Learning Mandarin

In just five years, the number of non-Chinese people learning Mandarin Chinese has soared to 30 million. What is fuelling this expansion, and will it change the status of English as a global language?

Shanghai-born lawyer Kailan Shu Lucas of Chinese Learning Centre organises lessons in Mandarin, the main Chinese language, for pupils in London - and she is very busy.

She now co-ordinates lessons for 12 London schools. She believes that in most cases, having their children study the language is a career calculation made by the parents.

"Parents nowadays think that in 10-20 years' time, when their children are in adulthood, China will be even bigger - and so learning Chinese will be a very helpful tool," she told BBC World Service's Analysis programme. "This will be a very useful, important language to learn."

Versatile

In London, the parents of most of the non-Chinese students studying Mandarin Chinese are from the finance industry. Kailan said that in this industry, China is "a big thing."

"That influences the parents' thoughts," she added. "They want their children to learn Chinese and be more versatile in terms of job prospects in the future."

The belief is that China is not just a new rival, but a new provider, not just a UK phenomenon - in the US too, numbers of teenagers taking Chinese have rocketed.

Adapted from BBC news, January 2007

chinese translation | japanese translation | korean translation