So, you want your child to learn Chinese. Why? That is probably the first question to consider as a parent before you enrol your child in a Chinese class.
For sure, there are a myriad of answers to this question, not one answer less relevant or more important that any other. In my own family, our children grew up in a Mandarin-speaking environment in Taipei, Taiwan. Since then, we continue to emphasise in our immediate and extended family environments. The goal is connection with family and meeting daily language needs.
Some families have adopted children from China, in which case exposure to their country of birth is a wonderful way of connecting them with the language of their birthplace.
At my place of employment, parents have the choice of enrolling their elementary-aged children in a Chinese or Spanish daily language program. In this case, parents merely chose and are delighted to hear the results.
More recently, many families in North American are following a trend to enrol children in Chinese language courses offered at their elementary schools or in bilingual programs. This was heightened recently by an announcement by America’s President Obama, who seeks to expand the number of school children learning Mandarin Chinese there to 1,000,000 by the year 2020 (source here). Certainly, the number of Chinese programs worldwide is indeed expanding (see here, for example).
This “fad” can cause some families to become feverish about their children learning Chinese. While teaching Chinese in Hong Kong, I ran into parents who were frantic to get their children bilingual as soon as possible. One parent, who was Asia-Pacific head of a large corporation, was panicked to have his daughter fluent, as in “yesterday.” Certainly, he may have been thinking through today’s perspective, with China as such a hot market and with continuing potential for jobs in international business.
How can we as parents know if our 5-year-old will be interested in working in China 20 years from now. Heck, they may be so sick of learning Chinese by grade 5 they threatening to move out unless they can switch to Spanish or French. Who knows!?
We need to always remember, language growth and oral proficiency takes time. It is not a quick thing whatsoever.
Also remember this: Even though Chinese language programs continue to expand at amazing rates today, fifteen years from now we may all be marvelling at the expansion of Hindi or Portuguese language programs to serve the hot markets of India and Brazil. We just don’t know. For those of you who remember, 15 years ago Japanese was the hot language and schools in the U.S. and other countries were clamouring to expand their Japanese classes.
Another curious angle for having your children enrolled in Chinese classes is one I have come across quite often, the culturally relevant factor of “face.” I have seen countless numbers of parents who are sincerely proud of their children for speaking a few words of Chinese. This is admirable, and at dinner parties the Mandarin learnings may be brought out in front of guests for a few lines of the language. As you can imagine, not all kids are that keen to do so. If they kids are at all precocious, they might say something like what I heard from a former student, who said to his parents’ guests, “You all have big bums” (你们都有大屁股 nǐ men dōu yǒu dà pì gǔ). They had no idea…
Between parents, especially some at well-heeled private schools, having your children learning Mandarin can indeed result in a sense of pride and face even as the parents themselves remain mono-lingual themselves and marvel at what comes out of their children’s mouths.
Whether the initial aim is for cultural literacy or to become proficient in understanding and speaking the language, I do agree with experts who suggest children’s brains benefit from the journey of learning a second language (link to one reference here, and another here). Even if your child is exposed to Chinese for a short period of time, as I say to parents, “No harm done!”
