Learning Mandarin will put children off
From TimeOnline
Parents should realise they don’t have to tick this box
It’s not easy being a parent in 2010. As well as all the other things fathers and mothers feel obliged to do for their children — coaching to get into the right school, learning an instrument, dance classes, computer skills (as if they needed it) another “must” has been added: Mandarin.
China will soon be the most powerful economy in the world. To survive, Top People will have to speak the language. On your bike, Mum. Find a suitable tutor and take up your child’s only remaining free evening in the week.
Head teachers like me are feeling the pressure to supply more Mandarin lessons rather than pedestrian French and German. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, wants every secondary school pupil to have the right to learn Mandarin alongside the 231 other things the Government has decided it’s essential for children to grasp this week.
Everyone needs to calm down. Mandarin shows all the signs of being the educational equivalent of swine flu: genuinely important but, so far, massively hyped. The truth about Mandarin is surprisingly complex. I have to declare an interest. On one of the first educational exchanges with mainland China several years ago with two Manchester schools, we were urged to learn some simple phrases. The well-meaning leader of the team put in a year’s work. In his speech to the local welcoming committee he thought that he was saying thank you, but appeared instead to have compared the senior local dignitary to something rather unpleasant associated with a pig. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
BACKGROUND
Mandarin will stretch our children
Labour: primaries to teach Arabic and Mandarin
Teenagers have better things to learn than Mandarin
Mandarin - no easy option
Mandarin is fiendishly difficult. Many schools have horrendous drop-out rates. The real danger is that we burn children’s fingers and put them off not just Mandarin but languages in general, when a more gentle immersion might have let them stand the heat in the kitchen.
A kinder way to introduce Mandarin might be not to make it compulsory, but to have it as a club in school, sweetening the pill of a demanding language by talking about Chinese culture, food and history. We don’t just need to speak to the Chinese: we need to understand them.
Mandarin is different from other languages. The conventional skills that enable children to pick up French or German don’t help. Those who take to it best aren’t linguists, but musicians. Our system likes to compartmentalise subjects, and few schools have a crossover between music and Mandarin. Yet it might prove the richest source of recruitment. There is also a very practical objection to GCSE Mandarin. Whether head teachers, parents and pupils like it or not, A* grades are increasingly influential in deciding whether a candidate gets an offer at a UK “Ivy League” university. The lion’s share of A*s in Mandarin will inevitably go to native speakers. Any universities adviser meeting a clever child who hasn’t heard Mandarin spoken round the table would feel nervous about suggesting it as a GCSE. However hard non-native speakers try, they will find it hard to excel.
Two university tutors have told me that they would prefer students to start Mandarin at university. They argue that there is a shortage of good teachers of Mandarin in Britain, and that too many students who learnt it at school have been taught badly. They also believed that the challenge of the new language was better handled by someone that bit older.
A Chinese saying (it would be, wouldn’t it?) states that we always educate children for the world we lived in, not the one they will live in. It is absolutely right to recognise that our young people will benefit greatly from more knowledge of another language. With Mandarin the issue is not whether we do it, but how.
Another suggestion is to develop an alternative qualification. Let native speakers colonise the GCSE. The Government could pioneer a series of diplomas, like piano grades, in Chinese studies that would mix language with culture and history.
Teaching of formal Mandarin could be postponed until the sixth form, when students are mature enough to cope, and sign up for it because they want to — not because their parents or the Secretary of State think that it’s a good idea.
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Comments:
Peter Anderson wrote:
The learning of written Mandarin encourages the development of spatial awareness, working memory and pattern recognition. Given the dumbing down of the Maths syllabus, bringing Mandarin into the national curriculum might be way not so much to help our children communicate better with their future bosses, but to at least have a brain as well wired as those of their bosses' children. (ex Maths GTP and Plant Manager in China for 7 years)
Steve Fual wrote:
Learning to speak Mandarin is relatively easy - reading and writing is hard because of the non familiar character set. I would think the problem is that finding good chinese teachers in the UK might be difficult.
En-Pu Chang wrote:
I am not even from China, I am Taiwanese, and I also want to say some people’s personal experiences do not represent everything, especially language-wise, which happens in Asia. I just don’t understand if I can and have been learning/studying English for more than 15 years and why English speakers can’t do it. I am not any smarter than people here, I’m studying in Scotland now, and English-speaking people are not stupid either. Is that really that difficult to learn a language which is not Latin-based? Or some people here just do not want to face the truth that they have to learn another language, Mandarin for instance, because it is getting more important.
If my opinions stir anyone here then I must say I am really sorry for that. But I just want to comment something on this topic because I am a Mandarin speaker and I am studying in Scotland right now.
