Thursday, June 11, 2009

Trends in searching to learn Chinese

We know that people are using Google to search for how to learn Chinese, and Google Trends is a useful for comparing these searches over time.

Below you can see what happens if we examine the trends in relation to searches for the following three phrases: "learn chinese", "learn mandarin", "learn cantonese".

search trends

Clearly "learn Chinese" is the most popular, and indeed searches for Mandarin specifically are more than double the searches for Cantonese.

In general the trend is downwards, and other than an impressive spike around the time of the Beijing Olympics, it has continued to fall.

  • Here you can look at a graph of the number of searches for the flashcard software Anki versus ProVoc
I've tried various other searches in relation to learning Chinese, but none of them were as interesting as the above. If you can think if any other good searches, leave a comment below.

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