Mandarin?

[Cortina]

Any schools offering this?

More useful than French?

Anyone's children studying currently?

Thanks.

Before I pronounced on whether it was a gimmick or an advantage in the future workplace, I would want to know something about the qualifications of the teachers. One advantage of the commonly taught languages is that it is not usually difficult to get hold of highly qualified teachers.

As to what languages your children should be learning, that will depend not only on which countries they will be in contact with later on in life, but also what they will study at university.

When I was young, we were told that Spanish was the language you should study, as there are so many Spanish speakers, and that German was pretty useless. In fact, I found German invaluable for coping with my university studies and subsequent research: I've enjoyed having Spanish but have only ever used it for holidaying purposes and do not anticipate ever using it for anything practical. My field is admittedly a little specialised, but a lot of my friends say the same, German is really useful because so much is written in German.

DS's school offer Mandarin GCSE, but those doing it are either Chinese / one Chinese Parent, OR they have done well at the lunchtime Mandarin club that runs from Yr7 (by a parent I believe).

DS wasn't interested - his friends at the club said how hard it was just learning 5 new words (writing them etc).

He stuck to French & Latin

[clicked on this thread title thinking it was in "baby names"]

Heheh

I don't speak Mandarin, but I work in dictionary publishing and have done a lot of work on Chinese bilingual projects, working with Chinese publishers, so I have a familiarity with some aspects of the language, and agree with what BIWI says about the process of learning the language being almost as important and valuable as the actual language learned. And not only because of the culture and the use of characters, but because they have a completely different way of structuring and organising the language, so learning about that helps learners (given a good teacher) to think in different ways, in a way that learning a European language never could. I would love to learn it.

If your children are interested in business (don't know how old they are) then I can also say that China is an incredibly exciting place to be. There is such a buzz about it.

And I disagree entirely with whoever said it's not worth learning because there are already so many native Mandarin speakers. Firstly, I'm afraid that is so typical of English native speakers. And secondly, making an effort to speak Mandarin would be much appreciated, regardless of one's proficiency. Politeness and thoughtfulness are enormously important aspects of Chinese culture and making an effort is, if nothing else, polite. One is far more likely to succeed in business by showing willing.

Thanks midnightexpress. I really found your post really interesting and informative!

midnightexpress, I totally agree with you about the process of learning Mandarin being as valuable as the language learnt.

I am amazed watching my dd doing homework writing the characters how much more difficult it is to just learning the formation of 26 romanised letters. Each character not only has to look right but the strokes also written in a specific way (eg horizontal left to right) in a specific order, which will be different for each character.

And the ability to pick up intonations, which children are so much better at than adults.

She is only 6 years old!

It is almost brain training, I find.

God, yes, I wish I had the brain of a 6 year old. It takes so much work to learn everything!