Left speechless by Chinese youth

China's youth was speaking loud and clear at the telephone interview round of the "21st Century Scholastic Cup" speech contest, which I recently helped judge. They were saying, we are young and speak English better than you will ever speak Chinese.

Over two mornings I interviewed around 80 aspiring linguists aged between 16 and 18. The finals for the nation's premier English-speaking competitions are today and tomorrow, at the Beijing Conference Center.

It is sponsored by China Daily and the publisher of Harry Potter, Scholastic Inc, and organized by our sister paper, 21st Century Teens.

Over 10,000 students entered the competition and these had been winnowed down. It was my job to further separate the wheat from the chaff for the finals.

My assistant, Nightingale, flitted around the office making cups of coffee and ensuring the calls went smoothly. She dialed the youngsters' numbers and calmed them down when needed. Some were, apparently, petrified about speaking to a foreigner for the first time.

This was a golden opportunity to take the pulse of China's new generation and come up with some generalizations.

Firstly, young women seem to be better than men at speaking a second language. According to Nightingale this is because "girls work hard, boys play more". It was difficult to get in a word sometimes. One young lady said her favorite animal was the Tibetan Antelope. "They are so cute I could hug them. If I was a goodwill ambassador for the Games I would like to go to the airport and say 'hello'."

Second, the students were invariably patriotic. I have judged speech contests in Britain and this was not a feature of them. I asked one lad about Mao Zedong.

"He was great, a real leader who led many revolutions so we are now living in a wonderful world, walking along a perfect road "

Everyone was going to do something for the country. In the West the theme is usually "me".

Thirdly, there were misconceptions about the West (most of them had not been abroad). A surprising number of students reckoned if they studied in the United States they could have fun all day because parents were more liberal. Many foreign students studied hard too, I assured them.

Some of my questions caused confusion, especially the one asking, "If you were god what would you do?" Nobody seemed to understand this and the replies were only marginally better if the question became, "If you had super powers what would you do?"

Eventually I discovered the question was unimportant, since the prepared responses would be much the same, along the lines of a beauty contest. There was going to be world peace, a great Olympics, and thousands of volunteers at the airport speaking in tongues.

My overall impression was China's youth is speaking good English. A recent Economist article suggested that learning Chinese, for English-speakers, is a waste of time. "One reason is that many Chinese already speak reasonable English."

This would have pleased my father (English) who always maintained the supposed inability of British people to learn another language was in fact a ploy to make foreigners speak English. It seems to have worked.

(China Daily 12/07/2007 page20)