I wanted to share my reserves about endangered South East Asian populations because of declining birth rates and the likely loss of importance of Asian languages worldwide. To give you more details, I’ve always wanted to learn an Asian language. But it’s a constant dilemma in deciding between a “useful” language and a “fun” language. I’m going on a tangent but as Spanish is set to gain more and more speakers over the coming decades and since I’m French, I thought it would be a cinch learning it. But no matter how logical and matter-of-fact my reasoning is, when my emotional side takes over I can hardly keep on because there’s not as many incentives to learn it as say English. And since I already got down English and, significantly improving my business opportunities in most countries across Europe. It’s difficult not letting my desires get in the way. Now that this part is covered, let’s circle back to Asian languages in particular. There’s way less motives for learning Asian languages considering how remote and secluded those tend to be (you speak Chinese in China, you speak Japanese in Japan). The only reason I would go for any of those languages is for entertainment and god knows how much entertainment I would unlock learning any of them since there’s a ton of untranslated content out there. But the problem I ran into is sustainability and expectations. Because both China and Japan will go through a period of population decline in the decades to come, this means there will be less people to create content and I don’t have the impression they will stoop to opening their borders to welcome foreign workers seeing how ethnocentric they’ve always been. From my experience learning Chinese, even if my knowledge is very limited I had so much fun and stimulation compared to learning Spanish. I have absolutely nothing against Spanish or anything but I feel way more connected to Asian cultures in general and learning a language would help deepen my knowledge of them. But how relevant is it to learn a language whose current speakers are expected to either gradually or drastically decrease in the future? I don’t intend on speaking with people IRL it’s just for entertainment purposes and bring more meaning and spice to my life. And as a European I have to face the fact that I would be judged as a Weeb or be singled out (I don’t even want to imagine how I would be perceived learning Japanese towards Weebs), whereas it would be more socially accepted sticking to Spanish. I think I went through all the points I wanted to address. Now I want to ask you for your take on this. Am I supposed to go for my inner desires telling to learn an Asian langage or be rational and keep learning Spanish despite the hard times I’m currently going through? Any counterpoint is more than welcome as long as it’s not I’ll-intended of course 😊
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