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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Excuse your ignorance, but there is China, Singapore, Taiwan, Macau, hong kong. [/quote]

There is also a long history of Chinese being spoken in this country.  I'm a Cantonese-speaking ABC whose children are too young for YY, and who hasn't made a decision about entering the lottery.  My spouse and I are simply collecting impressions for now.

I thought that posters might be interested in a blurb from the Chinese Immersion School of De Avila in San Francisco, which my brother's children attend.  The school, which started up just three years ago, has been enthusiastically embraced by both the Bay Area Chinese community and native English speakers.  The blurb offers great insight into why this is the case.

What this wonderful school tries hard to do (see para 4 of the blurb below), is ensure that both the admin team and each class is comprised of a mix of native Chinese speakers, ABC Cantonese speakers, and English speakers.

I point out that the small DC Chinese community's make-up is similar to that of the Bay Area.  If anything, the percentage of native Chinese speakers is higher here, with local Chinese being less assimilated overall, and, hence, more inclined to seek out their own kind in suburban heritage language schools than W. Coast counterparts.  It is my understanding that the professional class of ethnic Chinese attracted to YY in small numbers, which might include us, isn't actually terribly representative of the community as a whole.

CHINESE IMMERSION SCHOOL (CIS) OF DE AVILA SAN FRANCISCO:

Many people ask why the CIS curriculum begins with Cantonese rather than Mandarin.  After all, Mandarin is the official language of China, and with more than a billion people speaking it, it is by far the most spoken language in the world.

Cantonese, with just 71 million speakers may seem like an unusual starting point.

To understand why CIS begins with Cantonese it is important to understand a few things about dual immersion language learning, the city of San Francisco, and the nature of Cantonese.

[b]CIS employs dual language immersion in which native English speakers and native speakers of the target language learn and play side by side. In an ideal case, a third of the class would consist of native English speakers, a third would be native Chinese speakers, and a third would be bilingual Chinese and English speakers. This model allows students to learn from each other and become bilingual and bi-literate (able to read both languages).[/b]

While most Chinese speakers in the world speak Mandarin, most Chinese speakers in San Francisco speak Cantonese, and well over 75% of the Chinese speakers in the SFUSD use Cantonese as the home language.  Cantonese is the language of Hong Kong and the southern coastal region of Guangdong in China.  Since the middle of the 19th century, Chinese immigrants from the Cantonese speaking parts of China have been immigrating to San Francisco, and while Mandarin speakers are on the rise, they still comprise a minority of the Chinese speakers in the city.

Rather than asking Cantonese speaking children to set aside their primary language and learn English, dual language immersion allows those children to further develop their Cantonese and become literate in Chinese.  This in turn provides the children of Cantonese speaking immigrants with a better foundation for learning English and other languages.

[b]English speaking students benefit as well.  By teaching Cantonese in the primary grades CIS is a more attractive school to immigrant families, and the presence of native Cantonese speakers in the classroom enhances the learning of the non-Chinese speaking students.[/b]
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