Chinese or Russian for MFL degree language?

[MsFogi]

DS is planning to study MFL and wants to do a language ab initio - he has narrowed the choices down to Chinese (Mandarin) or Russian and can’t decide between them. Do any knowledgeable MNers have any advice? My gut instinct is that Chinese may be more interesting for graduate recruiters (as the market for Russian is somewhat limited due to sanctions now and for the foreseeable future). My understanding is that if he does Chinese he wouldn’t come out with the sort of fluency he would if he did a European language or Russian but I am not sure that is a deal-breaker - but can any more knowledgeable people tell me how much Mandarin a student would/could learn by doing it at uni and spending a year in China or Hong Kong? DS is completely undecided and I am trying to help but coming from a place of ignorance unfortunately so turning to the wisdom of MN both for insight into the language itself and into the cut-throat graduate recruitment market!

I would say surely Russian is a nightmare to do just now - obvs impossible to spend time there, so that makes Mandarin a shoe-in for me, if those are the choices.

I have no knowledge of either really (a few words of Russian hah) but I would imagine that yes, his knowledge of Mandarin will be limited; but you have to start somewhere and if he is keen then he can extend it after uni in all kinds of ways (inc living there and I would imagine teaching it.

My old MFL HoD had done Russian at uni and very much regretted it; they couldn't recall any (they were only about 7-8 years out of uni) but obvs they did nothing to further it (which is fair enough). What other MFL is he doing?

Either. They are both rare and government sought languages. Each has a separate script. My DD has studied Arabic and Chinese and was interested in Russian but it wasn't available (at school). So literally, either. Whichever your kid has the preference for, choose.

Having done one of these I'd say do what he's most drawn to. I believe Russian students are currently sent to the Baltics or Kazakhstan which is going to be a very different experience, whereas Chinese will be in country, but in terms of career prospects, very few language students end up using the language anyway - it's more a good way to demonstrate an aptitude for learning, resilience and being quick to pick things up. In my cohort, most grads who were employed by the government were taught Arabic quite quickly as it was a more needed language in those days. My Russian is rusty but I can still 'get by' over 20 years later. Any language will fade if you don't practice.

If studying Chinese, he will want a year in Taiwan or China. Hong Kong speaks Cantonese normally which will limit his exposure.

I will say he should pick whichever interests him. You can learn to a good level as a foreigner. The food writer Fuchsia Dunlop and ex Australia prime minister Kevin Rudd both speak very good Chinese.

The problem with mandarin is dialect so I'd go for Russian.

Hong Kong is predominantly Cantonese so your son would probably go somewhere more North in China.

Both languages have issues around (a) access to proper immersion which is an absolute requirement for mastery (b) maintenance. I studied (European) MFL and am old and know many people who studied Russian or Chinese and have come to deeply regret the waste of time because they forgot their very hard-earned language skills very promptly after graduation - and hadn't been learning other, vital skills, during their degree. I would never, ever recommend getting into debt doing Russian or Chinese ab initio at a UK university - indeed, I wouldn't recommend it at all unless an applicant had a trust fund or at least enough parental financial support to do another degree afterwards.

That’s very interesting @Ceramiq and echoes what my old boss said. @MsFogi I was kind of trying to suggest a different MFL tbh. I think (say) joint French and German would be more useful than French plus Russian ab initio.

I have a Russian degree. 20 years on and having spent the last 10years in a job where I don't use the language, my reading is OK but my speaking is quite poor (my brain doesn't seem to work quick enough for a conversation, whereas it has time when reading). I was able to spend a few years working in Russia after graduating, which really cemented what i had learned, but obviously that isn't possible at the minute and as pp have said, will impact the level of influency achieved.

Career prospects - security services (GCHQ especially) and NSC / FCDO will be interested in both if that is of interest to your DS, but there are likely to be more limited private sector opportunities for Russian due to sanctions. Both are eligible for this summer internship scheme, which keeps coming up on my targeted ads and looks great (this is the russian link but there is also a mandarin version). It didn't exist when I was at uni. https://www.brightnetwork.co.uk/graduate-jobs/mi5-mi6-gchq/language-talent-programme-russian

However most MFL students don't go on to roles actively using the languages - it's more about all the other skills that you develop in studying MFL. My cohort went onto things like military intelligence/ HR in multinationals / civil service / big 4 consultancy etc

But generally I'd say for your DS to go with whichever culture he finds more interesting. Only 60% of my degree was language - the rest was history, politics, economics, literature, etc relating to the region. I personally found russian history and politics absolutely fascinating, which made studying much easier for the other 40%. If he has no preference language wise but a preference for the literature or history for one over the other, then that can be a reason to choose that one.

