Sinophilia

Random observation. I was just thinking about languages and linguistics (which isn't too hard to believe when you consider that it's I who's doing the thinking) earlier today.

And I thought about language pairs and relative difficulty: e.g. English phonetics is hard for Japanese speakers, but Japanese logographs are difficult for English speakers. So it's a bit of a trade off, I guess.

Anyways, I was thinking how most people don't flinch when a person of asian descent speaks fluent English. And yet, most people are shocked when a person of european descent speaks Chinese. Is this an example of unidirectional racism? Or is just simply because most white people who bother to learn to speak Chinese also come with some of the hugest egos known to man? It's as if they need this extra ego as some sort of overcompensation for self-confidence or something.

But I guess, anyone who does anything outside of his demographic norm would carry some pride for being able to do something outside his expected experience at all. So in that sense, it's normal. Just damned annoying.