Friday, March 31, 2006

The Mandarin Chinese Craze

Two weeks ago, I was talking to Ken Carroll of Chinesepod.com about an article in Wired magazine titled “The Mandarin Offensive”.

Today I saw this video from CNN about the Mandarin Chinese craze in United States.


(Quicktime 9.19 MB or CNN Video)

International investment guru Jim Rogers, who has a Chinese nanny for his own daughter, says: “China is the next greatest country in the world, whether we like it or not, and the best skill I can give her is the absolute fluency in Chinese.”

"A Chinese nanny with advanced education, who speaks both English and Mandarin Chinese, can make between $60,000 to $100,000 a year. But top Manhattan agencies say they fill only a fraction of requests. It is hard to convince qualified Chinese this is a job worth doing."

Too bad I don't have the patience to deal with children.

9 comments:

  1. No patience, eh? I fear for your offspring.

    And, although I am a fan of the rise of China, and hopefully a place for myself as a senior official in the new dynasty, I recall stories about people doing this kind of thing to their kids with Japanese in the 80's, when everyone thought Japan was going to economically rule the world.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Granted I am out here in the sticks, but is this really true or is this a spoof, cause it sounds like a spoof to me?





    China Law

    ReplyDelete
  3. China Law,

    Watch the video clip and read the article in Wired magazine.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's like me growing up in Hong Kong in the 80s. Parents paid tons of money to have their kids learn English. 10 or 20 years later, half of the people in Hong Kong still can't speak English fluently. And now, Hong Kong people are also taking about getting the kids to speak Mandarin (which makes more sense, considering where Hong Kong is located).

    Rich parents would never end their quest to get their kids from learning way too many things.

    -- Angela

    ReplyDelete
  5. What does qualified mean? I'm sure there are near-millions of generic 'teachers' in China that would jump at the chance...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Welcome to learn Mandarin Chinese on My blog.

    http://blog.melnyks.com

    ReplyDelete
  7. As a TA for a Beginning Chinese class, I found this article super interesting. The class is still not as popular as say Spanish, but even in the two years I've been here the program has expanded considerably.

    Still, all considering, maybe I should just become a nanny.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Find this nice website to learn chinese :

    http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese

    40 free online lessons with audio!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hello,
    Here's a list of News articles about the rise of the Chinese language.
    I would like also to share some useful resources to learn Chinese :
    - Chinese-English dictionary : An easy-to-use dictionary with over 34,000 entries. It can be searched by Chinese characters, Pinyin, or English. Audio pronunciation is available.
    - Learn Chinese : Free Mandarin Chinese lessons. Each of the 15 units contain easy to understand dialogues, usage notes and a practice page.

    Good luck. :-)

    ReplyDelete