Posted on 04/02/2005 3:29:18 PM PST by MadIvan
AMBITIOUS New Yorkers are rearing a generation of “little emperors” fluent in Mandarin so they will be equipped for a global economy that may come to be dominated by China.
Chinese nannies who can bring up bilingual babies are sought after in Manhattan, and nursery schools are adding the language to their curriculums.
Jim Rogers and Paige Parker are the parents of Hilton Augusta, a 22-month-old blonde, blue-eyed girl. She already understands as much Mandarin as English after her parents hired a Chinese nanny. Their apartment is decorated with words for objects such as table and chair in English and Chinese script.
“China is going to be the next great country in the world,” said Rogers, a writer and banker. “We thought we should start to prepare her at birth for what will be the most important language in her lifetime.”
Finding the right nanny took weeks. She had to speak the kind of Mandarin heard in government circles in Beijing. Clifford Greenhouse runs the Pavillion nanny agency in New York. “There’s been a tremendous surge in demand. We get dozens of requests a year. It is extremely hard to find the right, well-educated, cultured Mandarin speaker,” he said.
Many of the requests come from families of mixed Chinese and American parentage or from parents who have adopted girls from China.
But a good third are from parents who hope to give their children a leg-up in the globalised world. Rogers and Parker plan to enrol Hilton Augusta in St Hilda’s and St Hugh’s, a private nursery and elementary school in Manhattan, which is adding Mandarin to its curriculum in September.
Virginia Connor, the headmistress, said the classes would begin with toddlers. “We’ve been asking ourselves what will children need, not just five or 10 years ahead, but a long way into the future.”
Hilton Augusta will be more prepared than most. Her parents have booked a holiday in Shanghai this summer to reinforce what she has learnt and to familiarise herself with the culture.
Rogers said: “I’m pleased and proud that one day my daughter will be talking about us with her friends and we won’t know what she is saying.”
Parker admits to misgivings about being excluded from what will be an important part of Hilton Augusta’s life. “I do worry about it a little but the benefits outweigh any uncomfortableness I feel.”
I'll be going back to school next fall (I'm 28) and will have to complete the foreign language requirement. I took two or three semesters of Latin my first time in college, but it's been so many years that I can't just start where I left off. I've been thinking about starting over in another language, maybe Chinese or Russian.
It's amazing how blessed young children are with the capability to learn languages. I am so grateful to live in a city where I have the opportunity to put my daughter in such a great Chinese language program and I'm proud to say that she went from knowing no Mandarin to it becoming her language of choice.
And no, I am not worried about Mandarin interfering with her learning of English. If anything, I think being bilingual has improved her English language skills.
And in case I haven't enraged enough of FReepers with these comments, I am currently interviewing Chinese nannies for my newborn daughter, who I am burping as I peck out these very sentences.
Jim Robinson may be a naive romantic, but it's not just limousine liberals who recognize the value of teaching Chinese to their children.
I studied it (college level) when I was in my early 50s - 20 years ago. One of the best things I've ever done. It is an absolutely fascinating language. I'll never be fluent (don't get enough practice) but it is with me constantly. I do something with it, in some way, every day.
By all accounts, being able to speak several languages is a good thing. I regret that I wasn't able to continue learning and using the french I learned all through junior high and high school (an hour a day for six years of school). I'd love to learn Vietnamese, because I love the food, have a friend whose family is from there, and their written language is based on the latin alphabet. And Hungarian would be interesting, too, as again I have a Hungarian friend and the language is quite distinctive amongst european languages. But realistically neither of those languages would likely be of any real use to me. Mandarin, on the other hand, is the official language of the largest country in the world, and I work with many people of Chinese origin, although most of them speak another dialect as their native language, Cantonese most commonly.
Maybe I'll find a night class or something somewhere and start working on my French again. It is still advantageous here in Canada to know french (let's not bother getting into that discussion here - the official languages act is reality nonetheless), and it's still one of the more common colonial languages in the world, used widely in Africa. If nothing else, it's always good to keep your mind active learning new things.
Mandarin is more widely spoken that can be imagined. Check out this link. Scroll down to the chart.
http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/most_spoken_languages.htm
If you took some Latin continue with Spanish. Spanish like French or Italian is a dialect of Latin. Will be quite useful for a long time (few hundred million Latinos are not going away soon). It is relatively easy to learn.
I can't imagine anyone being enraged by that. It's this particular guy & his wife that smack of socialism for some of us. You won't be teaching your daughter Mandarin, for example, solely so that she can be part of the elites, to lord over everyone else, in the imagined New World Order. At least I hope not. :-) Congratulations on your new one.
Actually it leads to Augustine's theory that there is no such thing as evil as such. Insofar as something still exists, it is good, but is diminished or perverted by being turned from its proper purpose. Thus evil is the perversion or diminishment of something originally good.
Much evil results simply from disordered love--loving something either too much or too little. The correct priorities need to be observed: people more than things, God more than people, and so forth.
But they pick up accent free languages without even giving it a thought.
A child that young could learn a language in about 8 months, but of course it has to be a continuous process to increase the vocabulary.
It's the way the brain is wired at that age.
Precisely correct, IMHO.
One of my best friends studied Russian beginning in high school (mid-80's) because it was the red menace USSR. It did pan out for her in terms of job security. She's worked for decades in various capacities in governments, since she's been fluent & all. Things aren't the same now, though!
Ol Jimmy's doing OK for himself!
As a reading teacher, I have an interesting comment on this phenomena. There is a "dirty little secret" among the upper level society with children who are brought up with non-English speaking nannies and in houses with little give and take conversation. These kids are language deficient--as deficient as that typically seen in the worst housing projects. This type of deficiency requires immense exposure to language and many times the kids just never catch up.
Stay at home moms offer their children so much with the day to day conversation and things they probably just take for granted. A child who is spoken to and read to daily is often facile with upwards of 75,000 to 100,000 words before entering kindergarten. Language deficient children can be as low as 10,000. What a difference!
Is it hard to see which one will excel and which one will be trouble very quickly?
That's very interesting. Guess homeschool moms are doing more than they think!
I just realized they actually refer to the baby with two names. I wonder if the parents do that or the journalist just wasn't sure which one she goes by.
does that includes the well-known "Texas Drawl"?...Howdee Ma'am...just asking. :^)
I went to school with a bunch of people who took Japanese because it was the future....
haha...
China will go the same way.
When the little girl does a triple gainer off the 35th floor of a Hong Kong balcony because she didn't get into the preferred university, I will believe she was successfully assimiliated.
I have a couple friends who grew up in HK and came to the states for schooling...they are loathe to go back to visit relatives, let alone to work.
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