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hubby is japanese and he speaks it (obviously) i can mutter my way through it (enough to understand the conversation or get my point across), my 12 year old speaks it and even our 5 year old knows quite a bit.
It might be cool to know, but Mandarin is kind of useless in today's world. If she ever needs to go into any business in China or with a Chinese person, chances are, they already speak English well. Learning Spanish would be much more useful to her. It's really the only language that you can use in the US on an everyday basis. In the country, as a whole, around 10% of the population speaks Spanish as a first language. In some areas, like the Southwest, parts of Texas, and Florida, it's much higher, I think it's about 60% in my city, Miami. Spanish is spoken by over 400 million people in around 20 counties. Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people in one country. You choose
It might be cool to know, but Mandarin is kind of useless in today's world. If she ever needs to go into any business in China or with a Chinese person, chances are, they already speak English well. Learning Spanish would be much more useful to her. It's really the only language that you can use in the US on an everyday basis. In the country, as a whole, around 10% of the population speaks Spanish as a first language. In some areas, like the Southwest, parts of Texas, and Florida, it's much higher, I think it's about 60% in my city, Miami. Spanish is spoken by over 400 million people in around 20 counties. Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people in one country. You choose
Mandarin is spoken in more than one country. Just an FYI.
Half the people in the world are fluently bilingual, nearly all learned both languages in childhood. It has not done any of them any harm.
Educated bilingual Americans have vast and lucrative career opportunities open to them, which are not available to people who are not bilingual.
And, if she becomes functionally bilingual in childhood, it will be much, much easier for her to pick up additional new languages in adulthood. However, just studying Chinese now is unlikely to make her "bilingual", unless she has an incentive and an opportunity to use it frequently in ordinary conversation with native speakers. So look for social occasions where she can do that regularly, too.
Last edited by jtur88; 04-13-2011 at 09:20 AM..
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