Why makers should learn Chinese

Phil Torrone's written a call-to-arms for geeks and makers to learn to speak and read Chinese. I'm not sure I'm confident in his premise that the Chinese economic revolution will continue to produce strong returns and thus increase Chinese economic and technical dominance to the point where this is a must-have for anyone who cares about technology, but you don't have to accept this to believe that knowing Chinese is an enormous asset to anyone trying to make sense of the world (and especially the world of manufacturing and technology) today.

Phil's written up a bunch of tips for approaching Chinese language instruction, which is an admittedly daunting prospect for a lot of westerners, with its trifecta of unfamiliar tones, non-Roman script, and absence of Latinate/Germanic cognates.

Fast forward almost a decade, and I'm living in NYC and talking, reading, or emailing with someone in China. If you make anything, eventually you'll find that there isn't a supply chain that beats what China has; while a lot of people will claim goods are made in China only because of lower costs, that's not 100% true. The supply chain of components to assembly are almost impossible to find elsewhere. If you look at once-booming industrial cities in the USA, you'll see a lot of the work, from parts to assembly, happened in big chunks of locations -- this is efficient and allows manufacturing to flourish...

You're going to see and hear about more and more open source hardware and maker businesses visiting China, and we'll likely even see and hear some familiar faces in the maker community spending extended time living/working in China. Makers are smart, nimble, and efficient. Being on-site and on the assembly line is usually how we think; we don't mind getting our hands dirty and participating in all parts of the process. It's only going to make sense that more and more of the most prolific makers will consider learning a new language the more time they spend in China.

Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese

• [turn_self_off]

  Reminds me of a similar claim about Japanese back in the 80s (with a funny cameo during the opening minutes of Hackers, where the lead social engineer a night shift guard).

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    Yep, The whole “Oh Noes, Teh Chinese Will Rule The Future!” meme is *exactly* the same as the Japanese one in the 1980s, albeit minus the cyberpunk vibe. How come nobody seems to think the Indians will rule the future? There’s *also* about a billion of them, they come out of a culture at least as impressive as that of China, and they are also rapidly economically expanding. Plus Hindi and related languages are Indo-European, making them easier to learn by Westerners.

    • [turn_self_off]

      Not sure, but it seems to me that the economy of india is more about exporting services then goods. This thanks to being a former English “colony” with a reasonably well developed urban infrastructure, allowing a electronics connection to the English speaking world (UK, USA, Canada, Australia and so on). I am not sure India have the equivalent of Shenzen.

• [CH]

  Thanks, that was a really good write up (well, I only skimmed it thought, and put the link into my bookmarks, but anyway… :)!

  I really want to encourage people to try Chinese. I’m really just a very much beginner, but honestly, it is not that hard. The tones are hard, or the tones in themselves are not, but to remember which tone goes with which word (for me it’s easier to just remember how a word is supposed to sound than what tone it actually is… too many steps for my poor memory otherwise). But the grammar is really easy! And I say that as somebody who seriously sux at grammar… in any language. And learning to write is seriously fun! It’s more like drawing, really, in my opinion. You feel like a kid with a new set of crayons… well, I do at least! I _love_ writing Chinese characters… my handwriting would make a Chinese toddler laugh at me, but I’m having fun!

  • [jonandmoni]

    I’ve been learning Mandarin for a few years now (not full time, just a couple of hours a week). It’s an evil, evil language. Just when you think you’re doing pretty well, a taxi driver won’t understand a word you say. Actually, the best thing to do is see it as a game, the writing system is really cool (just totally impractical as a system of communication).

• [mn_camera]

  A couple points:

  1) Offshoring your supply chain takes you from being a maker to being a manufacturer. Not a bad thing in general, though I do think confusing the terms is not helpful. Manufacturer = offshored supply chain, maker = closer to DIY, in the way I see the term employed here more often than not.

  2) Given that much of this site’s audience is American I’d suggest Spanish and Portuguese as first choices. If the idea is communicating and interacting, let’s start with the folks over the back fence, not six blocks down.

  • [saadaaahndhagee]

    Geographic distance is no longer that much of an issue. You don’t need to talk to somebody just because they are near you.

  • [greggman]

    Given that much of this site’s audience is American I’d suggest Spanish and Portuguese as first choices

    Just so you know, top 3 languages spoken in the USA are #1 English, #2 Spanish, #3 Chinese. Add in Canada and French becomes #3.

• [Tian]

  As the person behind Hanzi Smatter, I have mixed feeling about if everyone learns Chinese.

