Do you guys think it is worth to learn chinese if I’m planning a career in science?
China is becoming more and more influential in the world, plus in 2020 it’s published more scientific papers than USA, most of which are not translated, thus being able to read them would be an advantage. (https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2020)
I’m not sure how to find information about which country puts more money and is progressing faster in molecular biology/biophysics though.
I have undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics. I taught myself business, entrepreneurship, computer science, machine learning, web development and Chinese. I have run my own consumer hardware startup.
The Chinese word for kinetochore is 动粒. If you go to the English Wikipedia page on kinetochores it’s all in English. If you go to the Chinese Baidupedia page on 动粒 the first sentence lists the English word “kinetochore”. That’s because English is the lingua franca of science.
Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous idea. Learning Chinese because you want to break out of your Western cultural assumptions is a great idea. Learning Chinese because China is the center of the world is perfectly reasonable. Learning Chinese because you want to advance your scientific career is inefficient.
Learning Chinese is harder than learning chemistry. It is harder than learning business and entrepreneurship. Learning Chinese has a difficulty comparable to maybe 4 years of full-time technical training in physics. That’s twice as long as a Master’s Degree in computer science. If you’re already planning to get a graduate degree in molecular biology then learning Chinese too basically amounts to doubling your workload. You could get bigger bang for your buck teaching yourself to program.
I expect that the biggest use of Chinese would be if you wanted to do business in China or with Chinese companies. If you want to do this then learning even a little Chinese is a really good idea (though somehow not mandatory). If you are not interested in either of these things then Chinese is unlikely to help you (directly) in career success.
Learning Chinese should be thought of as part of a liberal education. You should learn Chinese for the same reason you should learn about fiction, art, history, physics, anthropology, math and psychology—because it broadens your understanding of the world. This sort of thing is very useful, but it can be hard to pin down exactly how it’s useful.
If you’re willing to throw years of effort into something with no (immediate) career payoff then yeah, you should learn Chinese. But you should not learn Chinese (just) so you can read biology papers written in Chinese.
That’s because English is the lingua franca of science.
That’s true today. The question is whether it will still be true in two or three decades. The Chinese government can just decide that it wants to fund a certain sub-section of biology with a lot more funding then there’s outside of China for that part of biology and have the relevant papers published in Chinese.
On the lingua franca of science issue, I get the impression that for scientific careers over the last few generations, going out of one’s way to learn foreign languages to read/communicate with non-English-speakers seems to have become less prevalent, rather than more, among English speakers.
For instance, mandatory foreign language requirements in US PhD programs are rarer and rarer (perhaps only in elite schools, and more or more restricted to humanities, not STEM) for fields like hard science.
Of course this is in comparison to and a holdover from when non-English European languages like French, German, Russian etc. made up a larger share of the scientific literature in past generations if not centuries, and may not apply to the rise of Asia.
But I do wonder, has the relative importance in science from the rise of China or Asia (let’s say when Japan rose to prominence last generation or two ago) convinced more people to learn non-western languages in the same way people did with French, German, Russian ec. when continental Europe was a scientific center, that can be seen in language learning trends?
Most discussion of language learning centers around business, international relations, geopolitical stuff, with science relatively little discussed but that might be because scientists make up only a small proportion of the populace.
It’s worth noting that Chinese is an impractical language for science. When coining a new term in English a reader has a good idea of how to pronounce it while the same isn’t true in Chinese as far as I understand.
Given the political enviroment in China, the government howerver can decide to set standards even if those aren’t good. Wouldn’t be the first time that internal politics reduced China’s technological capacity ;)
Historically, yes, it has been hard to figure out how to pronunciation scientific neologisms in Chinese. (The Periodic Tables of the Elements is especially full of unique characters.) These days, I don’t think that is much of an issue. If you coin a new term from commonly-used characters then its pronunciation tends to be obvious. For example, 高能加速器 (high-energy particle accelerator) is composed entirely of well-known characters with single pronunciations.
High energy particle accelerator is a phrase that’s made up out of other building blocks. A word like entropy on the other hand isn’t.
I don’t think we are at a time where everything that could be discovered on a basic level has words. New scientific paradigms usually need new words and for a Chinese research community to form, funding a community to gather around a new paradigm would be a way to do it.
Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous idea
There seems to be a definite shift in the last decade or two (or maybe generation) from the perception that people who are into Chinese-related things like culture/language are doing it for heritage and cultural interest reasons vs. doing it because of the perceived importance of China geopolitically, business-wise, science-wise etc. and because China is seen as “the future”.
Whether it’s really practical or not, it appears claimed practical (careerist) reasons have increasingly taken over cultural reasons/liberal arts for being interested in China.
By contrast, it’s interesting that say learning, French or Japanese, is still more associated with interest and appreciation for the culture than hardheaded pragmatism. Or even stuff like learning Korean because K-pop is seen as cool now.
Here is just an example (from a fairly mainstream media source, NPR), of what I was thinking about when it comes to motivation, titled A Daughter’s Journey To Reclaim Her Heritage Language, and discussing a third-generation Chinese American who never previously spoke a Chinese language trying to learn at age 30 to reconnect with her roots.
