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Posts: 360

Shifu

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Q: Will you teach your kids Mandarin?

We all know about China's growing influence in the world sphere and how more people are coming here to study Chinese and so on. Do you think Mandarin is a contender to rival English as the international language and that we should all teach our kids? 

11 years 8 weeks ago in  Teaching & Learning - China

 
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Posts: 1091

Shifu

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the English written language sucks but spoken wise it is easy to learn, it incorporates languages from all over Europe and the middle east and southeast Asia. one of the big reasons  people learn it is because of how easy it is. the only ones that are easier are Spanish and Portuguese, the hardest are Chinese Japanese and Russian.

i have bean learning Mandarin so i would try to teach my kids when i have them.

now that i think about it should have my kids spend time with my mom when i have them so they can learn Spanish.

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11 years 8 weeks ago
 
Posts: 2186

Emperor

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My daughter already speaks Putonghua (Mandarin), Guangdonghua (Cantonese), English and the local Nanning dialect like a two year old, but then she is a two year old. We are using the OPOL system to teach her.

We are teaching her these languages because she will need them, for school, initially in China and High School and later in the UK, not because I  or we think the Chinese languages will become dominant.

 

N.B. You don't actually 'teach' young children languages, they 'absorb' them, you only have to 'learn' after about the age of six.

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11 years 8 weeks ago
 
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Governor

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I will try to teach them Mandarin, English and Spanish. I think that learning languages woukd be much more useful for them than most of the things that they could learn at school.

 

But if I had to choose only one, I wouldn't prioritize Mandarin over English, I don't think that English is losing its position as the main international language anytime soon.

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11 years 8 weeks ago
 
Posts: 1420

Shifu

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I don't really think that Mandarin is going to rival English at any time soon. However, its still going to be important for them to learn Chinese so that they can stay connected to their cultural roots, and so that they can communicate with the members of their family that don't speak English. It's strange to think of them as being second generation immigrants, but because of their mother and her family, they will be.

 

A much greater concern for me is that they'll be too attached to a Chinese way of doing things as they'll live in the US. I can see that their mother is gearing up to shift into full on tiger mother mode immediately after giving birth. My concern is that its going to cost them a large portion of their childhood while they are young, and that it will cripple their social skills from pre-adolescence to adulthood.  I'm also worried that it'll ultimately hold them back in their professional lives as they get passed over for promotions in favor of less technically proficient coworkers that are frankly just better at doing things like networking and self promotion. If you look at the statistics on this, the bamboo ceiling is very real. 

paulmartin:

Ting bu dong

11 years 7 weeks ago
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mattsm84:

Could you be more specific about what you don't get?

11 years 7 weeks ago
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11 years 8 weeks ago
 
Posts: 7204

Emperor

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It does not matter what Languages they learn however in saying that it helps if they can practice at home

We speak both at home so they understand and speak both

If one of us was a Spanish or French speaker or anything else

I would hope they picked it up  

For myself I would have had a ball if I spoke a second languages when I was young and single

for starters I would have done the student exchange program

and I would not be the Shy wall flower that I am smiley

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11 years 8 weeks ago
 
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