  On one hand it is great, blah blah blah…

  On the other, I will have less fodder for my site:

  http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

  Tian

  • [Snig]

    Entertaining site.

• [Restless]

  I guess, if nothing else, I could learn to cuss the way they do in Firefly.

• [nixiebunny]

  As a designer of electronic devices, I can assure you that there are plenty of chips available with English data sheets. The chips that have Chinese data sheets tend to be either blinky-light controllers or other such consumer-electronics control chips such as those in DVD players.

  I produce stuff in small quantities, for a discerning niche market. I use American contract manufacturers who do the work in the good ol’ USA. I do the laborious final assembly myself. I am a maker, after all, not a suit.

  Were I producing iPods or netbook computers, then Chinese would be highly beneficial to me. But I’m not interested in that – it sounds too much like work.

• [legion]

  “Why makers should learn Chinese”
  So you can tell your oncologist exactly what substances you’ve been poisoned with? In a place with no rules, you can’t trust the ingredient lists…

• [fraac]

  噢，這真是個快樂的進展……・噢，这真是个快乐的进展……

• [Anonymous]

  “Every” maker “should”? I don’t see why this guy can’t just say “I found it very rewarding to learn some Mandarin, and I have found that skill somewhat useful in my life.”

  Why shouldn’t every maker learn Cantonese? What about Korean and German and Japanese? For that matter, can makers learn nothing from Arabic?

  What about acquiring a solid practical knowledge of civil engineering and organic chemistry and fluid dynamics and the architectural practices of the ancient world?

  Some makers will know some of these, and more. But not “every” maker can know everything.

• [yrarbil cilbup]

  Yea keep on shipping jobs to China, its not connected to the depression here (worst unemployment in our life time). The Fascist rulers will not be satified until everyone has been brought down to the standard of living found in these slave states.

  Slavery is alive and well in asia. You can whitewash it with funky economic jargon, but it is still slavery.

  • [turn_self_off]

    The cyberpunk term “wageslave” comes to mind.

    The corporation is mother, the corporation is father…

• [Snig]

  I’ve been learning Spanish for the last couple years, and was hoping to learn Mandarin. I conveniently have Spanish speaking patients who help educate me by looking at me funny when I talk stupid, which is helpful. The Memrise website “stupid video game approach” is actually something that I was expecting to be on the web and had been sort of looking for, will definitely play with it.

  @mn_camera, I of course think it great to learn Spanish or Portuguese, but people learning about the language/culture they’re interested in will likely fuel learning better than any other reason. Mandarin speaking folks are not unusual in my region (DC), though YMMV.

  Meetup also (locally) has lots of groups centered around languages.

• [Emo Pinata]

  At some point people ask themselves if the booming economy is worth it. I’ll remain fat and happy in the US even if we’re the world’s #2 economy.

• [jesse.ewles]

  Do you mean learn Mandarin?

  • [Snig]

    No, Hakka. Mandarin is so 2009.

    • [Ty_MY]

      Hahaha. Nyee oih hok hak ka wah?

      Hakka is the homey-ist sounding.
      Hokkien is great for cursing.
      Cantonese is good for jokes and puns.

  • [Dewi Morgan]

    Yeah: I often hear that I should learn “Chinese”, but WHICH Chinese should we be learning?

    And should I also learn European?

• [Chris Owens]

  For the last decade I’ve been traveling regularly to China, and I can tell you in addition to giant factories, they have makers and workshops and small factories too! All these places need fixtures and jigs and other small-run equipment to do their thing, and there are makers making both that equipment and starting their own operations!

  Even a small Chinese city will have a whole area of shops carrying electrical, electronic, pneumatic, hydraulic, control, and machine-tool equipment.

  Where would you go for that in this country? Home Depot? Hah! Harbor Freight if you’re lucky. Otherwise, get out your Grainger catalog, be prepared to pay top dollar, and wait weeks.

  In Suzhou, head over to the intersection marked on my map as Tao Hua Wu St. and Xue Shi St., make a deal and take your gear home today! It’s a very maker-friendly place!

• [Manyhappyreruns]

  I’m learning Chinese, I’m in China right now, and have recently calculated that I’ve spent 5% of my life here.

  The more I learn about China, the way it does things, and the way people in China do business, the more I worry personally about the ethics of dealing with China if it ever becomes part of my job in the future (I’m 19). For a good example, think of Foxconn, the owner of those sweatshops in Shenzhen. Would I be able to rest easy facilitating some American company unethically dealing with a very unethical Chinese company? Once you start talking about business in China, the huge (huuuuge) income discrepancy always becomes more and more pronounced in the back of your mind. My educated guess is that this factor of the Chinese economy is a result of the Cultural Revolution, the sheer number of people, which is also a result of the Cultural Revolution, and the ironic near full-on capitalism in this country.

