Mine the only ones not learning Mandarin?

RozPal
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:14:08 +0000

After HS graduation, My DD, who spoke no Chinese, decided to go to China last summer with some friends (one of whom was Chinese American who was fairly fluent) and attend the Beijing Culture and Language institute. She spent five weeks, four of them at the school. taking class four hours a day. They spent the first couple of days learning Pinyin which uses the Latin alphabet to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. She then decided to focus only on the spoken language and not bother with the reading or writting of Chinese symbols. By the time she was done, she was very comfortable getting around, asking for directions, ordering food and best of all, bargaining in the markets. I was amazed that she could get so far in just four weeks of class (and no outside extra homework). The school has 17,000 kids at any one time. Kids are in small classes grouped by proficiency, or lack there of. It was an incredibly enjoyable and enlightening experience. She just started a pilot Business Chinese class at Wharton, which will also focus only on speaking and listening. We’ll see how that goes.