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Lecturer: More and more American parents are becoming interested in having their children learn Chinese. This is not only a case of having their children attend private classes or of schools teaching the language instead of, or in addition to, the West European languages that are traditionally studied in the States, like Spanish, French and German. Oh, no. Studying geometry can be taxing for any 10-year-old, but at a select number of American schools, children are not only learning about angles, they are doing it in Chinese. This select number of schools is growing, since Chinese is a hot language thanks to China’s surging economy and growing world clout. Even children as young as 6 are honing their Chinese at school, motivated by a mix of parental prodding and their own desire to do something different. I went to see one of these schools and it really is amazing when you walk into a kindergarten classroom, and the children are ’understanding what the teacher is saying and it’s all in Chinese. Half of the time the kids aren’t even aware that the teacher is speaking a different language. They just fall right into it.
    The United States has declared this year to be the "Year of Languages", although few Americans are aware of the designation. According to a survey by the Language Association, more college students are studying foreign languages than ever before. Enrolment in Chinese has risen by 20 percent over the past 3 years. The 1.4 million students learning 15 leading languages represents a 17 percent increase over the same period. However, only 9.3 percent of Americans are able to speak a second tongue, compared to 52.7 percent of Europeans, according to the Census Bureau.
    At first glance, weighty national priorities take a back seat to the fun of cultural exchange at Potomac Elementary. Hallways are festooned with Chinese art and learning aids, such as stuffed animals labelled with Chinese names. Children sing Chinese folk songs and American nursery rhymes in Chinese. In the fifth-grade immersion class, songs and games come only after a rigorous vocabulary drill and lessons on triangles and trapezoids-- all taught in Chinese. The students are good at listening and do pretty well at reading, but writing is their weak point, according to the class teacher, who has a Ph.D. in education and was a teacher in his native Beijing.
    I asked two of the children--a boy and a girl--about their experiences of learning Chinese. The boy said that mastering Chinese characters was tough. When I asked why, he said that he finds the writing particularly hard because you have to do the strokes in the right order. The girl said that learning Chinese is "cool" and that she is starting to catch on to the complex writing system of characters that contain elements of meaning and sound. She pointed out that it is quite different to English because there’s nothing like letters to refer to. However, she noted that she can remember how to write Coca-Cola in Chinese because it has a lot of little boxes that refer to a mouth. This visual aspect of Chinese characters and how it influences children when they are learning the language is a theme I’ll return to later.
    Even though it is clearly the parents who are pushing for more Chinese classes, my research revealed that they are not usually pushing their children too hard, which I think is a good thing. Parents of the kids say they are loathe to plan careers for 10 year olds. To quote one of them, "Even if my child doesn’t use her Chinese going forward, she’s learned so much about another culture." Some of the parents are encouraging their children--directly or indirectly--by taking night classes in Chinese. This has been proven to be a great motivator. If children see their parents learning something, they will usually take an interest in learning it too--or at least take a greater interest in learning generally.
    Dreams of selling Coca-Cola and other American products to China have helped drive the. interest in Chinese studies. According to the Language Association, 640 U.S. colleges offer Chinese programs, while 102 schools from kindergarten to 12th grade teach Chinese. Teaching Chinese is also of keen interest to the U.S. government, which launched the National Education Program in 1994 to fund university studies of languages of key world regions, including East Asia and the Middle East. In 2002, the NEP announced that it was placing particular emphasis on programmes to teach Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Russian.
    I spoke to some students who had just started learning Chinese here at this university. All of them had learnt Chinese since the age of 11 and some had started even earlier. Student A said he had started learning Chinese eight years ago because he thought it would be pretty fun. However, as he began contemplating college, he recognised that there were good opportunities for employment in China upon graduation. As he said, China is expanding fast and now they need services, including lawyers and businesspeople. Student B said that she wants to follow her father and start her own business and have an office in China. Student C said that he thought his studies would bring national gain as well as personal achievement. To quote him, "When a lot of kids like us grow up and hopefully are able to speak Chinese, and get jobs with businesses who are trading and doing business with China, it will be a big leap for our country."