I wont rely on Ukraine numbers.
White people in general harp a lot about Asian demographics whether to talk about "Asian xenophobia" or to promote sexpats when the most glaring examples of on-going depopulation are all in white Eastern Europe.
From what i gathered even the US and western Europe have peaked in population.
Russian is a very Indo European language with very Indo European sounds. It has all the standard Indo European stuff like conjugation, grammatical gender and complex consonant clusters that Chinese doesn't have.
MIPT has made Chinese compulsory. Experts did not approve the initiative
The university explains that in the next seven years, up to half of all scientific articles will be published in Chinese, so students must be proficient in technical translation. However, physicists and Chinese teachers believe that this initiative will not benefit MIPT
Photo: Evgeny Yepanchintsev/TASS
Students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology complained that they were forced to learn Chinese. If earlier German, French, English and Spanish were taught at MIPT, then in the new academic year it is not supposed to study other languages, except for English and Chinese.
As follows from to the appeal of the MIPT Student Council to the department of foreign languages of the university, the Chinese language has become mandatory. At the same time, additional courses to improve English are canceled at MIPT.
However, most students would like to continue learning English, as it is the language of the international scientific community, Ilya Zakharov, chairman of the MIPT Student Council, points out:
Ilya Zakharov
Chairman of the MIPT Student Council
“Since 2023, when studying in educational programs at MIPT, Chinese has been studied as the main language. English is taught to the Upper Intermediate level, after which the students are simply confronted with the fact that they are now learning Chinese. There were always several languages: there were French, German, but this September we discussed it together with the administration, and it was decided that the number of languages should be reduced to three - to Chinese, German, Spanish. [This was done] mainly for budgetary reasons: it is not very cost-effective to maintain many languages that are not spoken by very many people. And now they are deciding, in principle, to reduce most of the things in English, in Spanish, that is, in the next year or two we will have only English and Chinese.
Starting from the next academic year, the first two years of undergraduate studies will be taught according to the scheme: first English, then Chinese. In the third year, both languages will be studied together - one pair per week each. In the fourth year - again one language, the choice of the student. In the magistracy, you can choose either English or Chinese (if you have good English).
In fundamental science, the Chinese language is not particularly needed, explains astrophysicist, professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Popov. All more or less important studies are translated into English, which the Chinese experts, like everyone else, are quite fluent in.
Sergey Popov
astrophysicist, professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences
“For fundamental science, in my opinion, one language is still relevant, and this is English. This is if we are talking about work. And it will be so for the foreseeable future. I read almost 100% [of scientific materials] in English. I write 90% in English, but it could be 100%. Perhaps the Chinese language is not very relevant. If I chose myself, I would think first of all about professional communication. But I would rather choose German. I can imagine a situation where some technical things - not fundamental science, but engineering - can only exist in Chinese. But the lack of choice for such a top university is rather an indicator of the weakness of the university.”
At the request of Business FM, MIPT sent a written comment, which states that in order for graduates to rely on the latest scientific publications in their work, to be able to read technical documentation, the formats and volumes of introducing Chinese as a second compulsory language into the educational program are now being discussed. It is in Chinese that up to 27% of all scientific articles in the fields specialized for MIPT are currently written, and according to the forecast of researchers, up to half of all technical and engineering documentation will be published in the language of the eastern neighbor by 2030, the university noted.
To learn how to read technical documentation in Chinese, you will first have to master literary Chinese at least at an intermediate level, and then move on to learning technical Chinese. To do this, within the framework of a five-six-year higher education, language pairs should be daily. One or two pairs of Chinese a week for two or three years of study is just a waste of time for students, Taras Ivchenko, Associate Professor of the Department of Oriental Languages at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State Humanitarian University, is outraged:
Taras Ivchenko
Associate Professor, Department of Oriental Languages, Institute of Linguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities
“I don’t think that people who specialize in physics will include four or five pairs of Chinese in the educational process. If this is not done, the extent to which people will learn this language will be limited. I don't think that they have any prospect at all to read scientific articles in this language. The working language, the common language for all scientists involved in this field, is English. It is desirable that the people themselves who are doing this experiment do it for the sake of obtaining content, and not in order to be considered that we have introduced the Chinese language.
As the expert notes, the peculiarity of technical texts in any language, not excluding Chinese, is that they lend themselves well to machine translations.
I get their frustration because you really need a big bulk of Chinese words before you can really start appreciate and used the chinese language. I