Here’s an article claiming immersing students in Mandarin might not have the same success as Spanish immersion programmes. My favourite part is the first comment saying that it seems to work pretty well in China; Chinese children seem to pick up Mandarin like it’s their native language or something!
Posts under ‘Chinese’
Mandarin gaining popularity, French losing
For a long time, I have held the view that China is going to dominate the world as an economic power during the next few decades. Relating this to languages, I enjoy discussing whether this will create a change in terms of using English as a business medium.
My conclusion in the past has been, unfortunately, [...]
Chinglish to be banned from Beijing Olympics
I found this article a while ago and use it for a laugh in my English classes. For those that don’t know, Chinglish is when Chinese gets poorly translated into English. It’s quite prevalent when you’re travelling round China and always amusing. Here is the BBC article about the preparation for the Beijing Olympics and also [...]
Language use on the Internet
I found some interesting statistics of the languages used on the Internet and I’m sad to say it’s rather biased towards English at the moment. According to the research, 29.7% of internet users are English native speakers, 13.3% Chinese, 7.9% Japanese, 7.5% Spanish, 5.4% German, 4.6% French, 3.1% Portuguese, 3.1% Korean, 2.7% Italian, 2.2% Russian, [...]