<p>Asking for a friend, should parents enroll their children in Chinese immersion for 2012-2013 school year? Pros and cons.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I think it depends on what the parents hope to gain. </p>
<p>I will say that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn. D, a college junior, has been studying Chinese for six years. I think she benefitted because when she was small, she had Chinese babysitters and developed an ear for the sounds of the language. Sadly we did not keep up her Chinese when she started kindergarten, but I do think the early exposure helped. Of course, we had no way of knowing that she would grow up and want to know Chinese . . . we did not set out for her to learn Chinese; it just happened that there was a community of women (wives of graduate students) who were available to babysit.</p>
<p>Why not? I started my first foreign language in kindergarten. The younger you start, the easier it is to learn it.</p>
<p>My brother is in 2nd grade and started with Portuguese last year. I don’t see why not. By the time the kid graduates from college (s)he’ll hopefully be fluent (although with Chinese, either they pick it up or they don’t). Not very many non-Chinese 22 year-olds are fluent in Chinese. Four years of study in college usually doesn’t amount to much for a language like that. I say yes, put him in Chinese class, but only if he himself wants to.</p>
<p>I think it would be worth a try. With a language like Mandarin my understanding is the earlier the exposure, the better. My D began self studying it in 7th grade and has done exceptionally well through lots of hard work. She’s just about set for graduate studies at Peking University. </p>
<p>That said, she’s mentioned from time to time that it might have come easier for her had she gotten an earlier start.</p>
<p>My son has been in an immersion program since 1st grade (he is entering 10th now). Many studies exist touting the benefits of learning two languages early on, including the ease of learning a third language.</p>
<p>Chinese grammar is very different than English. I am wondering what kind of impact it would have on a kid’s English writing ability if it is an immersion program. </p>
<p>My younger daughter’s school required Spanish from K on. We moved to a Spanish speaking country when she was in 11th grade. She had a hard time conversing at first because she only spoke proper Spanish, but within 6 months she was like a native. She can text as fast in Spanish as in English, and she dreams sometimes in Spanish. </p>
<p>I would just make sure the kid has just as good of foundation in English and is encouraged to read in English just as much, especially if the kid is going to study/live in the US later on.</p>
<p>I think it is great to learn another language, but English is the global language.</p>
<p>The younger you start the easier it is to learn. Immersion is the way to go. How many kids in the program already speak Chinese? We have a very popular Spanish immersion program at one of our elementary schools where they speak exclusively Spanish half the day and English the other half. They try to keep the ratio 50/50 for native speakers of each language so that there is a critical mass of kids who are comfortable with each language.</p>
<p>Achieving fluency in a language other than your own really does seem to develop a different part of your brain. I was always a dunce at French in high school. I spent a gap year in France and then went on to study German in college. I was amazed at how much easier it was for me to learn German even though it was not a Romance language. I had very good German at the end of the year, and after spending a month in Germany during the summer, I was quite comfortable. I ended up going to Germany after grad school - and with some review I was able to speak German well enough to work in an architectural office there. While in Germany I took Italian and it was really, really easy.</p>
<p>It is a very admirable and sensible thing to raise ones children bilingually. English is a global language, but knowledge of other global languages will only become more important in the future. That said, Chinese is not and never will be a global language - it will never come close to the importance of English, Spanish, French, German and Russian no matter how big its population.</p>
<p>As China is one of the other biggest countries in our world and becoming a force in our economic structure it might be beneficial to a child to learn it and maintain as it would make them quite marketable for international jobs. But I agree with the other posts in that English is just as important as most people around the world speak it.</p>
<p>Is this a school funded by Hanban or locally?
