A top university in northwest China has scrapped English tests as a prerequisite for graduation, rekindling a heated debate about the role of the world’s lingua franca in the country’s education system after years of rising nationalist sentiment under leader Xi Jinping.
In a notice Wednesday, the Xi’an Jiaotong University in the capital city of Shaanxi province said students will no longer need to pass a nationwide standardized English test – nor any other English exams – to be able to graduate with bachelor’s degrees.
The announcement caused a stir on social media, with many praising the decision and calling for more universities to do the same.
“Very good. I hope other universities will follow suit. It’s ridiculous that Chinese people’s academic degrees need to be validated by a foreign language (test),” said a comment with more than 24,000 likes on microblogging site Weibo, where a related hashtag attracted more than 350 million views Thursday.
Passing the College English Test, a national standardized exam first held in 1987, has been a graduation requirement at the majority of Chinese universities for decades – although the government has never made it an official policy.
The common practice underlined the importance Chinese universities placed on English – the world’s predominant academic and scientific language – especially when the once-insular and impoverished country was opening up and eager to catch up with the developed world after the turbulence of the Mao Zedong era.
But in recent years, some universities have downgraded the importance of English, either by replacing the national College English Test with their own exams or – as in the case of the Xi’an Jiaotong University – dropping English qualifications altogether as a graduation criteria.
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I’m learning Mandarin at a later age now (40). The keyboard stuff is okay but it NEEDS to be a smart keyboard where you typically use pinyin and it’s not that bad for what it is, but my typos are crazy now.
That being, I’m ethnically Chinese and it’s really difficult to pick up. I know a lot of foreign languages are but Chinese feels rougher. Also, other Chinese people can be bloody rude when I’m trying to speak Chinese. I’m tired of hearing “stop trying to speak Chinese” … well fuck you too, your English isn’t exactly music to my ears either, but I put up with it.
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The French attitude is generally sympathetic, so long as you’re at least trying.
I’ve often had shopkeepers etc. correct obvious mistakes, “non, c’est 'blabla bla '” “ah, blabla bla ?” “oui”.
Except in Paris. Paris, people just want an excuse to be a dick to you.
Paris, the Philadelphia of France
Lmao. A twitch streamer I watch took a trip to Europe a few weeks ago and Paris was the one place he hated because everyone there were assholes
I kinda cheated, I’m slightly below conversational Cantonese … which is another dialect of Chinese. I picked up Mandarin because Cantonese is so damned hard to learn on its own rather than Mandarin’s vast learning material out there. The intonation is definitely difficult. I’m still not great at it … the key for me is not really getting bogged down with perfection so far. I just correct myself and move on. It’s easy to get paralysis due to wanting to be perfect.
A lot of Chinese people come to me to speak English and I grew up in London and lots of Eastern Europeans would struggle speaking English as well. I’m more than happy to work with them and practice. Never saw it as an issue, myself as well.
The lack of tolerance is two things, ignorance or patience. Doesnt matter what country or culture, most folks just dont have the time to try to figure out what gibberish you are trying to say. OR they simply don’t have the intercultural experience to know what to do in situations where a non-native speaker is trying to communicate. It’s the old “yelling doesnt help me understand your language better” scenario. I got it a lot when I lived in Taipei and I see it here in the US with my coworkers.
Oh yeah, okay, let me be clear the scenarios you say make sense and are understandable. However, I’ve had school friends and even friends now who tell me to shut up because I sound embarassing. Or even “what are you even trying to say”.
It’s something that really gets to me because there’s a certain vulnerability when attempting new things or things you’re not good at it.
Dont. Get. Me. Started. You just identified one thing that really grinds my gears. Until there is acrid smoke pouring out my ears. Literally. My room reeks of burnt oil and grilled brain. What’s left of it anyway.
god imagine trying to write code in languages like Chinese
FYI you can type in any pictographic language using a regular keyboard. You can switch between languages on the fly too (windows+spacebar on Windows), it’s pretty handy.
I point this out cause people often mention that as a reason they don’t want to learn a different language
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That’s an odd thing to say. Why learn any language? It’s fun, you learn things and it lets you talk to people and engage in things you wouldn’t be able to.
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I mean it may or may not but its funny that this move would have been better a few years ago when it was all the rage. I mean im not going to learn chinese but honestly foreign language has always been my worst subject. Literally. When graduating college it was the remark I most got from my transcript.
I think you’re way overstating the keyboard thing? iirc some of the fastest typists (by some metrics) are Chinese.
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You might be 40 years too late with that keyboard comment. Which major language still exists today with no easy way to type with a keyboard?
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