There are over 6.doc

There are over 6,000 languages in the world. Some are more important than others, not better or more advanced, just more important. Why? Because they are spoken by more people, in more countries. That does not mean that Finnish is not important to the Finns, and Maori is not important to the Maoris. It is just that these languages are not so important to the rest of us。　　世界上有6000多种语言。其中一些比另一些更重要，但并不意味着这些语言更好或者更先进，只是更重要。为什么呢？因为这些语言的使用者更多，使用范围更广。并不是说芬兰语对于芬兰人不重要，或者毛利语对于毛利人不重要。只是说这些语言对于我们其余的人来说没有那么重要。　　On the other hand, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over one billion people. Chinese origin words account for 60% of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese vocabulary. Knowing Chinese will help you learn these languages too. It helped me. Chinese culture has influenced the world for thousands of years with its art, philosophy, technology, food, medicine and performing arts. Today China’s economy is booming. Chinese seems well worth learning。　　另一方面，中文普通话有10亿多的使用者。汉语起源的词语占到了日语、韩语和越南语词汇的60%之多。懂中文也将会有助于你学习这些语言。它就帮助了我。几千年来中国文化一直在艺术、哲学、技术、饮食、医药和表演艺术方面影响着世界。今天中国的经济正在迅猛发展，中文似乎很值得去学习。　　Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese are essentially dialects of the same language. If you learn one, you can learn the others. I did. If you learn Spanish, you open the door to the culture, music, history and possible business dealings with 800 million people in 60 countries, including the US and Canada。　　西班牙语、法语、意大利语和葡萄牙语从本质上说是同一种语言的不同方言。如果你学会了一种，你也可以学会其他几种。我就是这样。如果你掌握了西班牙语，它就为你打开了一扇门，你可以接触到和8亿人相关的文化、音乐、历史，可能还有商务，这8亿人来自60个国家，其中包括美国和加拿大。　　If you get ambitious you could try Russian, as I have been doing for the last two years. Once you have Russian you can probably communicate with other Slav speakers。　　如果你在语言学习方面有雄心壮志，那么你可以试试俄语，过去两年我一直在学。一旦你掌握了俄语，你应该可以和其他的斯拉夫语言使用者交流。　　But hold it here! Before getting carried away, let’s look at the present situation of language teaching. According to one Canadian survey, after 12 years of daily French classes, only one high school graduate out of 1