Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

Tom Scocca:

I started to truly appreciate the power of early childhood Chinese-language education when our son, at the age of two, started speaking English wrong. "The blue of cup," he would say, meaning his blue cup.

This wasn't a random preschool linguistic hiccup, we realized. He was trying to use Chinese syntax: "of" was standing in for the Mandarin particle "de" to turn the noun "blue" into an adjective. And his odd habit of indicating things by saying "this one" or "that one"-he was rendering the Chinese "zhege" and "neige" in English. That is, he was speaking Chinglish.

The usual arguments in favor of Mandarin education say that he should be on his way to conquering the world. An extra language, the theory goes, supplies extra brainpower, and Chinese in particular is a skill that will prepare young children to compete in the global 21st-century marketplace of talent.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 19, 2011 3:23 AM
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