I was asked why I am wanting to teach Max Mandarin.
We have a few reasons. First, in the family on both sides the only language other then English that anyone speaks is Polish or Mandarin. I don’t see a big need for Polish in the future… maybe I will be wrong. So I think that if Max is going to learn another language it should be one that people already speak around him. We do have friends that speak Finish and with my ancestry from Norway there is some Norwegian in the family. However I don’t see these as being big languages in the future.
Secondly, Tony works right now with many Mandarin speakers. He has the whole time since he went to grad school. The Chinese put a bigger weight on education then sadly we do in this country. Therefore a lot of them end up in the sciences. While we may have got a few people in our family wondering why we were going to teach Max Mandarin, Tony’s colleagues at work thought it was wise right off the bat. Max seems very much like his daddy in many regards. So we are both imagining that Max will go into some sort of science. We could be wrong, but honestly at this point we are hedging our bets.
Thirdly, one quarter of the worlds population speaks mandarin. That stat is mind boggling to me. Mandarin is becoming more and more main stream in this country but it isn’t as big as Spanish yet. To think that Max will not have to deal with and work with Mandarin speakers in his working life I think is foolish. Yes he may have to deal with people that speak other languages too, but with 1/4 of the world population speaking one language I am going to hedge my bets on that language.
Fourth, we have already decided on what school we are going to use to home school Max… at least in the early grades if not all the way through. This school will be teaching Max Latin starting at the 3rd grade. If Max has a foundation of language like Mandarin and Latin I can not imagine that other languages that he may want to learn would be hard for him. Mandarin is NOTHING like English. When I say it is nothing like, it is like only eating oranges your whole life then being given a taste of chicken and having to describe it using the same words as you would to describe an orange. See how difficult that may be? Latin is the basis of many languages. So therefore he would be having a great foundation to go forward in life.
The other question that was asked was what school my sisters are in. Seeing that this is a public blog, I don’t want to put that out there. However I can say that I know that this person who asked this is from Canada. I can’t speak for Canada, however in this country more and more schools are embracing this immersion concept. I know I was shocked to find out that there was a school like this in a neighboring school district where I live. However we don’t want to move and we really would prefer to home school so we will not be using that school. To give you an idea of how fast this is spreading. I know when I married Tony in 2003 there were 3 public immersion schools in this country. I imagine now that number is much much higher with more planned.
That is all I have for now!
Jennifer
Thanks so much for answering my questions, sorry about the last one lol i was just courious whether you’re referring to mandarin immersion (not where it is) cause it would be so cool if we have those here but Im pretty sure we will soon, cause especially Vancouver has extremely high population of immigrants from Chin ! And I totally agree with everything else you said. These languages are becoming so important, and will be even more so when our kids grow up. So why not give them a head start. Yay for smart mamas ! I am right now doing the library technician program which is a diploma but I am thinking about going for the bachelor in linguistic, with major in Mandarin myself (or Russian on that count)