The late, great, Lee Kuan Yew wanted Singaporeans to be bilingual. He went university in London and spoke perfect English and wanted everybody else to do the same. What was good for business was good for Singapore.
What if your first language is English/ Chinese looks challenging. What if your first language is Chinese?
For those learning English or another European language, an easy start is Esperanto. Why Esperanto?
Esperanto is not a pretty language with a lilt like Italian or Welsh but it is an easy language to learn and enables you to communicate with anyone. For nationalists who are hostile to the idea of learning the language of what they see as another country, a rival culture, Esperanto has no country or nationality. It is neatral. Admittedly, it is European laguage based. That is its advantage. So it should be the language of Euorpe, the entry language.
Studies have shown that learning Esperanto speeds up learning of another language such as Spanish.
We already have one country where Esperanto is a popular language for school leavers. Hungary. We also have a country where most people speak two languages, Belgium, where they speak French and Dutch. Switzerland is a country where many speak two languages, such as French and German, or French and Italian, or all three, or sometimes even four languages if you add in Romanch.
What about China? The Chinese and Japanese written languages are the same, sign languages. Just like our international signs for no smoking with a cross over a cigarette. So if you learn to read Chinese, you can also read Japanese. If you are Chinese, you can already read Japanese. If you are Japanese you can already read Chinese. If you are a teacher, and you learn to read either Chinese or Japanese, you can also teach people to read the other language.
Our Latin alphabet emerged from simplified signs. Chinese has been simplified.
If you are going to China or Japan, in case you are caught in an emergency or even a regular fire drill evacuation every Friday (which we had when I was at school in the UK) you need to know the exit sign, which looks like your middle three fingers raised on a flat base.You might like to think of it as a simplified arrow.
The other sign for exit is a mouth, a square, with two legs, the second one curon the right curved like a miniature tail on the letter y. I cannot read Chinese but I sit on the trains in Singapore and read the English dign for emergency exit and in the middle are these two Chinese signs.
A third essential language if you are travelling or doing business worldwide would be Russian or Cyrillic. Cyrillic is the written system for the language of Russia, and Bulgaria, and several other countries.
Which Chinese city could be the next multilingual city? Shanghai near the border with Russia? Somewhere in the South where they are nearer to Cantonese speaking Hong Kong?
Or will the Chinese stop learning English and leave Singapore to be the international multi-lingual trading centre. On Singapore's railway system, called the MRT, you hear announcements in four languages, English, Chinese (Mandarin), Malay (which is almost the same as Indonesian), and Tamil for the Indians from the South of India and Sri Lanka.
Useful Websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
https://www.italki.com/article/438/how-learning-esperanto-can-help-you-learn-other-languages?hl=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script
About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.
Angela Lansbury teacher of English (advanced and English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language, French and other languages, aspiring polyglot.
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