Mandarin - Year 7 - Independent or State School

[ukdaole]

I am looking for schools which offer Mandarin from Year 7 onwards. Preferably within a 20 mile radius of London. Please let me know if you know of any programs. Thanks

Personal tutor...would be better

Think most independent schools offer Mandarin from Y7.

If you are looking for Mandarin traditional chinese. I dont think they will do it... Whereas if you are looking for Pinyin simplified Chinese then maybe..I know at my daughter's indie its not supported unless you personal tutor...

Why do you want a school that teaches Mandarin? It's such a hard language to master - your DC would be far better off with a traditional European language.

I dont know much about it Kenlee, but my son has Mandarin. He writes a character per letter, much like with our standard alphabet. Would that be simplified?

hmm does he write China as ?? (simplified ) or ??(traditional).

In the end it doesn't matter...as the sounds are the same.

I think its a great idea to learn an Asian language as well as an extra European language. My daughter quite likes Spanish..

So hopefully she has it covered. Unless she goes to Africa...

You might get it as an after-school club. Grey Coat Hospital School has offered it in the past, not sure about this year. Fairly sure I've seen it in others too.

A lot of state secondaries offer it as well. Elm Green and Charter are two in south London.

A bit further away but I remember reading it's a compulsory subject at Brighton College.

Dulwich College if you have a boy - they have a partner school in Shanghai!

Not common in the prep schools around us in the Surrey/Hampshire border to do mandarin.

For a girl, St Nicholas' School in Fleet offers Mandarin (with a native speaking teacher) from Year 5. Not quite within 20 miles from London though.

At SPGS it is one of three options for ML in year 7, then offered as ML2 in year 8. Fairly popular.

Compulsory in yr7 at Nottinghill & Ealing High School. I think it is also taught at Putney High.

Ibstock place offers it

Haydon offers it - postal address is Pinner if you're looking it up but it's actually in Northwood Hills (NW London)

Why restrict yourself? Choose the school you like best and get a tutor for Mandarin.

Does your DC already speak some Chinese? (I'm guessing from your user name that you have just arrived in the UK from somewhere Chinese-speaking)

I would agree that private tutoring might be the way to go, as in my experience, teaching of Mandarin in British schools is a bit hit-and-miss, as it is hard to find good, qualified, experienced teachers. And of course most children would be coming to it with no knowledge of written or spoken Chinese. The other possibility is to find a Chinese Saturday school - there are lots of them around the country, and they seem to be the preferred option for families with one or more Chinese parent.

Hampton boys' school offers it from Yr9 but not yr 7, and only if you are already excelling at languages.

Mandarin is taught in a significant proportion of independent schools and some state schools too. There is a problem that the development of excellent Mandarin teaching has lagged behind demand and so a few schools do not teach it because they could not recruit good teachers and a few schools have jumped on the bandwagon though they do not have excellent teaching. I would therefore ask some searching questions, how many who study it, carry on with it? What is the success rate at GCSE etc.? Sevenoaks that I know of runs a good programme, and have done so long enough to be experienced.

If you DCs have studied Mandarin overseas GcSE is at a fairly basic level, 300 characters. Most DCs of returning expats move fairly quickly on to AS. That would not be available at many schools.

Agree most DCs we know with a native Mandarin speaking parents have attended Saturday schools (and got A*s) and focused on getting the best academic school for their child.

YDraig ? It is the most spoken langage in the world, and spoken in an area of the world that is developing rapidly and offering many opportunities to our DCs. It may be hard to learn for some learning styles but if you have a pictorial memory and a ear for tone then it can be easier. I would say that though, having lived there, and studied Mandarin. Your opinion is based on?

I wouldn't say Mandarin was hard to master, either. The writing system is complicated, but the fact that it is so different to European languages can be seen as an interesting challenge, and the actual grammar and pronunciation of Mandarin are really pretty simple - the only thing people sometimes struggle to get the hang of is the tonal system, but if you have an ear for languages it's not hard.

I would say that Welsh (taking an example that I presume is relevant to YDraigGoch) would be just as difficult for most native English speakers, if not more so - the sentence structures are very different (unlike Mandarin, which is mostly subject-verb-object like English), some of the consonant sounds are hard to pick up if you haven't been exposed from childhood, and that's before we even start on the mutations etc...

To be honest I found Mandarin to be quite difficult. The basic speaking part is easy. Its when you start on the nuances of poetry and phrases that need to be rote learnt. These form the backbone of Chinese culture and ideology. I did had a knack for Shakespeare at school. Something I suppose the foreign students will find it equally difficult.

Although, I have to admit my daughter is already booked in with a tutor for her Christmas holidays back in HK just to maintain her level of Chinese...

We also whatsapp her in Chinese... so that will help to...

Although she tends to write one word English responses.. Unless she requires money to pay for something she wants to do...

St Mary Magdalene Academy in Islington does.
The latest cohort that did their GCSE this summer approx 85% got A* and the rest got A.
Pretty impressive I would say.

I hear it's compulsory at Kingsford Community School in Newham and the top gcse students get a full boarding scholarship to Brighton College