Tom Smith wrote:
I read an article from a researcher at the London School of Oriental and African Studies who stated that it typically took British students three times longer to learn Mandarin Chinese or Japanese than it took to learn a European language. Mandarin Chinese is difficult. Its a myth that there is no grammar. There is plenty and in areas where grammar is lacking then meanings have to be worked out from context and that isn't easy so, there is no advantage there. Learning to distinguish between tones is a skill that is difficult to acquire. There are many words that are pronounced the same that have different meanings and may or may not have different tones. In effect context is extremely important in understanding Chinese. There was a British study that showed native Chinese speakers use twice as much of their brain as native English speakers during a conversation. Given the nature of Mandarin this doesn't surprise me one bit. As for the writing, well an alphabet would have been nice but no luck there. If you think that learning mandarin is going to be easy then good luck with that.
Graeme Bell wrote:
Unfortunately too many people commenting here simply don't understand the realities of communicating with Chinese people on their native patch. Having lived and worked in Taiwan and Hong Kong, I can assure you that attempting to teach Mandarin on any kind of scale to native English-speakers is ridiculously pointless and a silly fashionable fad.
Firstly any Chinese person operating in the areas of international business or international relations of any sort will either already speak English or be learning it. English is the one and only international business language in East Asia, and China in particular. Other Europeans doing business in China don't waste their time trying to learn Mandarin, they just polish up their American English (British English idioms don't work at all except in Hong Kong).
Secondly, despite what Bill Torbitt says, for most Europeans Chinese is very, very difficult to learn. Easy to learn the odd phrase well enough to make one's Chinese hosts smile indulgently, but to communicate effectively in Mandarin or indeed Cantonese takes a huge amount of learning and constant, constant practice.
If you try to speak Mandarin less than fluently, 99% of Chinese people either switch to English or just switch off. They are not generally tolerant of having to make any effort to understand poor Mandarin, so trying to speak it if your skills aren't top notch is an utter, utter waste of time.
Dr. Stephen needs to tell some home truths to the parents badgering him - attempting to teach Mandarin except to the most talented language scholars is just a waste of time and a waste of resources. What would be a thousand times more useful would be to teach Chinese culture and business etiquette - in English.
stephen bolam wrote:
The chinese saying is so right. how do we know what world our children will have to live in? our forecasting is not great. What the heck does Ed Balls know? Is the Govt a good forecaster?
As to GCSE, native Russian speakers dominate A* results. My daughter was good but did not stand a chance as native Russians were gaining 95%+; the same will happen to Mandarin. This makes a GCSE qualification a mockery-and it will only be the preserve of the Elite. Now who would want that?.
bill torbitt wrote:
Mandarin is not fiendishly difficult. It was designed to be the simplified common language of China (which has hundreds of native languages). It has almost no grammar and only four tones - even Brits should be able to cope with that. The writing is also simplified (except in Taiwan) and is complex but logical, sometimes very appealingly so.
My admiration is with any foreigner succeeding in learning Englaish
Dave Jones wrote:
Daquan Quartermaine
One of the reasons why Dutch children are so good at English is that Dutch, like Scandinavian languages, is very closely related. Indeed, for English-speakers, Dutch is about the easiest foreign language to learn, after which you should try your hand at Danish. Along with most Latin-based languages and the rest of the Germanic-based languages, apart from German and Icelandic, Dutch is a Category 1 language. THE EASY ONES.
The remaining Indo-European languages, are Category 2, which includes German, Russian and Hindi, for example.
Mandarin, along with Japanese and Arabic, is Category 3. HARD. However, it is not impossible. The tones are difficult, but the absence of articles, conjugations, moods, voices and declensions, plus the regularity of the word order compensate. Even the script is surmountable.
H Spencer wrote:
David Webb wrote:
"...English is compulsory in modern China so a British learner would need a very high standard in order to be able to use the language with the kind of Chinese they would be meet."
-I don't see the logic here. Are you suggesting that because Chinese people learn English, the Brits would need to learn Chinese to a high level because otherwise no one would engage with them in Chinese? Is that really a good enough reason not to learn an additional language (as you can say the same for almost any country these days)?
It really sounds like the really lame excuses I hear from native-English speakers to make up for their laziness. The fact is though, I'm often embarrassed by the standards of English us Brits use when abroad. Everyone seems to think that as long as you stare at someone and raise your voice, the world will understand what you mean when you talk about 'the pot calling the kettle black' with a heavy Scouse dialect and a chuckle. Perhaps we should learn English as a international language at school also. That way we might not end up being the one English speaker at an international meeting, who few understand.
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