Chinese In Schools

I was flipping through today's Buffalo News and noticed on the section "Next", the "voice of the next generation" they call it. On the cover they show a student drawing Hanzi and the caption says "China 101." I flip open to the article and read through it to see what was going on. Apparently, City Honors school, a school I am quite familiar with, is mandating all 5th and 6th graders to take Chinese, and offering it as an elective to 8th graders. There are a few other schools with Chinese programs popping up in Buffalo as well.

The article does make the mistake of saying that Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. It does beat the pants off of English for native speakers (Spanish might be ahead too), but if you included second-language speakers, English gets about 700 million more knotches.

I'm glad about the prospect, and I always figured it would catch on, but it seems that it has caught on a little ealier than I thought. It'll be good for kids to learn a non-Indo European language. The article goes on to have a teacher speak in broad terms about how English is more like French and Spanish and not at all like Chinese. They aren't genetically related, but if I remember my typology, Mandarin and English aren't that radically different. The teacher even notes that the main obstacles will be learning the tones, and the basic characters. I say kudos to those who now have the option and are willing to pursue it, students, teachers, and administration alike.