Are the Chinese becoming better English speakers than Indians? This question was triggered in my mind after a conversation with a summer intern in my team. She is pursuing an undergraduate law degree in a local Chinese university.
She speaks good English, albeit with occasional grammatical mistakes, at the right pace and with an accent that is more than understandable. There are few business managers around the world who will confidently say the same thing about the Indians they have worked with, after either having offshored business processes to India or having done business with Indians. Most of the Indian workforce today probably speaks English with fewer grammatical mistakes, but there are huge question marks on their pace and accent, which makes it extremely difficult for a large percentage of the world to understand them.
Upon digging deeper, I realized something nothing short of phenomenal: the English speaking ability of Chinese students is getting better with each passing batch. This means, chances are that a student graduating from university this summer speaks better English as compared to a student who graduated last year. This of course is not true for everyone who graduates, as individual will and hard work play an important role, but the system has been designed to enable this.
This is very obvious at the work place as well. There is an almost visible disparity between the English language ability of a 27 and a 23 year old. This particular discovery assumes even more significance when you put it against the fact that in India, unless you are studying at a convent school or one of the elite public schools, it is likely that your English language ability is not even at par with people of your parent's generation.
Today, a large number of Chinese students do not just stop at English, as the one foreign language that they know. Learning French or Spanish, amongst other foreign languages, is becoming very common. More and more universities are facilitating this further by encouraging their students to go on exchange to Europe and other parts of the world.
This development, if sustained, is bound to open many more opportunities, in the manufacturing as well as the services sectors, for the next generation of Chinese entrepreneurs and business leaders. There reach will not just be limited to the English-speaking world, but can expand to other parts of Europe, Latin America and Africa.
About the author: Shantanu Bawari is Shanghai-based correspondent for Business Trends Asia. This article appeared earlier on www.businesstrendsasia.com
