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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] Also, Chinese [b]as a tonal language is easier to learn when young and harder to learn when older[/b].  The romantic languages don't have quite that issue.  It is easier to learn Chinese when of grade school age and Spanish later than vice versa.  All of these suggest to me that if you don't have any other guidance for which to select, then I would select Chinese for younger students.[/quote]

This is a great point and one of the reasons that bilingual ethnic families like us aren't as concerned that our kids don't/can't necessarily attend YY, where I'm having a hard time picturing us feeling at home, as y'all outside the Chinese domain might think.

Coming into high school AP and college Mandarin classes with the tones I grew up with speaking good Cantonese, I found I could spend around 1/3 the time most classmates who didn't know Chinese did on course work and still get As.  Mandarin tones (4-5) are actually quite a bit easier to contend with than Cantonese tones (6-7).  When I took the Foreign Service placement exam for Mandarin, in my 20s, I was surprised to score so high (a "4", "5" was advanced native speaker level) that State didn't bother sending me to language training.

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