[mr_00ff00]

But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent?

I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.

[jjmarr]

Chinese is too difficult of a language.

I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.

Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.

Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.

Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.

You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.

Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.

Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.

[tired-turtle]

Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language. Chinese morphology, tense, and overall grammar are far easier to learn than most European languages. Chinese speakers are extremely forgiving too because modern Chinese speakers span dozens of dialects but all (except 东北人) learn a second dialect: Mandarin.

The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.

In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.

Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.

[acheong08]

100% agree even as someone who grew up around people speaking mandarin. I still cannot write despite having taken the language in both GCSEs and IB, while also living in the country for 3+ years.

i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent

[neither_color]

It's not just about language. There's no common practical path to becoming "Chinese", either in a legal or cultural sense. Save for a few rare exceptions, you cannot move there, join the culture, become a citizen, etc even if you're fluent. The western systems arent perfect but they allow a greater number of people who really want to assimilate do so regardless of background.

[iamlintaoz]

It’s true that learning Chinese as an adult—especially if you come from an English or other European language background—can be extremely challenging. I have several colleagues who have lived in Beijing for more than a decade, are married to Chinese spouses, and still can barely speak the language, it becomes even more challenging for reading.

This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.

Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.

[numpad0]

  > Chinese is too difficult of a language.
  > I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
  > Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. 

Real voices like this coming from English speakers are always interesting to me as a Japanese speaker, showing how the concept of "learning $foreign_language" to many isn't default expected to be another one of those complimentary bag of lemons. The first thing many Chinese learners among Japanese populace are keen to point out is that the syntax is "practically identical" to English, unlike European languages. Learners of e.g. French or German never make such a point but rather chooses to bring up complicated language quirks that they can't get the knack of. And everyone laments on pronunciations.

Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.

[Pooge]

> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language.

Oh, just like English!

/s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense

[tsunamifury]

I have worked in with the Chinese now for two years in technical fields. I have a strict requirement that they learn English as it is a more technical and specific language and less prone to the use of metaphorical weasel words that slow progress.

I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.

There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.

[5o1ecist]

> Chinese is too difficult of a language. I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Considering that there are a billion+ people capable of speaking chinese, with many million of them not speaking it natively, your generalisation might instead be a rather specific, individual problem.

[jjav]

> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language.

So identical to French then!

[expedition32]

The Netherlands solved the language problem by switching to English.

Nobody has any delusional ideas about it- xenophobia is a luxury the country cannot afford.

[sandbach]

Skill issue.

[lateforwork]

China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1].

At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?

[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

[shiroiuma]

Exactly. And what is the EU doing to attract American talent that doesn't want to live under the Trump regime with his ICE stormtroopers? Nothing really. Meanwhile, highly accomplished people in the US with Chinese ancestry are being wooed to China to do important R&D there.

[p-e-w]

China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix.

The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.

[rayiner]

The importance of immigrant “talent” is clearly overstated. Japan became a powerhouse in the 20th century with virtually no immigration and a significantly smaller population than the US. China is becoming a technological powerhouse with no immigration as well.

[notarobot123]

I think the corporate/globalist perspective looks at the liquidity of talent as well as cost. Having a native talent pipeline is possible, but it's expensive and takes a long time to create. On top of that, it's not very flexible if an industry suddenly shifts. Re-training is a much more difficult than simply hiring a different set of immigrants. It's important (at least to corporations) because it makes a significant difference for how quickly a company/industry can adapt and evolve to stay competitive in global markets.

[koito17]

Even more importantly, there's just a lot of people in China. New York City's population is approximately 8.8 million; that is the scale of a mid-sized Chinese city. The population exceeds 1 billion, which is difficult to comprehend in terms of scale. The reference I like to use is: 1 million seconds is ~11 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is ~31 years.

To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)

[conception]

Well, China has a tremendous pool of people to pull talent from. Do they need immigrants? Or just continue the path of “building it in-house”?

[rayiner]

China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace.

But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.

[msy]

They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.

[drecked]

If the U.S. is losing talent to anywhere else in the world isn’t it losing a relative advantage or increasing a relative disadvantage with China, even if China is not the one benefiting from the lost talent?

[helterskelter]

> If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent.

I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.

[ggregoire]

> I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.

[ainch]

Mandarin is weird, because I don't think it's that hard to speak at a passable level, mostly because the grammar is so simple. Many people are spooked by tones, but I think their importance for simple communication can be a little overstated.

But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.

[viking123]

I learned it in high school and university as European and I can speak decently. China isn't that good of a place for foreigner due to difficulty of getting permanent residency/citizenship. Hong Kong is the exception but the economy is not too hot there now.

I moved to Singapore although it had nothing to do with my language skills.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Even if I was fluent in mandarin, China still wouldn't be in my shortlist of countries to move to due to low salaries in engineering, poor working conditions (996), authoritarian government, etc.

[gambiting]

>>I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.

[rstuart4133]

> But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent?

You can ask Google for metrics:

- China produces about over 1.3 to 1.6 million new engineering graduates per year.

- The USA produces about 130,000–200,000, or about 1/10 of China, but has a population of about 1/4.

- Europe is hard to measure, but USA plus Europe combined is almost certainly less than China by a significant margin.

[foxglacier]

China doesn't need those other people because Chinese people are naturally smarter than them, generally. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, just look at the data and you'll agree.

[fyredge]

It may look that way on the surface, but they are absolutely no better than other ethnicities. The main difference is the culture of pragmatism and the constant strive to better their lives. Education is seen as a path to better opportunities, which becomes a major focus for their youth of all social standing.