compulsory Chinese in Junior School

[henrietta1199]

What do you think about it?
Several very well regarded schools like SHHS, Latymer, Bute, Forest, St.Chistopher offer Chinese as a compulsory subject in Junior school until age 11. I doubt the usefulness of it. My 6 yo daughter is very academic and also bilingual (english-russian). We are investing a lot of efforts into academic Russian.(we attend Russian school on Saturdays, read Russian books, write etc.) Adding extra very hard foreign language does not seem to be a good investment of time and efforts. We are happy with French and/or Spanish.
Would you dismiss schools with compulsory Chinese? I found that at Senior school (11+) none of the famous well regarded schools have Chinese as compulsory.

I think I remember you saying that before Plural. However as there is a shortage of MFL teachers and certainly Mandarin teachers, not all schools can teach Mandarin. I’m all for giving children options but other languages are needed too.

BubblesBuddy - Your argument ignores all the people in China who are not learning English. Even with your numbers, there are over 1 billion people in China who are not learning English, whereas only 0.01% of French students are not learning English. From a utilitarian standpoint, why would you, as an English speaker, bother learning French when virtually all French speakers will be able to communicate with you in English, rather than learn Chinese when over 1 billion Chinese speakers will not be able to communicate with you in English?

I have no preference for whether my children "learn" French, Spanish or Mandarin in primary beyond the reasoning that I've already given, which is that they might as well get some exposure to a language which is not French if they will have to learn French (in greater depth) at secondary. If, hypothetically, all my likely secondary choices mandated that my children learn Mandarin, then I would prefer they be exposed to something other than Mandarin at primary.

It doesn't mention Mandarin, but today's Guardian article "Spanish exam entries on track to surpass French in English schools" may be of interest.

@BubblesBuddy as far as I know as I'm not involved in staffing it seems that they have teachers come over from China as a swap. Sort of like TEFL teachers but obviously teaching Chinese not English...

That's pretty cool.

We had Spanish or French or German in high school then 5/6th year we could do latin as part of our choices - I did mine right through via classical studies.

Those classes are the reason I'm nicknamed gryffen as it was 6yrs of CS and Archaeology lol

One suspects GCSE Mandarin won’t help with millions of people in China due to the huge number of minority languages spoken. In addition, the people who matter in business and commerce will speak English. I guess it might be nice to speak to the guy making the steel, but it’s probably not necessary.

Spanish is attractive for a MFL choice because people go on holiday in Spain. Germany isn’t seen as a holiday destination and, for whatever reason, holidays and perceived usefulness do determine language choices. As so few go on to do degrees in MFL and learn about culture and literature, the idea of ordering your milk shake in Spanish is a tiny bit attractive to an 11 year old.

If a restaurant in China doesn’t have an English menu, heaven help you! You really will not know what you are eating. Even with rudimentary Mandarin, it would be a minefield. Therefore unless we suddenly up the number of people committed to languages in this country, we are going to be lacking anyway. I think we now get 47% of 16 year olds taking a language GCSE, up from 40%. No one ever sees any great learning opportunity in failing to learn a language so they are easily discarded.

Mandarin has the largest number of native speakers on the planet by miles. The British Council report is indeed well worth a read to understand the relative importance of languages assessed by other metrics. DS is doing Mandarin and German and secondary school, and I wish he had the opportunity to do Mandarin earlier.

One suspects GCSE Mandarin won’t help with millions of people in China due to the huge number of minority languages spoken.

Hanyu Chinese, aka Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and, as such, the language used in government functions across the country and the language of instruction in nearly all schools. Whilst almost 30% of people in China have a different dialect as a mother tongue, nearly all of them would have learned Mandarin in school.

In addition, the people who matter in business and commerce will speak English.

This is mostly a function of the privileged position of the English language in the world economy. But the point is even stronger for France and Germany than for China.

I don't dispute your conclusion that your particular interests should drive which language you learn. I do dispute the numbers and arguments you use to denigrate the learning of Mandarin.

Have you tried to learn Mandarin as an adult?

I am doing it now. It’s far easier than I thought it would be - was told by the teacher that native English speakers with some foreign language experience tend to pick it up quicker as we use tones instinctively. My company is paying - general consensus is I’ll be fluent enough to have conversation with Native Mandarin speakers, and read a newspaper, in 18 months of part time study.

It’s up to you. I personally think language lessons run in schools tend to be a waste of time. They can barely get kids to halter in French let alone fluent, so they won’t be able to do it in Mandarin.

Having said that, however, in 20-30 years time having fluent Russian and fluent Mandarin will definitely ensure your daughter has access to the best jobs.

A lot of older Mandarin speakers in China (Taiwan, Hong Kong) never learned how to read it because they use Pinyun instead. Pinyun is probably the language used most in most China based companies - at mine everything is written in Pinyun and then translated to Mandarin / English as appropriate.

The existance of Pinyun and use of similar tones is probably why native English speakers find Mandarin more straight forward.

DD will be starting secondary next year. She will be learning French together with everyone else in her form. As they will be taking all classes together as a form, they will not be differentiating between those with zero French, those who learned some French in primary, and those who speak French at home. The entire form will be starting from scratch. The school acknowledges that some students will have a harder time than others and some might be very bored but this is the way they do things.

Is this normal in the secondaries you are familiar with?

@expat - they probably do this to give native language speakers an easy GCSE A. But in my year most native French speakers didn’t get as high GCSE grades as non-natives because they were marked down for using slang. If you want your dd to learn another language then fight for it.

DuchyDuke - yes, I've heard that native speakers often fall down on the exam because they don't necessarily learn the grammar correctly.

But my question is, when you were year 7, did they make the native speakers sit through the same class as someone with no background?

I think it's a brilliant idea. I wish all schools did it. It's good for children to learn that there are other ways to write than our alphabet, that the musicality of some languages matters. It's just so different from our langauge in every way. Doesn;t really matter if they don't progress much - at least they are becoming less insular. And if a few English pupils go on to become fluent Mandarin speakers they would be gold dust in the world of business. They'd know what is actually being said around a deal table rather than just what is being translated.

Yes they did expat

Who will teach it? Having heard my ds' hideous pronounciation of the French and Spanish he was "taught" at primary, unless they have a proper teacher I doubt the result will be intelligible.