those complications, told them to use "right?" To me, teaching the tags was a waste of time. Things like getting them to use correct tenses in narrative or conditionals were better uses of grammar-teaching time.

To some, this was heresy.

In this spirit, I counsel to avoid the "I very like hot dog" trap by using "really".  "Like something very much" is just clumsy.

If you read the article it is quite clear that it is talking about people who read and write English, but not necessarily speak it frequently.  I work with a number of people in this field, including Chinese journos, academic researchers (even some Chinese English teachers!!) etc.  Their written English and comprehension of written English is good, but they have more difficulty in speaking.

An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice.

... hence my job, getting them practice at the actual English chat.

New quastion: what would you change about the English language, had you the power?

New quastion: what would you change about the English language, had you the power?

I'd change the spelling of 'question' to 'quastion'.

I'd teach Americans how to say zed and to spell like Canadians.
I'd teach the English to speak like Canadians.
I'd teach the Australians, umm, lessee now, umm... to get us another beer.

Sorry, latefordinner, the Americans have the spelling idea right.  No need for that 'u' in colour and other related words.  Hiccough makes more sense as hiccup.

I'd like to change some of the spelling to more accurately reflect the way words sound.

Plurals need some work, too.  I'm teaching a munchkin class a unit on farm animals that also teaches plurals.  Cow - cows.  Horse - horses. So far, so good. Sheep - sheeps.  No, just sheep.  Hui shenme?  I don't know, it just is.  Pig - pigs.  Goat - goats.  Goose - gooses.  No, geese.  WTF?!?   Stupid English.

I'd teach Americans how to say zed and to spell like Canadians.
I'd teach the English to speak like Canadians.
I'd teach the Australians, umm, lessee now, umm... to get us another beer.

Thanks for acknowledging that Aussies have English exactly right!!  No need for us to change anything.

As for the beer -    it's my shout.

I'd remove plurals.

We aren't confused by 1 sheep, 2 sheep.

Why shouldn't it be 1 dog, 2 dog?

Same as Chinese then. yi tiao gou, liang tiao gou.  That would work.

It would work better without the *&%@#ing measure words.

I could live with s or es to designate unspecified quantities of plurals.  It's the huge number of exceptions (to almost every rule) that mess up English.

Naturally, all the flaws in the language originated in England.  America has been struggling to fix all these errors.

American English - the true World Standard.   

Same as Chinese then. yi tiao gou, liang tiao gou.  That would work.

tiao? isn't that the measure word for long, thin things, like roads or cigarette cartons.

I thought it was yi zhi gou

Unless of course you are talking about wiener dogs. 

Dogs, fish and snakes are tiao - along with towels, trousers, rivers, skirts, roads, laws, news, views, arms, legs and human lives!

Chickens, sheep, monkeys, birds, cats, crabs and most other animals are zhi.

Horses and mules are pi.

See why we don't need measure words in English! 


No measure words.
No plurals.
Regularies verb forms.
Change wildly unphonetic spellings. Or, perhaps, make each letter or letter group simple represent one sound. Ah, how simple it would all be.

Making this actually work? Not a snowballs chance in hell. Language is an evolving beast, and we can't really mess with that.

So, my favourite suggestion is no more plurals.

Chickens, sheep, monkeys, birds, cats, crabs and most other animals are zhi.

Horses and mules are pi.

I have long suspected this.

And all dogs are named Ralph.