2006年NPR美国国家公共电台二月-Teaching Mandarin for a 'Chinese Century'

At this middle school in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a sort of linguistic 1 wrestling match takes place every afternoon. It pits about a dozen students ages 12 to 14 against the formidable language of Mandarin 2 Chinese.
"Hey~Jia. Jia. The door is “men”."
The students put up a good fight ,but Mandarin seems to be winning, evidenced by the pained expression on the face of young Chelsea Kirby.
#1: "It is hard."
#2: "What's the hardest part?"
#1: "Every thing, the symbols, and everything."
Those symbols or characters make up the Chinese alphabet. There are at least 3,000 of them, then there are the tones, the dreaded 3 tones.
#3: "You basically have four, four different tones. And the minor 4 part and we can tell the difference, but to Americans and especially for those new students, they have no idea."
Change the tone, explains teacher Parky Fue, and you change the word.
#3: "One word for horse, pronounce “ma” for mother, “ma” so you don't want to call your mom the wrong thing."

So why are these students wrestling with this notoriously difficult language? Some say they are here by accident, or because they thought it would be in easy “A”. Oops! But one student seems to know exactly why he is here, his name is Patrol Widner, and he is 12 years old, twelve going on thirteen.

Patrol Widner: I think it's very good, because Chinese is a growing language and, and we can need it later, because businesses like banks and companies are shipping 5 jobs overseas to China, and so now learning Chinese is gonna become a real, real vantage in that.
Patrol is a public school student, taking part in a pilot program, one of a handful nationwide, Joseph Lee is the school’s principal.
Joseph Lee: Last year, there were only 16,000 students in, in the United States that were even taught Mandarin Chinese, and you are talking about 1.5 billion people in the world who speak the language, so we, we have to catch up.

On Lee's desk is a copy of Thomson Freeman's bestseller - The World Is Flat. The book's message that American should prepare to compete with an emerging China and India helps explain the push to learn Mandarin. Michael Levin ,head of education for the Asian society , points to the experience of the US automakers and their early forays into the Chinese market. The US firms lost ground quickly to smaller Korean automakers.

Michael Levin: It was the Korean's knowledge not only of the culture, but directly of the language and the ways of doing business in China that gave them the upper hand. It wasn't so much the quality of their product, as it was the quality of their preparation to make the deals.

With that in mind, Washington has stepped in. A bill in the senate will pump more than a billion-dollars of federal funds into Chinese language programmes. Some school systems, though, aren't waiting on Washington. In Chicago, more than 3,000 students are already studying Chinese, beginning in kindergarten.Program director, Robert Davis says many of the students are Latino, so for them, Chinese is just another language.

Robert Davis: I go into these kindergarten classes for little kids,and the teacher is saying, you know, this is an orange and then they are saying it in Spanish and then they are saying in Chinese, just flows all together. It's it's spectacular.

Not everyone, though, finds it quite so spectacular.
Theresa Hanson: If I had a choice, I would not have picked Chinese.
That is Theresa Hanson, she questiones how Chinese is going to help her son, a middle school student in Florida.
Theresa Hanson: Honestly, I don't see where he is going to use Chinese, even though they become a, you know, the powerhouse in the world. Everybody's going to speak English.
In fact, many Chinese, some one hundred million are learning English. American schools, critics say, should focus on teaching maths and science skills. Language is common , Languages go. Remember when Japanese was all the rage, but those basic skills are always needed.Perhaps, says Robert Davis, but China he says is simply too big to ignore.

Robert Davis: You know, we want our students, even if they don't go to China, work, you know, for Motorola in China. We want them to, be able to have an understanding what is going on in China and if nothing else, this just gonna expand their perspectives, expand horizons for them.

And for some parents, it's never too early to expand those horizons. They are hiring Chinese speaking nannies to care for their infants and they hope give them a head start in what someone calling “ the Chinese Century”.