THE US is being overwhelmed by a rush to learn Mandarin, the official form of the language used in mainland China, the Guardian Weekly reports.
There are two forces driving Mandarin's momentum: parental ambition for children facing a future in which China is almost certain to be a major player and a government worried that America may get left behind in the new world order.
"Interest in learning Chinese among American youth and their parents has grown dramatically in the past five years," said Vivien Stewart, vice president of the Asia Society, a US group trying to bridge the gap between Americans and the peoples of Asia and the Pacific.
In a survey by the US College Board's World Language Initiative, high schools across the country were asked whether they would consider adding Advanced Placement courses in Italian, Russian, Japanese and Chinese. The organization was amazed at the results, said Tom Matts, the initiative's director.
Fifty schools said they would offer the Russian option, about 175 said Japanese, and 240 said Italian. "And for Chinese, it was 2,400, 10 times the number of any of the other three," Matts said.
According to the Guardian Weekly, there are thought to be about 50,000 American school children studying Mandarin at US public schools and another 50,000 outside the public system, in private and specialist schools.
The bottleneck is the supply of Mandarin teachers. It requires enormous tenacity for Westerners to learn a language like Mandarin, with its thousands of written characters and its tonal nuances. According to the Asia Society, all of America's teacher-training institutions turn out only a couple of dozen home-grown Mandarin instructors every year.
"Our teacher education system is not geared up for producing these teachers," said Michael Levine, the Asia Society's executive director of education.
One way to ease the shortage is to find native Mandarin speakers. Last month China's Education Minister Zhou Ji announced a plan to help train hundreds of US educators in the Chinese language, AP reports.
The initiative will bring more than 150 guest teachers from China to US high schools and immerse nearly 600 American teachers of the language in Chinese culture through summer institutes. It will also provide financial aid to nearly 300 American teachers seeking state certification in Chinese.
The Chinese language "is an important tool for the rest of the world to learn about China and to communicate with the Chinese people," Zhou said at the New York headquarters of the US College Board.
