It is more beneficial to learn English than Mandarin

The argument

The claim here is economic rather than linguistic. Whichever language is harder or easier in the abstract, learners choose on the basis of what a language returns for the effort it costs, and on that measure English remains more beneficial for economic opportunities and for practical reasons. The asymmetry is already visible in who is learning what: there are more Chinese people learning English than there are English speakers learning Mandarin, which means the flow of effort is running towards English at precisely the moment Mandarin is supposed to be displacing it. The decisive point is what that asymmetry does to the payoff for an individual learner. There is a decline in US students interested in learning Mandarin because of the limited payoff, and the reason students give is instructive: even those seeking employment in China find that many Chinese people in their job sector are already fluent in English. The investment is undercut by the very spread of English, since the more widely Chinese professionals learn it, the less an English speaker gains by learning Mandarin, the common language being in place before they arrive. Mandarin is also costly to acquire, and the difficulties and time needed to learn it are weighed against a payoff that keeps shrinking. Against this, the practical value of a shared language in business and politics is considerable. Language differences in business or political settings can cause misunderstandings and will hinder progress, so there is real pressure towards converging on a single working tongue. But convergence favours whichever language is already most widely held, and it is much easier for the participants in an international exchange to communicate in English. The conclusion drawn is that English's position is self-reinforcing: for English learners the effort of Mandarin is not worth the payoff, and each learner who acts on that calculation makes it less worthwhile for the next.

Context

There are more speakers of English as a second language in China than in any other country. English is so widely spoken elsewhere as well; is there any point in preserving or learning another language in an increasingly globalized world where collaboration and mutual understanding are so needed for progress?

Premises

Counter-arguments

As instant machine learning translations become quicker and more accurate, the need for a global lingua franca may diminish. People may be able to communicate freely in their native language with speakers of other languages, aided by instant language translation.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Individual payoff and global dominance are different questions. The premise concerns what a learner should choose now; the conclusion is a claim about the world's international language over decades, a status set by trade volumes, institutional adoption and the accumulated stock of speakers rather than by the calculation any one student makes. [Rejecting P2] The observation is self-limiting. That many Chinese professionals already speak English is a fact about the present stock, itself the product of past incentives, and it concedes the mechanism the opposing position relies on: a very large population investing heavily in a second language because of where economic opportunity is understood to lie. If that judgement shifts, so does the flow. [Rejecting P3] The cost-benefit calculation is measured against a status quo that machine translation is changing. As instant translation becomes faster and more accurate, the practical return on learning any second language falls — which weakens the case for English as much as for Mandarin, and so undercuts the comparison rather than confirming it.