Language barrier for Chinese students and GRE physics score
I came across a blog mentioned about why Chinese students got good GRE physics scores. http://incoherently-scattered.blogspot.com/2008/01/graduate-admissions-acing-gre-physics.html
Some suggested that they practiced a lot with previous exam problem sets, and think that might be considered as cheating in American standards.
I just want to point out one obvious reason that many people in US might neglect. That is, for most physics majors, all the textbooks they used are in Chinese. So if one student does not study those previous GRE physics problem sets. He or she has no other way to quickly master all those special terms in physics.
If the exam problem sets were translated into Chinese, the level of difficulty is not a problem for advanced Chinese undergraduate students. About 10 years ago, I myself was preparing GRE physics while also preparing GRE general exam, TOEFL, and doing my experiments as a master degree student in Beijing University. I scored 970 (the maximum is 990) and was still laughed by a bunch of my classmates who got 990 without much effort. It was rare at that time to see someone got GRE physics score below 900 if he or she prepared for it seriously. I agree with those commented in the aforementioned blog that GRE physics score doesn’t have much correlation with future success in physics, which seems to be more about opportunities/luck to work in a productive group/area, and maybe the ability to manage research group. Otherwise we would see more successful Chinese PIs. And as a matter of fact many of my classmates left physics (for a richer life etc) and only a few are still struggling (as far as I know only one is exceptional and got an AP position in a good place).
People from Russian and many other European countries seem to have no problem with English literature. I learned to speak Russian during my college years. At that time Russian literature still had a strong influence in China for historic reasons, and I was too ambitious / naive and thought I should learn a second foreign language besides English. Today, I forgot most of what I learned, but one impression is that most scientific words are pronounced very similarly in Russian as in English. Also for Russian students, they usually have a very strong physics education and many of their textbooks, like the Landau theoretical physics series was translated into English and is considered one among the best textbook series.
Other countries/regions in Asia, like Korea, Taiwan, and Hongkong have a different situation than China. I leaned from a new Korea graduate student in our group that in Korea, they are using textbooks in English, and he says that he is more familiar with physics terms in English than the words translated into Korea, and most literature he read are in English. I also heard from a Korea laundry shop owner that she can teach her ABK (American born Korean) kid basic Korea in half a year, probably because Korean language can be spelled like English, while Chinese characters are more difficult from her experience. That could also explain why many ABC (American Born Chinese) have difficult to learn Chinese.
Right now in most Chinese universities textbooks in Chinese is still the only choice. Chinese people tend to follow traditions and resist changes. It is kind of a dilemma: if we use textbooks in English our own language might be consider inferior, which is not something people can be proud of; if keep Chinese as the working language, that means for most of the researchers they are disconnected from the rest of the world. China is a large country, in principle it is possible to develop our own system and keep using our own language. Historically, we have done that before in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the empire of China had the largest GDP in the world. But in recent centuries, the scientific development happened so fast, and closing the door was proved not the choice. Recently my former MS degree advisor in Beijing University, now a retired professor, told me he is spending time on a committee in charge of translation between English and Chinese words in physics. I think that is a really meaningful effort.
In the future, when there are more and more returnees with PhD degree from US and other English speaking countries join the faculty, those young professors may start using textbooks in English, like what happened in Korea, Hongkong, and Taiwan. Hopefully then, the language barrier for Chinese students is not a problem any more.