Back in the days (perhaps even not so long ago as the 90s), it feels like this—along with liberal arts folks, cultural intellectuals like humanities professors -- was far closer to an archetype if not one of the central examples of the average American interested in Chinese culture or language.
Now this sort of thing is heavily swamped by the perception that interest in China is all political/business/realpolitik related. The heritage/culture side—both Chinese Americans interested in so-called “reconnecting with their roots” or anyone of any heritage for that matter interested in the subject—seems pretty drowned out by comparison.
Yeah, I largely agree with lsusr. According to my mom (whose career has focused on second language acquisition and Chinese-American cultural exchange), basically no student gets past second year Chinese at a university level unless they’re majoring it. Like, even business majors who plan to work in China. When I took university-level Chinese it really shocked me how much harder it was than other languages I’d learned – after nine months of five hours a week of quality university-level instruction, reading-wise I could barely understand books aimed at toddlers, and speaking-wise I could theoretically order food in a restaurant but wouldn’t be able to understand any responses to what I said.
And it would be harder than other languages even if you were just learning to speak, but learning to read basically doubles the difficulty (if not more). My mom is quite fluent in speaking and listening – she worked for years as a Mandarin-English medical interpreter, and lived and worked in China (and Japan, which uses some Chinese characters) for a decade long before Google Translate existed – but she’s almost entirely illiterate in Chinese. Many if not most people in the village where my dad grew up were illiterate as well.
Point being, your question was whether it’s worth it for you to learn (to read) Chinese, and I think the answer to that is no for almost anyone in almost any situation. Not because it wouldn’t be great to know Chinese, but because the time investment is so shockingly huge.
I thought a bit more about it and at the rate that automatic translation gets better I would expect that it’s no problem to read biology papers in 1-2 decades if they are written in Chinese and you don’t know Chinese.
China’s sciences are not very good, and relatedly most of those papers are likely of extremely low quality. I know Chinese, and it’s a wonderful language, but I wouldn’t recommend learning it for that purpose. My 2c
While most of the papers don’t get translated Chinese authors generally get rewarded more for publications in high impact factor journals. That means that a good Chinese scientist currently publishes in English and the Chinese language paper will be on average crap.
On the other hand China is progressing and very nationalist, so there’s a good chance that some fields will progress to publish high quality research in China sooner or later.
Do you guys think it is worth to learn chinese if I’m planning a career in science?
China is becoming more and more influential in the world, plus in 2020 it’s published more scientific papers than USA, most of which are not translated, thus being able to read them would be an advantage. (https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2020)
I’m not sure how to find information about which country puts more money and is progressing faster in molecular biology/biophysics though.
I have undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics. I taught myself business, entrepreneurship, computer science, machine learning, web development and Chinese. I have run my own consumer hardware startup.
The Chinese word for kinetochore is 动粒. If you go to the English Wikipedia page on kinetochores it’s all in English. If you go to the Chinese Baidupedia page on 动粒 the first sentence lists the English word “kinetochore”. That’s because English is the lingua franca of science.
Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous idea. Learning Chinese because you want to break out of your Western cultural assumptions is a great idea. Learning Chinese because China is the center of the world is perfectly reasonable. Learning Chinese because you want to advance your scientific career is inefficient.
Learning Chinese is harder than learning chemistry. It is harder than learning business and entrepreneurship. Learning Chinese has a difficulty comparable to maybe 4 years of full-time technical training in physics. That’s twice as long as a Master’s Degree in computer science. If you’re already planning to get a graduate degree in molecular biology then learning Chinese too basically amounts to doubling your workload. You could get bigger bang for your buck teaching yourself to program.
I expect that the biggest use of Chinese would be if you wanted to do business in China or with Chinese companies. If you want to do this then learning even a little Chinese is a really good idea (though somehow not mandatory). If you are not interested in either of these things then Chinese is unlikely to help you (directly) in career success.
Learning Chinese should be thought of as part of a liberal education. You should learn Chinese for the same reason you should learn about fiction, art, history, physics, anthropology, math and psychology—because it broadens your understanding of the world. This sort of thing is very useful, but it can be hard to pin down exactly how it’s useful.
If you’re willing to throw years of effort into something with no (immediate) career payoff then yeah, you should learn Chinese. But you should not learn Chinese (just) so you can read biology papers written in Chinese.
That’s true today. The question is whether it will still be true in two or three decades. The Chinese government can just decide that it wants to fund a certain sub-section of biology with a lot more funding then there’s outside of China for that part of biology and have the relevant papers published in Chinese.
I am curious too how this will play out. Lingua francas tend to be sticky, but they also tend to follow the world’s dominant power.
On the lingua franca of science issue, I get the impression that for scientific careers over the last few generations, going out of one’s way to learn foreign languages to read/communicate with non-English-speakers seems to have become less prevalent, rather than more, among English speakers.