Personally I think curriculum should be decided locally ( with a nod to aligning at least state wide), and not by a foreign government with money to spend.</p>
<p>Margatini: China’s size and economy have nothing to do with it. Too many people make the assumption that because China is growing in importance, the language will too. In fact Chinese is becoming less important; it is now the norm for English to be spoken in offices all over China - even if the workforce is 100% Chinese. </p>
<p>*French: Spoken all over Europe, Canada, Africa. One of two working languages at the UN (the other is English) and is one of the most studied second languages in the world.</p>
<p>German: Spoken all over Europe, the unofficial lingua franca for Central and Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Spanish: Spoken in Spain and all over Latin America</p>
<p>Russian: Spoken in Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia</p>
<p>Arabic: Spoken all over the Middle East and North Africa </p>
<p>Chinese: Spoken by over a billion people, but all in one country and most of them are farmers*</p>
<p>I think it’s good to be exposed to other languages as early as possible. My oldest participated in an after school Mandarin choir, which I assisted with, and her class took a “field trip” to Chongqing when she was in 2nd grade as part of sister city program with Gary Locke now US Ambassador to China.
Cultural activities were the main emphasis of the program rather than learning the language.
So many things to learn at that age!</p>
<p>I think the school choice partly depends on what the other school options might be. Does Chinese immersion best fit the educational priorities of the family, or are there other schools available that offer programs that are more compelling?</p>
<p>Our kids started chinese language classes around K and they went up to eighth-grade. It was typically two or three hours on the weekend and maybe an hour of play stuff afterwards. Parents were expected to spend significant time with their kids at home working on exercises and I think that it would be hard to use such a school without a native speaker at home. There are a fair number of these kinds of schools in the suburbs of Boston - I assume that this is true in other major metro areas where there is enough of a Chinese population.</p>
<p>What I found interesting when I volunteered at the polls was that the 2nd language ballots were issued in, in King County, Wa.,was not Spanish, but Mandarin. Perhaps alongside working to teach US citizens Chinese, some emphasis should go towards teaching English.</p>
<p>My S’ private had the boys study Japanese until 9th grade (which was 2003). Now the school requires they study Mandrian. My S continued Japanese in HS and took Mandrian in college.</p>
<p>He has lived in Taiwan for 6-7 months (during which he taught English along with other employment) and he has traveled extensively in Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malayasia) and visited Hong Kong and Singapore. He reports that English gets one by in all of these. That said, he has acknowledged that starting on Japanese (or Mandrian) early in the game is a real assist.</p>
<p>^Having traveled a bit off the beaten path in Japan, I can tell you that there are many places where you will find people where no one seems to speak any English at all. I’ve found in my extensive travels that the level of enjoyment and understanding you get is strongly related to your ability to speak the local language. I don’t think it matters much what language you start with. For most people in the US Spanish will be the most useful language (and it’s the one language I don’t speak!), but there are lots of reasons for learning each language. There are Chinese doing development all over Africa for example.</p>
<p>True when off the beaten path English may be less prevelant. I also agree that even knowing the most basic travel words (please, thank you, where, how much) in the native language is usually an ice-breaker and appreciated by the locals. </p>
<p>In Laos S met up with randomly and traveled for awhile with three other back-packers-Malay male, mainland Chinese female and Australian male. All spoke English. In 2005 we (S and I) spent some time in New Zealand. One adventure outing included 2 girls (early 20s) from Russia. Perfectly conversant in English.</p>
<p>IMO–the lack of knowledge of any langauge other than English is a personal loss, if nothing else. </p>
<p>My favorite “its all one big world story” was trying to assist a NZ adventure guide instruct a German tourist on how to traverse a steep slope using a climbing rope to get out of a cave we were in when the German had gotted silt in his eyes and essentially was blind and neither he nor his buddy spoke English. And no one else spoke German. The guide only spoke English and he was at the mouth of the cave giving instructions to go to the right, left, fast , slow, stop, go.</p>
<p>We solved the problem by the guide yelling thse instructions to me in English, I relayed it to the German buddy in Spanish who then yelled it out to his blind German friend who only spoke German.</p>
<p>I think it depends on a child.</p>
<p>My daughter is enrolled in a school with Chinese immersion program. We chose not to enroll her into that program, because I felt that she would get frustrated with not understanding the new language. I also felt that her English skills would suffer. </p>
<p>Instead I enrolled her in after-school Spanish program, that is being taught by district teachers 3 days a week. It is heavily subsidized program in our school district and only costs us $50 a year (!). I feel that this way she gets the best of both worlds - proper English language instruction and second language instruction early on.</p>