A problem with Chinese

Translation is a troublesome task at the best of time. And translating a phrase from traditional Chinese characters to English words is a notoriously inexact task.

I've seen this phrase spelled out about a dozen different ways including these;

• Gang He Fat Choi
• Gung Hey Fat Choi
• Gung Hei Fat Choy
• Kung Hey Fat Choi

For people contemplating learning Chinese the sheer number of characters, between three and four thousand for basic levels of literacy, makes the task a daunting one.

In recent years there has been vigorous debate about the likelihood that Chinese will supplant English as the world's lingua franca, or as some have described it, "everyone's second language". One common issue is the learning curve for the alphabet. People coming to English from any of the Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish), the Germanic languages, or even the Cyrillic languages have a huge head start.

At my age I can't even contemplate the difficulty of wraping m,y head around and inflection-based langauge with thousands of characters.

That being said, I'm tempted to enrol my three-year old in Mandarin lessons. In this part of Canada it is likely to be much more useful that French.