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As a university student who has quite unexpectedly ended up being an East Asian Studies major, and who is learning Chinese as well as French and Italian, I object to a few things in this article.

Chinese is indeed a difficult language to learn, and the greatest difficulty is certainly the memorization of characters. It is hard, it requires a lot of time and if you don't keep it up you will forget them. I have read that even native Chinese speakers are beginning to forget how to write some characters as typing becomes more and more common.

However, this does not mean that China should give in and start using pinyin, the romanization, to write Chinese. Chinese characters serve a far more important purpose than just "tradition and nationalism," although those are also important.

For one thing, Chinese has relatively few syllables. Even taking tones into account, there are not nearly as many syllables in Chinese as there are in English. For instance, in the sentence you gave, wo3 shi4 zhong1guo2ren2 (the numbers represent tones), the sound shi4, meaning "to be" (not just yes, as the writer assumed) can have many other meanings, even with the same tone. If you type in the sound shi with the down tone into a Chinese dictionary, you will get pages of results. There are a huge number of meanings for the sound shi4, like yes, to be, city, type, to test, to try and many more. The only way to distinguish these from one another is that each different meaning has a different character, even though they are pronounced the exact same way! This would make reading anything significantly long or complex very difficult if it were written in pinyin.

Also, a wonderful thing about Chinese characters is that they transcend language barriers within China. Chinese, Cantonese, Shanghainese and Wu are all different dialects/languages of China. The pinyin of Cantonese is completely different than that of Mandarin (Canto has 8 tones versus Mandarin's 4). However, the characters are the same. This makes it possible for a person in Hong Kong to read a mainland newspaper.

Finally, although I think you may be right about Chinese not becoming the language of the future, I certainly think the rise of people studying Chinese should be applauded. Chinese civilization is wonderful and rich in every way: food, music, art, philosophy, literature... Even if people only start learning Chinese because they think it will help them do business in the future, in the process they might well discover how rich and beautiful Chinese civilization is.

I respectfully disagree. The purpose of learning Chinese is not because it is currently spoken widely across the world, but because it will be. They have amply shown that this is China's century. It's true that English will likely continue to be the universal language of aviation.

However, I'd encourage a child to learn Chinese simply because one should learn the language of one's employer, as well as the eventual rulers of the world. The US is well on its way to becoming a country like Britian--a third-rate once great power, suitable for a nice vacation, but no longer a leader.

"America’s superpower status has made it everyone’s favourite second language."

Don't you think the British Council is to thank for the spread (and education) of English too?

You'd think the world would collapse without America if you keep reading this sort of bollocks.

Yeah this author doesn't know what he's talking about...here's your evidence: "(Sentences like wo shi zhong guo ren can be translated bit-by-bit as I yes middle country person, meaning “I am Chinese.”)"

C'mon, you get this straight during the first month in any college Chinese course.

Do your homework before you write....

I agree with the overarching notion that English will still remain the dominant second language, even with the rise of China. China will become an economic superpower, but culturally I don't see the US losing its position anytime soon. The internet is multilingual, but dominated by English, and Hollywood movies remain as popular as ever. China choked its own media output after the cultural revolution, thus the rise of Hong Kong cinema, and more recently Taiwanese cinema. And make no mistake, Hong Kong/Taiwanese culture does not represent China.

Ignorant Life, more like. Lazy Life. Don't trouble me with learning strange foreign languages life.

Twit.

The dominance of English is a combination of both superpowers. Britain gave birth to America and set up English colonies around the world where they use British vocabulary (India, Malaysia etc.) America created mass media like TV, movies and the internet as well as making English the second language in non-British colonies like East Asia.

Most likely, future historians will collapse the British and American Empires into the same empire.

For god sake,china never intends to promote chinese to the dominate position. Switch the characters to pinyin?Dear author,please make yourself a little more intelligent before issuing such a silly opinion.

