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A quiz: If a person who speaks three languages is trilingual, and one who speaks four languages is quadrilingual, what is someone called who speaks no foreign languages at all?
Answer: an American.
Yet these days, we’re seeing Americans engaged in a headlong and ambitious rush to learn Chinese — or, more precisely, to get their kids to learn Chinese. Everywhere I turn, people are asking me the best way for their children to learn Chinese.
Partly that’s because Chinese classes have replaced violin classes as the latest in competitive parenting, and partly because my wife and I speak Chinese and I have tortured our three kids by trying to raise them bilingual. Chinese is still far less common in schools or universities than Spanish or French, but it is surging and has the “cool factor” behind it — so public and private schools alike are hastening to add Chinese to the curriculum.
-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times
Really? He does go on to say that Americans should learn Spanish first as a more practical matter. Spanish proved impossible enough for me, and I'm Hispanic! Mandarin just never would have happened. It's monolingualism until the day I die. It's not like I have that much longer to go anyway. If I can manage to fuck it up this long, I can fuck it up a little longer.
Answer: an American.
Yet these days, we’re seeing Americans engaged in a headlong and ambitious rush to learn Chinese — or, more precisely, to get their kids to learn Chinese. Everywhere I turn, people are asking me the best way for their children to learn Chinese.
Partly that’s because Chinese classes have replaced violin classes as the latest in competitive parenting, and partly because my wife and I speak Chinese and I have tortured our three kids by trying to raise them bilingual. Chinese is still far less common in schools or universities than Spanish or French, but it is surging and has the “cool factor” behind it — so public and private schools alike are hastening to add Chinese to the curriculum.
-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times
Really? He does go on to say that Americans should learn Spanish first as a more practical matter. Spanish proved impossible enough for me, and I'm Hispanic! Mandarin just never would have happened. It's monolingualism until the day I die. It's not like I have that much longer to go anyway. If I can manage to fuck it up this long, I can fuck it up a little longer.
