[MaxwellKahn]

As an American born person with some Chinese heritage, it's interesting to see this trend play out in myself alongside wider society.

When I was growing up, my parents and relatives would constantly try to convince me to learn my ethnic language, half to know my roots and half to catch the "China train".

In university, I took it upon myself to take Mandarin courses for several years, but only got to middling competency.

Now, as the years go on, I find that once innate desire to "one day learn Mandarin" gradually fade away. In terms of usefulness: - it seems less and less likely that I'll ever live in China for a significant length of time due to all the common reasons others in the thread are mentioning - I have many international Chinese friends, but our friendships are based on cultural affinity rather than linguistic affinity, so they're perfectly fine switching to English whenever we need to talk about something complex.

It's interesting, but many of my American peers of Chinese heritage are actually learning Korean or Japanese, which would have been extremely rare 10 years ago.

[talloaktrees]

I'm not ethnically Chinese but I studied Mandarin in college in the early 2000s then moved to Taiwan for almost a decade. I don't regret doing it, but it didn't provide me any sort of business or career advantage like everyone thought it would in the early 2000s

[porknubbins]

People never looked at the need for foreign language with enough granularity. For example there was never and real large demand for Westerners to communicate with mainland China. We send specs, they manufacture them. China doesn’t really do FDI here. Now there was a time language skills were a major plus in law or finance in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure about that anymore. The new US TSMC plants might have some needs but probably won’t have trouble filling them.