  My only experience living in China has been in a cities. Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, the smallest place I’ve spent time in has 6 million people in it. Despite that, I can’t see the tiny tiny amounts people work really hard for here in China as docile as everyone thinks about them when it comes up in conversation. People like to write off this slave labor by saying that “over there 13 cents is a lot of money.” True, 13 cents can take you further here than in America, but it still is just about as dissonant to a 16 hour work day as it would feel to us.

  Where I’ve lived, prices for everyday things tend to be between 30 and 50 percent less than in the US. I don’t think that’s enough to justify dealing with these types of companies with these types of wages. Thing is, dealing with these companies is practically inevitable. My friend’s dad owns a tea company that imports from China and he has to go through extreme measures to verify that everything is going the way it should. It’s important to him. Most companies are not like that. I know Chinese looks good on a resume, but I can’t imagine a lot of business situations where I wouldn’t feel bad using it.

• [bolamig]

  Back in the 80′s my mom told me to learn Japanese because they were on the verge of taking over the world. Glad I learned C instead.

• [DoctressJulia]

  Wo ai Zhongwen. I took 2 semesters at UW, and then I got to go there 2 years ago. It changed my life.

  Anyone got a room available in Shanghai? :D

• [saadaaahndhagee]

  Everybody says Chinese script sucks. In some ways you guys are right but in these ways you guys are wrong.

  1. Its put together in a pretty logical way, so you will be able to guess the meaning and pronunciation quite easily.

  2. Information packed in Chinese script is two times that of English script.

  3. Its a lot easier to skim through Chinese text. Maybe its because I haven’t studied English well enough, but skimming through English papers is a pain.

  • [aeon]

    Chinese script only sucks as a tool for mass literacy — the fact that it is so hard to learn to read and write was a screening test for bureaucrats in Imperial China. But I agree it’s much more information dense and easier to speed read or skim once you become fluent.

    It takes much more practise to become *fast* at reading English. Most people read English at around the 100-200 words per minute mark, which is trivially easy to achieve in Chinese. You have to teach yourself to switch off the narrative voice that reads to you in your head to get faster than that, a skill that comes easily with Chinese as it’s more directly visually processed.

    I can’t agree with you that you can guess pronunciation easily — you need to know a lot of characters before the pronunciation clues become obvious. So that’s not something that helps learners, while it’s something that’s trivially simple with an alphabet based script once you know the pronunciation rules for the language.

    English succeeds as a second language lingua franca because it is relatively simple to become literate and because it’s possible to extract meaning out of even badly pronounced speech with terribly mangled grammar. Chinese way less tolerant of error.

• [Anonymous]

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cz9TbdkzHI

• [lecti]

  I would, except it happens to be one of the most difficult language to learn!

• [damageman]

  I second or third the Japanese thing, history really does repeat itself. Plus I work in the auto parts industry and everyone, I mean everyone I speak to is asking me to localize production of parts back to the USA. You guys are fighting the last war still. Take a look at the trends for Chinese wages they have lost a lot of the edge they had. We should not learn how to speak Chinese or any other language for that matter. We should learn how to think long term instead of worrying about profits for next quarter.
  Not that buy things from China or anywhere for that matter is wrong, just that it is not the end all be all for everything! That said I would love to learn Chinese, I am pretty good at Japanese (jlpt lv 1 etc) so going all Kanji looks like a ton of fun to me, it really mess up my mind. love it.

• [benher]

  “Why every maker should learn Chinese”

  … So you can call up their English speaking customer support center in India and swear at them in Mandarin when they screwed up your order or slipped you some defective hormone laden iPqd?

  I think anyone here would be hard pressed to find a more sensationalist headline.

• [aeon]

  I like the story (probably apocryphal) I was told about a German manufacturer. When asked what language they preferred to use, they said “If you’re buying we speak whatever language you please. If you’re selling then you speak German…” ;-)

  There is no call to learn Chinese unless you are trying to sell something to China, reside there or you happen to have a Chinese speaking spouse. The latter is my excuse and there is no way I’d make any effort to learn otherwise — it’s very, very hard. In order to be able to communicate at all you have to make a very close approximation to native sounding speech. Time spent perfecting pronunciation, tone and cadence prevents you from picking up vocabulary quickly. The lack of any link between the written language and speech stops you from acquiring vocabulary passively through reading and as a tool for mass literacy the script system sucks. It’s beautiful, but it sucks.