The Asian economic giants

Japan has the second largest economy in the world in terms of GDP, after the US, but using purchasing power as the measure, China beats Japan into third place. It seems that these two Asian economic giants are neck and neck, and while Japan has traditionally seen the US as its main economic rival, it seems that their competition these days is a little closer to home.

Japan experienced runaway economic growth in the decades following the second world war, but following the Tokyo Stock Exchange crash of 1989, growth slowed. In 2009, the country's unemployment rate reached a post-war high of 5.7%, and many now predict that the Chinese economy is set to eclipse that of Japan as Asia's largest. As Japan's economy has shrunk, China has begun to experience massive rates of growth - 10.7% in the final quarter of 2009, while Japan's economy contracted by 6% last year.

It will be interesting to see how this change in economic circumstances affects language learning, both in terms of numbers of English speakers learning Japanese or Chinese, and numbers of Chinese and Japanese speakers learning English. Of course, these statistics are difficult to come by - it might be possible to find out the numbers of people coming from Japan or China to attend a language school in London, for example, but trying to find out how many are learning more informally is notoriously difficult - one of the reasons statistics on the numbers of people who speak a particular language can be difficult to come by. With Chinese having many more native speakers than any other language (although English probably has more speakers when non-native speakers are included), it seems likely that the country's continued economic growth will increase the importance of Chinese as a language of world business. Westerners looking to do business in Japan need to have an understanding of the language in order to succeed - it seems likely that Chinese will become an increasingly important business language too. Perhaps, as China opens up and becomes more prosperous, there will also be a growth in language tourism. For ambitious young Chinese students wanting to attend an English school London will be the destination of choice, while many British may consider that learning English in China is essential to their business prospects.