You need real linguistic talent and motivation to learn Chinese as an adult. Learning to read is very difficult, indeed several Chinese friends of mine, who speak Mandarin but who were educated in English, have tried and failed. Chinese is also tonal, so it is useful to be musical.

I used to work for an international organisation which used to provide language training, but would test aptitude in advance. (Listening to tapes in Kurdish and then testing to see how much you could recognise/remember.) Though I have learned four languages as an adult I don't have much aptitude so was limited to "easier" options. As I recall you needed to be top 2% to be considered for Chinese, top 10% for Arabic and maybe top 20% for Russian. If you weren't it was going to be a real slog.

There are a few Eastern European countries which have Russian as a second language so I'd plump for that.

Could not disagree with this more. Yes, language skills fade if you don't practice but doing a language degree is about so much more than learning cases and pronunciation! I learned a lot of other vital skills while studying Russian ab initio, I travelled the length of Russia aged just 19, I wrote essays in my third language about the politics and culture of one of the most influential countries on the world stage, I learned to see new perspectives and to be way out of my comfort zone, I discussed feminism and the role of women in soviet times and an evolving world and I learned a bloody hard language from scratch at the same time. What 'vital' skills would I have got from a History degree while I was wasting time on that?

I couldn't recommend learning a 'difficult' language more highly and I think it's exciting and brave of your DS to go for it. Yes, it's a lot harder than reading French literature and spending your year abroad in Aix en Provence, but it's a much more interesting experience and is highly valued by a lot of employers.

No-one today is going to be travelling the length of Russia unless they wish to risk their life (and indeed, the son of a friend of ours did lose his life to the Russian mafia a few years ago, after reading Russian at university). My point is that reading Russian or Chinese is a luxury position today when most students incur large amounts of debt in order to attend university.

I don't disagree that times have changed. And I'm so sad for the students who won't have those same opportunities that we did. But to say that people will regret studying a difficult language and lose out on vital skills doing so is disingenuous. I'd argue that if you're going to incur debt for a degree, you should do something really worthwhile, rather than treading the same paths as everyone else and staying in your comfort zone. All power to your DS, OP.

I agree with pp - both are equally useful and impressive, so he should go simply with his preference.

Something he can consider is that studying the language at higher level will incorporate study of the culture and history - is he more drawn to either in that respect?

A lot of schools in Malaysia and Singapore educate in Mandarin, which is rapidly overtaking dialect as the lingua franca in Chinese areas. Indeed dialect (Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka etc) is dying out astonishingly fast.

Taiwan would be an obvious place for immersion, but it would now be possible to find parts of SE Asia where Mandarin is the day to day language.

I took both Mandarin and Russian to Masters level, but not in the UK, across four different countries, and took the two languages about a decade apart.

I also taught Mandarin in uni in the UK for a couple of years, but this was in the 1990s, so much has probably changed, including teaching and learning resources, as well as job opportunities after graduating.

All those caveats aside, I do have experience in learning both, and have a decent idea of what some people ended up doing afterwards.

First questions:
What else would he be studying?
Would it leave sufficient time for language learning? Chinese in particular needs a heck of a lot of extra time put in by the student just for sheer memorization of characters and vocab. Of the top of my head, I would say at least two extra hours put in by the student per hour of taught lesson. Russian also needs time, but not quite as much.
Will whatever else he studies lead to a job where the language could be incorporated? E.g. geology, some type of engineering, law, business, computer science?
Can he make himself passionate about a subject to the extent that he would go above and beyond to learn it? I.e. spare time spent watching movies in the language, spending one's remaining spare time hanging out with native speakers of the language? (If the answer is no, then he probably shouldn't take Mandarin).

If you do only a BA you will not come out of it with anything like the type of fluency you would get in an easier European language. You would still be deciphering texts fairly agonizingly. Spending a year in a relevant country and studying the language full time there would make a very large difference to that, though, as long as one would spend that time studying intensively and not fooling around (as many do).

Will post more in a moment, as want to read what others have posted meanwhile.

