The Thriving Scene of Mandarin Learning outside China
Do you know that Tony Blair's seven-year-old son Leo is learning Mandarin Chinese at a school in London? And are you aware that secondary schools in England will soon be allowed to teach Mandarin rather than just a major European language (BBC News, 4 February 2007)?
In the UK, the number of students at colleges and universities taking Chinese as their main subject doubled between 2002 and 2005, although it has become evident that Mandarin Chinese is most effectively learnt at primary and secondary schools.
In the US, numbers of teenagers taking Chinese have rocketed. In 1998, just 6,000 students enrolled in Mandarin programmes; that figure is now over 50,000. "Students want to sign up for it; parents are asking for it; communities are asking for it," said Brett Lovejoy, of the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (BBC News, 9 January 2007).
Similar increases have been reported in most Western nations. Most interestingly, the election victory by Kevin Rudd in November 2007 gives Australia the first Mandarin-speaking leader in the Western world, who has impressed many Asian leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Worldwide, in just five years since 2002, the number of non-Chinese people learning Mandarin Chinese has soared to 30 million.
Huge Benefits
There are many benefits, both short-term and long-term, associated with learning Mandarin Chinese from a young age.
1. Balanced Behaviour: "Unruly" or "anti-social" behaviour is something almost unheard of at schools in China, one of the main reasons being that the highly disciplined process of Mandarin learning delegitimises some behaviours. Specifically, it emphasises understanding of the context and sensitivity to relationships with others rather than the "analytical" or "conceptual" vagour of one's self-expression. As such, Mandarin learning is a great complement to English language-based activities at schools, nurturing children and young people to behave in balanced rather than sometimes over-competitive manners.
2. Attractiveness to Employers: As China permeats every aspect of business, young people with both Mandarin and English skills are becoming hot recruitment targets. For example, many manufacturing companies not only need bilingual sales executives to sell their products to China but also bilingual purchasing executives to purchase from China. And most investment banks not only need senior bilingual executives to make the best China-related "betting" decisions but also junior bilingual researchers to research the China market in the first place (see a job advertisement posted on 13 February 2008).
3. Broadened Horizons of Thinking: Language shapes perception; what we see depends on what we are prepared to see. Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view, sometimes producing fragmented views and counterproductive actions. If we want to see systemwide interrelationships, we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles. The good news is that Mandarin Chinese is just such a language. And through studying it, pupils will begin to develop an ability to not only value but also work across alternative ways of seeing the world.