language choices - chinese or latin?

[mimsum]

ds has to choose two languages when he goes into Y7 in September - he definitely wants to do Spanish as his first choice but says he wants to do Mandarin Chinese as his second language. I'm not convinced that this is the right decision and I'm trying to persuade him to do Latin instead. He says Latin isn't useful - I think he has visions of himself chatting fluently in Mandarin by his mid-teens

any persuasive arguments one way or the other? we have to make decision by monday

Message withdrawn

um - may give away too much RL stuff - easily googled! Fourteenth/fifteenth century English - lots of manuscript and dialect work. And here's me disputing the usefulness of Latin!

I learned Latin at school and loved it, in fact I love any language with a complicated but systematic grammar. At the time it also helped me understand a lot more English words. Forgotten it all now though.

I also lived in HK for 5 years and am ashamed to say I learned virtually no Cantonese and very limited Mandarin. I'm not very musical and found it almost impossible to distinguish between the tones. What also put me off was that I'd never be able to read it properly. Chinese dc start learning the characters when they are 3. I do regret not making more of an effort though.

I guess your son should make his own decision really. Motivation is the key point for learning any language.

Habbibu I think perhaps I'm looking at it from my rather ancient standpoint. When I was at school, many moons ago, English grammar wasn't really taught (I think things have improved in that respect, I am a child of the seventies, early eighties), so when we started learning French, nobody had the foggiest notion what a verb was, let alone a preposition or a gerund. And I found that the way Latin was taught to me really helped me to grasp all of that, which in turn helped with other languages. But I take your point.

Anyway, I was arguing in favour of Chinese, so not sure why I've gone off on this particular tangent.

I would say choose Latin.
Also depends on the teaching quality,very hard to get good teacher of chinese and there are so many dialects.

Fair enough. Not sure things have changed that much (apart from the term gerund!) - I had to give a student English teacher flatmate of mine a crash course in English grammar. She had a degree in Eng Lit!

English language degrees are relatively unusual, mind, so you do end up learning some odd stuff and getting on your high horse sometimes (as I appear to have demonstrated).

Message withdrawn

I spent the summer after my A-levels with my family in Canada. My outstanding memory is my bi-lingual (Chinese- I think Cantonese/English) cousin translating for me when I stayed with her grandparents. She was 3yo.

I lived in an Arabic country as a toddler and apparently had quite a grasp of the local language from playing with other children who lived nearby. It would be interesting, if I were to take it up now, to see if any of those pathways in pronunciation which are apparently set at young age are still there.

mimsum, I would go with what your ds is interested in.

Having learnt Mandarin since I was 5, I am reasonably conversant. It is fun. The fact that it is a living language with immense history and culture behind it is a huge plus.

Make sure that if your ds wants to learn Mandarin, that it is in fact Mandarin (putonghua), and not Cantonese.

My DS did French, German and Latin from year 7, dropped French in Year 8, and this year took up Greek (lunchtime) and Mandarin (after school) with the NiHao Mandarin language school. He is very logical and loves Latin (and Maths). He gave up on Mandarin at the start of this term because he said it was too hard.

Latin will help with Spanish as it is the root of some Spanish vocabulary. However aged 12 I would have opted for Mandarin. I am not sure either language is particularly useful at GCSE level - so go with his enthusiasm.

thanks for all the opinions - he's plumped for Spanish and Chinese - they have an aptitude test half way through y8 and if they're not going to get up to GCSE standard they can switch to Latin or Italian from y9 so he'll still have at least 2 languages at GCSE

he seems happy and has promised to work really hard