any suggestions for foreign language?

cheers
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:25:04 +0000

My sons are math savvy and highly visual but tone deaf. They find the characters and the structure quite easy to follow but have more difficulty with the tones. The Chinese are a bit like the French when it comes to poorly pronounced tones–according to my son.

Having had the immersive French and Mandarin, my older son is keen to do an immersive Arabic program as well.

Choosing a language for an international career is more critical than choosing what you ‘like’. The (reported) Chinese economy is growing at, what, 12% a year? In the coming decades, every 50 cent increase in the Chinese minimum wage will cause major upheaval in the supply chain across the world. It may be hard for US yuppies to imagine, but our children’s lives will likely be dominated by the Chinese econmy–if the Chinese nation stays stitched together.

My 20 year old son has already been approached by our friends who own manufacturing companies. They want him to get a job with a US manufacturer in China–and then come to them to help them open up a factory in China. Many of the male language students in China are studying Chinese at the behest of their father’s companies. It’s quite a dynamic group.

Arabic, on the other hand, is a less business oriented and more policy oriented choice–though there are many policy avenues with Mandarin as well.

I’ve heard Dean Gallucci at Gtown SFS say that the need for Romance languages is past and Arabic and Mandarin are the two languages worth studying at this point in time.