If one wishes to remain ignorant of the foreign language and live in a happy bubble, that's perfectly fine for the said individual, wearing colored glasses and wandering through a library full of books that he can't read. However the problem is that we have too many of these bubble-residing folks working as scholars, analysts, commentators, authors, and so on.
For example, when Tom Clancy published "The Bear and the Dragon", I donno where he found his ghost writer, but the guy had probably never set foot in China and had all kinds of weird ideas about what the country was actually like. Quoting one Dutch reviewer of the book on Amazon:
"Please Donate to the "Give Clancy a holiday in China fund", December 16, 2004
Reviewer: Geert van Roosmalen "Geert" (The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
I've read a lot of Tom Clancy in my life but this is an absolute low.
You would think with all the millions he's made he could at least afford an $1000 plane ticket to China. Even if he had just gone for one weekend he would have seen that his portrayal of China is complete rubbish. Not only is it inaccurate it's downright terrible. The only Mao suits you will find in China these days are on Mao's corpse and in fancy dress stores.
Laughable was the seduction of the Chinese secretary, Having western food for the first time after all that "Chinese garbage". It makes me wonder how Clancy feels about this 5th column of slant-eyes (with U.S. nationality!) living in his own country peddling their 'garbage' to god-fearing honest wasps.
I'm from Holland and I cant wait to see how Tom Clancy would portray my country in his next novel. Probably we would be called cheeseheads or something suitably insulting every two sentences. We would obviously all live in windmills and walk around in clogs. In fact we wouldn't even be able to walk because we would be continuosly sticking our fingers in holes in dikes to stop our country flooding. We would invade some country that has been our ally for more than half a century (eg. UK) for some ridiculous reason (Dutch businessmen want to monopolize world cheese production). Finally our totally incompetent airforce/navy (whatever) would be destroyed by a single US plane: Final result: Cheeseheads, 100000 casualties. USA, 0 casualties. US (incompetent)allies, 200 casualties (to keep it realistic). Of course this would happen in a book of not less than 3000 pages and include JR telling us that he really really really dosn't like being POTUS every 2 or 3 pages.
Keep it up Clancy!! You're sliding, but rock bottom is still two or three books away."
To cite a more recent example, this is Gwynn Guilford on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gwynn-guilford/0/b5a/6b8
"... broad expertise in China, having worked in Beijing and Shanghai for nearly six years. "
This is what she wrote for the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archiv ... le/279830/
"Because they lack siblings, the vast majority of Chinese couples 34 and younger are the sole inheritors of four parents’ wealth. When they die, their offspring get at least two extra homes (and, given investment trends, likely more). This extra supply will drive down prices, says Zhang, and because of the one-child policy, China will have too few young people to absorb the overspill."
When people say "a majority", I think "above 50%", and "vast majority", like absolute majority, means more than 2/3 (>66%). Well, let's see, China started the One Child Policy in 1979. China's total fertility rate was 2.63 per women in 1980, barely dropping below 2.1 around 1990-1993. Those who were born in 1980-1990 are 23-33 years old, prime marrying age today.
So how does someone who lived and worked in China for 6 years conclude that the vast majority of Chinese couples 34 and younger do not have siblings? Did she live in a bubble where no Chinese friends or coworkers bothered to introduce (or at least talk about) their family and siblings?
And finally, in the first post of this thread, John T. Reed wrote:
"The Japanese military had to use an alphabet to send Morse code during World War II. That suggests to me that those picture written languages must have to program computers with Mandarin translated to an alphabet. I am well aware that they can create Adobe post-script type translators to convert Chinese characters to the alphabet programming and back again at the other end, but doesn't the underlying programming have to use an alphabet? "
The most important code used by the Japanese in WW2 is JN-25, used by the Japanese Imperial Navy:
http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_he ... jn25.shtml
"JN-25 consisted of a codebook with approximately 27,500 entries and an additive book for superenciphering the codebook values. The additive book consisted of 300 pages, each page containing 100 random five-digit groups. It should be noted that this additive book for JN-25 was not a one-time pad: the five-digit groups were re-used, as needed."
In other words, the military code were numerical and not in alphabet. Perhaps he is confusing the military code with civilian Kana code. The numerical system possibly have its roots from the Standard Chinese Telegraph code from 1870's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
A code book is provided for encoding and decoding the Chinese telegraph code. It shows one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters and four-digit numbers from 0000 to 9999. Chinese characters are arranged and numbered in dictionary order according to their radicals and strokes. Each page of the book shows 100 pairs of a Chinese character and a number in a 10×10 table.
Personally, I find it amusing that the same people who rant about the pending doom/fall of America would advocate "don't learn this foreign language". French was once the Lingua franca of European diplomacy and literacy, but the "foreigners' who learned French did not have particular attachments to it, and switched to English when necessary. I hope this is getting through to some of you, that all the "foreigners", that is, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. who are learning English today do so because it's considered useful, not because they have some attachment to it. Suppose if US economy collapse and Spanish speaking world rises, then the Chinese schools wills simply replace their English classes with Spanish classes.
Frankly, it's incompatible to believe that the US is doomed to fall AND that English will somehow continue to be the world's lingua franca.