Most universities now support Mandarin to the level needed for students to get work permits in China and even prep for the visa exam as prestigiojs grad jobs in many fields (eg architecture, engineering) are now only available there . So fluency should not be a problem

I’ve learned Mandarin. Contrary to what people believe English speakers who understand English grammar pick it up quicker because English is much, much more difficult to learn. You can become fluent enough to live / work in China within 2 years if you study an hour a day.

cough Pizdets?

I did my degree 40 years ago. At the time, opportunities in Russian were limited to tourism, the whisky industry, GCHQ and the foreign office/diplomatic service. Naturally, there were restrictions with the latter two. If you had family in a Communist country, you were barred.

In those days, the firms that did offer jobs to Russian speakers often favoured men over women - they thought it to dangerous for women to travel in areas where Russian was spoken.

One of the lads in my course got a job with the BBC World Service - he'd married a Russian girl.

I'm fairly rusty now, though I can get by if I have to. I've interpreted, but only in a school or church situation. I wouldn't trust me in important negotiations at all. I believe that there are sometimes opportunities in the oil industry, but luck often plays a part.

I notice that when job opportunities are advertised for Russian speakers, the firms involved often state that they want a native speaker and then offer a salary that amounts to sweeties.

As others have said, a degree in Russian doesn't necessarily mean that that is going to be needed for your career. As with other subjects, you can use it to access various other Civil Service jobs, for example.

I completely agree. MFL are much more about language. You learn history,literature and politics. You also gain huge resilience from your year abroad and if you are in a difficult country you grow up faster and become more resilient and resourceful. A much better experience than sitting round in the library doing English lit or History in my opinion.

Hardly anyone goes into a linguistic focused career and those roles are not particularly well paid but MFL is v respected by employers as a test of intellectual ability. If your child has v good linguistic skills go for Chinese, I would say. It would be fascinating even if they never became fluent. Even being able to communicate a bit would be way more than anyone else - imagine if you were working for a business and was able to greet and converse with oversea clients - even at a basic level, it would be a huge plus!

That isn't a problem at all. You'd be learning Putonghua which is understood everywhere.

Years abroad for Russian are few and far between. US students go to UCL for their Russian year abroad these days.

Right, back again:

Does China still offer two year scholarships to UK graduate students? There used to be a lot, particularly compared to the number of people learning the language. Perhaps something worth looking into.

Re spending a year somewhere:

Kazakhstan is currently the most sensible place for Russian. Huge number of native speakers, including many Kazakhs who speak Russian natively and can not speak Kazakh at all.

For Chinese, should be in China if at all possible. Google areas where Mandarin is spoken natively, and aim for there. I.e not Shanghai or Guangzhou or Fujian (there are of course other areas) as although Mandarin is taught and used as a lingua franca, what people are using in daily life is not Mandarin, and the Mandarin that people are using can be quite non-standard in pronunciation.
I took a few courses in Chinese in China, a couple of months each time, quite some time ago, and the lessons were very rapid and intense. Asbin, definitely worthwhile.
Singapore is also possible, as a pp said, as the usage of Mandarin in daily life has really taken off compared with a few decades ago. That said, the temptation to use English would perhaps be too high.
Taiwan is not such a good idea. China simplified its writing system in the 1950s, whereas Taiwan continues to use unsimplified characters, so one has to put time into learning those as well, which may be useful, or maybe not, depending on one's intentions career wise.

What people who took these languages ended up doing:
Obviously, quite a number got a different job and never used the language again, but this is for those that I know of who did end up using it, and which langage they learnt. Will shorten language name to just its capital letter:

Working in computer science for major tech firms on machine translation and automatic language recognition (R, M)
Engineer - petroleum industry (R, M)
Engineer - industrial manufacturing (M)
Banking (M)
Air steward/ess (M)
Travel industry in one way or another (One set up her own company organizing tours to Lithuania) (R, M)
Interpreting (R, M)
Intelligence services (R, M)

Worth noting: the intelligence services stuff that I knew of were not in the UK (were India and USA) sounded utterly boring. Involved lots of reading newspapers and listening in to communications. Latter was CIA wanting to recruit people studying Russian, they came and gave a recruitment speech to each university class.)

Mandarin, if only because of the year abroad issue, without which it will be impossible to gain mastery. It'll be hard work though! But then so would Russian.

One of my DC is doing A-level Mandarin and it sounds so impressive. I'm very proud.