No Need for Australians to Learn an Asian Language

In the 1980s I attended a Queensland university. It was said then that if more Australians didn't learn another Asian language , particularly Japanese, our economic future would be ruined. Well where is Japan now? Their economy has gone down the "gurgler". To think of all the economic majors who learned Japanese but will never need it!

Some of the students I studied with learned Indonesian. What a waste of time that was. That country has drifted even further away from Western countries. It hardly communicates at all with Australia. The two countries have little in common.

Learning Chinese could pay off though - if Chinese don't learn English. But many are learning English. It is like exchange students who travel to another country to learn the language but their hosts are determined to talk at the dinner table in English.

It would be justified to spend money for Australians to learn an Asian language if there was one Asian language. There are so many languages spoken and written in Asia. China has two main spoken languages with a common written language. So we have a language problem within a country. Yet the Chinese economy is going ahead strongly.

Michael Wesley says "Simply relying on an elite means the rest of Australian society - as our economy internationalises and becomes more knowledge-intensive - will be trapped in 20th-century industries, while other countries will be moving ahead and taking part in the 21st-century knowledge economy".

This is rubbish. We won't be left behind because Asians are already speaking English or they are in the process of learning it. You see, Asians only have to learn one language to take part in international commerce - English.

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