And so the "Speak More Mandarin" campaign enters about year thirty. Singapore is in a funny situation. Mandarin was introduced as a unifying dialect to an island where people were variously speaking Chaozhou, Fuhiuan, Cantonese, Hakka and a few other dialects. But English was also promoted at the same time. The net result is a bit of linguistic schizophrenia that manifests itself in a few ways, some fairly pleasing (Singlish, a very expressive multi-dialect creole), some not so pleasing (the fact that really good English writing skills are hard to come by).

My wife is a classic example: Native English speaker; but also raised speaking Cantonese; understands Hakka thanks to her mom; got years and years of Mandarin drilled into her head in school (which was a pain at the time, I am told, but comes in handy now that we live in China).

My observation (and I am open to correction on this) is that primary household language in Singapore follows something of a class divide, with Chinese-speaking households breaking more working class, and English-speaking ones breaking more white collar or affluent. So perhaps the answer to more Chinese is simply less wealth.

I like Singapore's linguistic mix, myself. But it exerts a cost, and I think someday they'll have to decide on a main language. China may be on the rise in Asia, but my money would be on English.

No need for correction: The class divide between those receiving English language schooling and those receiving Mandarin does more or less cleave white from blue collar. The new mix in a permanent resident population of 3.6 millions that the government is determined to increase to 4.5 millions (and so solve the declining birthrate among more highly educated, affluent native Chinese) is the mainland Chinese immigrants whose manner of language, habits and general style is generally not appreciated by native born Singaporeans. Also, part of this Mandarin promotion and its attendant Confucian values remains the advancement of government authority, justified as the traditional, viable alternative to failed and morally bankrupt Western values, but I'm open to correction.

Chinese is an interesting language, but I think that it is just too complicated for large numbers of foreigners to easily learn. English will continue to grow in popularity around the world for 3 reasons. First, it has had a massive head start. Second, it is used globally: in any large metropolitan area you will always find English speakers, and this trend is continuing at an exponential pace. Lastly and, in my opinion, most importantly is the relative ease of English compared to Chinese. Learning to read and write English requires only 26 simple letters. Compare this to Chinese, which needs over 3,000 characters for users to be able to read and write well. It's just too impractical and time-consuming for many people to learn.

On top of this, even if one does learn Chinese, there will undoubtedly be a million new Chinese graduates who speak and write English (or any other language) fluently. The Chinese students whom I taught were quick learners, and there was no way my pitiful Chinese skills could keep pace with their rapid acquisition of English.

Chinese is a great language, and I think the calligraphy is beautiful, but the practical value of the Chinese language in a globalized world is questionable.

More than a billion people speak and write Chinese so why is it too complicated for that breed called "foreigners" to learn? Although far from easy but contrary to popular opinion learning Chinese is on a level of difficulty with Russian and - surprise, surprise - English, and not as hard as Japanese or truly notoriously difficult languages like Navajo.

Chinese grammar is relatively simple, uninflected, has not verb tense, articles, no masculine or feminine nouns, plurals and on and on, but is a tonal language which initially causes difficulty (like Thai and Vietnamese for example) just as the strangeness of characters does pass after practice.

"(T)here will undoubtedly be a million new Chinese graduates who speak and write English (or any other language) fluently." Really? Where are these million Chinese fluent in speaking and writing English? I know very few persons who are truly bilingual in Chinese (take your pick: Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukienese, etc.) and English, pitifully few, and most are the result of bilingual higher education combined with the necessity of living in both cultures.

Just yesterday television host 李咏 interviewing a popular Chinese instructor of English remarked he knew several foreigners who spoke Mandarin quite well after only a year. Granted, those same persons were illiterate but literacy is hardly too complicated to become impossible. It just takes time; well, about as long as it takes for a native Chinese to become literate in English, despite the fact that learning English has not the prejudices (as Brent has recounted, or as some of my Chinese-American classmates insisted that they were genetically disposed to learn Chinese - a notion that lasted until the first semester's grade results) to overcome as in learning Chinese.

Last, educated persons in Chinese or English have a vocabulary of around 15-20,000 word families no matter how you parse the characters or letters involved.

I don't dispute the prevalence and utility of English in the modern world but it never ceases to surprise me that most Americans think English is so easy, a constant testament to their incredible provincialism.

Yeah, I'm an American.

The paternalistic government's demeaning the dialects is what has lead to this situation of cultural disconnect and poor Chinese language skills. Heck, even the Tamils in Singapore speak good Hokkien!! My wife was at first Chinese educated when they had 2 separate streams of schools, and in her household Hokkien (min nan yu) is the lingua franca although her mom is Hakka and her step father is Chao Zhou. In her days, almost everyone could speak decent Cantonese as well courtesy of the Shaw Brothers, Canto stars etc.

The most vibrant and non sanitized element of Singapore's culture is the lower class dialect speakers, the Pasar(market)and Gobi Diem (coffee shop) cultures. Interestingly, I have found that the dialect speakers are much more successful here in China than your black & white bureaucrats and Raffles - NUS - SDU types.

Having said all that, I really want to learn Singlish and love the whole mixture of dialects (notice Pasar above is Malay) in the SE Asian chinese diaspora.