For instance, mandatory foreign language requirements in US PhD programs are rarer and rarer (perhaps only in elite schools, and more or more restricted to humanities, not STEM) for fields like hard science.
Of course this is in comparison to and a holdover from when non-English European languages like French, German, Russian etc. made up a larger share of the scientific literature in past generations if not centuries, and may not apply to the rise of Asia.
But I do wonder, has the relative importance in science from the rise of China or Asia (let’s say when Japan rose to prominence last generation or two ago) convinced more people to learn non-western languages in the same way people did with French, German, Russian ec. when continental Europe was a scientific center, that can be seen in language learning trends?
Most discussion of language learning centers around business, international relations, geopolitical stuff, with science relatively little discussed but that might be because scientists make up only a small proportion of the populace.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1089 is a paper that describes language distribution in scientific papers and the share of non-English papers is currently falling. Knowing non-English languages falls in importance for science.
It’s worth noting that Chinese is an impractical language for science. When coining a new term in English a reader has a good idea of how to pronounce it while the same isn’t true in Chinese as far as I understand.
Given the political enviroment in China, the government howerver can decide to set standards even if those aren’t good. Wouldn’t be the first time that internal politics reduced China’s technological capacity ;)
Historically, yes, it has been hard to figure out how to pronunciation scientific neologisms in Chinese. (The Periodic Tables of the Elements is especially full of unique characters.) These days, I don’t think that is much of an issue. If you coin a new term from commonly-used characters then its pronunciation tends to be obvious. For example, 高能加速器 (high-energy particle accelerator) is composed entirely of well-known characters with single pronunciations.
High energy particle accelerator is a phrase that’s made up out of other building blocks. A word like entropy on the other hand isn’t.
I don’t think we are at a time where everything that could be discovered on a basic level has words. New scientific paradigms usually need new words and for a Chinese research community to form, funding a community to gather around a new paradigm would be a way to do it.
Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous idea
There seems to be a definite shift in the last decade or two (or maybe generation) from the perception that people who are into Chinese-related things like culture/language are doing it for heritage and cultural interest reasons vs. doing it because of the perceived importance of China geopolitically, business-wise, science-wise etc. and because China is seen as “the future”.
Whether it’s really practical or not, it appears claimed practical (careerist) reasons have increasingly taken over cultural reasons/liberal arts for being interested in China.
By contrast, it’s interesting that say learning, French or Japanese, is still more associated with interest and appreciation for the culture than hardheaded pragmatism. Or even stuff like learning Korean because K-pop is seen as cool now.
Here is just an example (from a fairly mainstream media source, NPR), of what I was thinking about when it comes to motivation, titled A Daughter’s Journey To Reclaim Her Heritage Language, and discussing a third-generation Chinese American who never previously spoke a Chinese language trying to learn at age 30 to reconnect with her roots.
Back in the days (perhaps even not so long ago as the 90s), it feels like this—along with liberal arts folks, cultural intellectuals like humanities professors -- was far closer to an archetype if not one of the central examples of the average American interested in Chinese culture or language.
Now this sort of thing is heavily swamped by the perception that interest in China is all political/business/realpolitik related. The heritage/culture side—both Chinese Americans interested in so-called “reconnecting with their roots” or anyone of any heritage for that matter interested in the subject—seems pretty drowned out by comparison.
Yeah, I largely agree with lsusr. According to my mom (whose career has focused on second language acquisition and Chinese-American cultural exchange), basically no student gets past second year Chinese at a university level unless they’re majoring it. Like, even business majors who plan to work in China. When I took university-level Chinese it really shocked me how much harder it was than other languages I’d learned – after nine months of five hours a week of quality university-level instruction, reading-wise I could barely understand books aimed at toddlers, and speaking-wise I could theoretically order food in a restaurant but wouldn’t be able to understand any responses to what I said.
And it would be harder than other languages even if you were just learning to speak, but learning to read basically doubles the difficulty (if not more). My mom is quite fluent in speaking and listening – she worked for years as a Mandarin-English medical interpreter, and lived and worked in China (and Japan, which uses some Chinese characters) for a decade long before Google Translate existed – but she’s almost entirely illiterate in Chinese. Many if not most people in the village where my dad grew up were illiterate as well.
Point being, your question was whether it’s worth it for you to learn (to read) Chinese, and I think the answer to that is no for almost anyone in almost any situation. Not because it wouldn’t be great to know Chinese, but because the time investment is so shockingly huge.
I thought a bit more about it and at the rate that automatic translation gets better I would expect that it’s no problem to read biology papers in 1-2 decades if they are written in Chinese and you don’t know Chinese.
China’s sciences are not very good, and relatedly most of those papers are likely of extremely low quality. I know Chinese, and it’s a wonderful language, but I wouldn’t recommend learning it for that purpose. My 2c
While most of the papers don’t get translated Chinese authors generally get rewarded more for publications in high impact factor journals. That means that a good Chinese scientist currently publishes in English and the Chinese language paper will be on average crap.
On the other hand China is progressing and very nationalist, so there’s a good chance that some fields will progress to publish high quality research in China sooner or later.