And that pretty much exhausts my fund of Chinese language skills. Oh, I know a few Cantonese words that are supposed to request a package of cigarettes, but they were taught to me by an impish Russian/Chinese girl in Hong Kong who was not above a little joke. For all I know she was having me tell the shopkeeper that I desired a bowl of bat feet garnished with navel lint.
These quirky memories were triggered by the morning news report that China has become the world's No.2 economy -- our chief competitor. For the sake of my grandsons' future, I hope we are keeping track of the dragon with an appetite for lebensraum. I hope we are carefully watching the the strange machinations of the Communist capitalists in the Forbidden City and the Capitalist communists down around Shanghai.
But I wonder. Do what ever you want with these fun facts:
China's GDP now exceeds every nation but our own. Spain and Latin American aren't even in the running. Spanish is, by millions of students, the most studied foreign language in the United States.
And then there's France, and when's the last time you heard of a French accomplishment except the annual public relations explosion celebrating their successful sale of another year's worth of pre-nubile Beaujolais to American naifs? French is the second most studied language here.
Students of Chinese don't make a blip on the charts.
Mon Dieu! I thought this was the kind of disconnect between the real world and the publik skul classroom we'd never have to worry about once we got a cabinet-level Department of Education.
2 comments:
The Chinese are learning Spanish so they'll be able to speak to us. ;)
The answer to the question that you did not ask is, "Because it's easier to teach Spanish and French than it is to teach a language that is not based on a 'Latin' alphabet."
As commenter-at-large Ed Foster once told me, "Credentially is expensive." I'm going to assume that those native speakers, readers and writers best suited to teach are currently tied up teaching our math and science courses. It's also important to note that no teacher is allowed to choose materials, since they must first be vetted by a committee which will surely select the most error-ridden materials (and perhaps suggest additional errors), and have them printed by publishers that unfortunately provide evidence that there are indeed some books that deserve to be burned.
The best bet is to read a mechanically translated computer equipment manual, so as to familiarize oneself with the syntactical rules.
All paths lead back to my arguments against expensive university education, where it's assumed that the ability to tolerate academic rigor is some indication of a passion for the subject. Then the unions function on the assumption that years of services is the equivalent of skill in the classroom.
An aside: I marvel at the deteriorating, fully-equipped photography darkroom at our local high school. People tell me that film and wet prints are no longer the way of the world, yet an $800 Beseler enlarger is certainly more affordable than a $50,000 Noritsu ink print machine, or an optical printer--especially when that cost was paid decades ago. Yet "digital media" courses are offered as the alternate. Since we cannot observe the competence of the instructor by judging the prints, how would we know? The instructor has no portfolio.
Perhaps it is that "credentially" is assumed.
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