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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm curious whether the people who think learning Chinese is a fad are multilingual.  I speak 5 languages plus a bit of a 6th, and none of my decisions to learn them were driven by what I perceived to be popular or by other people's opinions.  Two were learned for work, one because it happens to be my heritage language and my older siblings speak it, and one because my fiancé speaks it.

The snarky pat of me thinks that this "fad" talk is defensiveness by monolingual people, but I have no basis for that. So fad people - how many languages do you speak?[/quote]

I speak five languages, my children only speak three. My husband and I send our children to an immersion charter and a heritage school (not Chinese) on the weekend. Most educated people I know think Chinese is a total fad.  Sorry Heritage Dad. I'm sure grandma will be impressed with your children's accents, but no one else is going to care.

[b]By the way, if people are looking for a fantastic Chinese speaker of whatever dialect, there are literally millions of Chinese native speakers who speak perfect English and are happy to come here for much less money than Americans would want.[/b] Most of them are educated in American or European colleges too. So really, it makes no sense if you're trying to be competitive in the marketplace.

Hope grandma is happy. [/quote]

I'm PP who asked about the "fad" comment.  I'm not heritage dad.

I don't agree with the bolded point above -- I've hired at least a half dozen native Chinese speakers who were graduates of prestigious US schools for roles where Chinese and English language skills were important (in marketing and in software development).  To be honest, it was a pretty hit or miss process.  I was much more impressed with a US-born consultant who had attended school in China and learned Chinese there.  My direct personal experience was that this US-born Asian-Americans who really deeply got US culture and was reasonably fluent in Chinese (and also spoke Japanese) did EXTREMELY well --- moving up rapidly through the ranks of the global manufacturing company where I was working and then going out on his own as a consultant and coming back at a much higher pay rate.  His expertise was more in logistics and management, but several times I was able to get a one sentence email from him as a favor that cleared up a question that had our Chinese native speaker translators and communications people (for whom English was a second language) deeply puzzled.  I know that he was able to do the same thing on a daily basis for logistics and engineering groups in situations where the US and Shanghai teams were talking past each other, and it was that ability that really made him in demand as a consultant.
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