I am afraid that this article misses some important points
Firstly, writing Chinese language in alphabets doesn't make any sense! I am not going to further explain this because the writer obviously doesn't understand chinese language. Pinyin is just a thing that helps with pronunciation.
Secondly, learning chinese for people using alphabets is as hard as chinese people learning the western language, and a lot of them master the language very well.
!

Whilst I concur with the premise of this article, namely that Chinese is unlikely to become the next lingua franca, I do have a few inaccuracies and misconceptions to point out about the Chinese language. (As an American of Chinese heritage and a former student of Prof. Victor Mair of the U. of Penn)

"Wo shi zhongguo ren...This was meant to show how China's monysyllabic morphemes are put together to form longer words."

Actually, most languages, including English, have words that are formed from morphemes (although not all morphemes are monosyllabic). You could easily argue for a bit-by-bit translation of the sentence "I built a makeshift automobile in Australia" to be:
I built a make-change self-moving in South(Latin)-country.

Also, to Jack's point (and RLG's response) - using a pinyin-based program to type can actually spit out the correct characters >95% of the time if you put the morphemes together to form words. The computer will recognize these combinations for a sentence typed "wo shi zhongguoren" instead of "wo shi zhong guo ren" where wo could be "lie down", shi could be "ten", zhong "clock", guo "to cross", ren "patience".

And the whole concept of expressing affirmation in Chinese is different from Western languages. In English, we say "yes", in French, it's "oui/si", in German, it's "ja", etc. However, in Chinese, you typically just repeat the verb that was just used, so the Chinese "yes" response to a question like "Do you want to go to the store?" would simply be "want". Conversely, "no" would simply be "not want". Which leads to constructions like those in Singlish that tend to overlay English words over Chinese grammar, such as questions like "Eat or not?", with most replying, "Eat!"

As a proud Mongolian, it is hard for me to recommend learning chinese. However, the learning a language opens up psychology of the people and helps you to understand them better. That is why people learn the language instead of hiring a translator. Chinese culture and people need to be understood better by the rest of the world if indeed they are to be the dominant economic power of the world. Therefore, I would encourage my kids to learn chinese despite the long history between Mongols and Chinese.

If many non-Chinese can beautifully speak and write the Chinese language, so can anyone. It's in the attitude and willingness to learn. In fact, I'd dare say that because of its nature of being pictographs, it's far more satisfying and interesting to learn than a bunch of letters. It's also an excellent way to learn the minds of the Chinese people. A lot of this is embedded in the development of the characters.

The tone of this article is what a foreign would expect to read as a "typical" Agglosaxon viewpoint.
Big global-cultural changes do not occur in a time span of (let's say) 5-10-20 years.. It's a long process and it is likely that such a change has just started. Just like when centuries ago other languages were considered as international languages were substituted to other ones.
The strenght of a culture is its language and it would be a fatal mistake of Chinese would change their language so it will be easier for westerns to learn it. Maybe in few decedes everybody will have to learn Chinese or else will be out of the global game.
None knows.. time will tell...

Unfortunately the author has made some serious oversimplifications, that makes his lack of knowledge of the Chinese language apparent.
First of all, calling the writing system "Traditional" is extremely confusing, Mainland China has in fact moved from the "Traditional" character forms.
Secondly, your linguistic analysis of the sentence "Wo shi Zhongguo ren" is extremely inadequate. As other comments have elaborated on, Modern Chinese syntax and morphology is far more complex than the interlinear translation you have provided.
Thirdly, you are not the first to advocate against Characters. The most compelling argument against this is the poem "Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den" by Yuan Ren Chao. The poem is entirely written with characters that sound like shi.
Fourthly, as a non-native who has studied the language (including its linguistics and history) for years, I can attest to the fact that learning characters is really not that hard.
Unfortunately these points distract from the truth in the article: most Americans/English speakers are simply too lazy to learn another person's language(the author being no different).