Originally Posted by
willibrord
English is on the way out. Mandarin will be the "world language" for the next generation. If you are under 50 start studying now. I am.
Even when China's economy becomes the largest in the world, English will remain the "world language" for the foreseeable future for several reasons. The biggest is that English has an alphabet, an alphabet which is used by many other languages. If you can speak English, you can also read English and write English. That is not true for Mandarin. Learning to read and write Chinese is very different from learning to speak Mandarin or another Chinese dialect.