2005年NPR美国国家公共电台五月-Chinese Classes Grow in Popularity with U

More than 1 billion people count Mandarin 1 as their native language. These sheer numerical dominance plus the fact that China has the world's fastest growing economy has made Mandarin Chinese attractive as a foreign language for more American students. Taylor Sylar reports from Oakland.

"e luo si…e luo si ren." At Pitmon high school in the Oakland Hills, there're 14 students in this 1st year mandarin class,a mixture of Asian, White, African-American and Indian. Freshman 2 SW is half Mongolian and half Russian. He says it wasn't exactly his idea to take on this challenge.
SW: My parents, it was my parents' idea. We just discussed about it. I still want to take Spanish but my parents said that China had a brighter future.
That brighter future lit up right now by China's explosive economy is luring 3 some 24,000 public school students to mandarin classes.

That's on top of the 150,000 students enrolled 4 in private Chinese programs. Those are tiny numbers compared with the four million students studying Spanish in this country but mandarin's appeal is growing.

Both because of economic prospects 5 and because of an expanding Chinese immigrant population here. Ninth grader Nicole Zeadow was already fluent in Cantonese but her parents, both from Hong Kong, want her to learn mandarin, China's official language. But Zeadow says she has her own motivation for wanting to learn the language." If my mum did want me to know something she would speak it in mandarin. So I would understand. So I would like…Ah, I need to take mandarin, I got to understand. So it was like both our decisions to take it." Zeadow says she plans to continue studying mandarin in college. She'll have lots of accompany there. Studies show that the number of students taking Chinese in college increased 20% between 1998 and 2002. That growing demand had the college board survey high schools to determine the interest in advance placement exams for mandarin. The response was 10 times what the board had expected. So as up to 2007 the college board will begin offering its mandarin AP exams which is almost certain to spark even more interest as students clamor for that early college credit and therein lies a big challenge.

The biggest bottleneck 6 given that we know this growing interest among students and schools in offering it, is the lack of certified 7 teachers.

Vivian Stewart is vice 8 president of the Asian society, a group dedicated 9 to increasing communication and understanding of Asia.

We have many speakers of Chinese in this country, both from heritage background and those who have taken it as undergraduates. But they are not preparing to be teachers because there hasn't been a market for teachers.

At least not until recently. Now, demand is strong enough that specialists are considering whether mandarin teachers need a fast track credential process. But even with teachers, getting a Chinese language program off the ground at a high school is difficult.

It can be expensive and slow to grow as the language has the reputation of being very difficult to learn. First, there're the artful and intricate Chinese characters to master , then students have the daunting 10 task of learning to pronounce mandarin where 1 word can have 4 meanings depending on which of four tones is used.
Nineth grader Shain Scolf offers this demonstration 11.

From ma, you use the 1st tone ma, it ends up being mother. But if you use the 2nd tone, which is i can't like up and down ma, it ends up being horse. So it always depends on what you're trying to say.

Well, there may be tones to perfect in mandarin, there're no tenses or conjugations unlike the Romance languages. Mandarin enthusiasts 12 say that once the fear factor is overcome, the language is actually not too hard to learn. For NPR news, I'm Terry