Reply to What are the foreign language trends among children of elites now? What are some considerations in picking a language.

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "What are the foreign language trends among children of elites now? What are some considerations in picking a language. "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Any trained monkey can learn to count to 10 in a foreign language, and I don't see the benefit of being able to count to 10 anyway.

Real fluency ( the kind that can naturally maintain a conversation ) requires real commitment.  Nannies in the target language from birth to age 10, full immersion school starting at age 3, yearly study abroads.  I would estimate from experience that the cost to get to real fluency is at least half a million dollars.[/quote]

Our kids went from PK-4 through 12th grade in schools that were either full immersion (just PK-4 & K), then 50/50 English/Mandarin (1st - 5th grades), then more like only 30/70 Mandarin/English (6th - 12th grade), with a few 2 week trips to China or Taiwan thrown in which included brief homestays.  We are a Black family so pretty much no one mistakes my kids for native Chinese speakers, but literally since they were about 6 or 7 yrs old, native Mandarin speakers (and plenty of majority Cantonese speakers too) are stunned and comment how well they speak Mandarin, and also when they are reading or writing how well they do both.  This is 3 kiids who had different levels of ease/difficulty with learning Chinese, but they all are constantly commended on how amazingly they speak, and how nearly fluent they sounded by 11th and 12th grades.

Most here will know where they went to Pk-5 and 6-12th.  It's a public school, the trips to China and Taiwan were incredibly good deals and kids who couldn't afford the trips got aid to go.  They may not be fluent but the oldest 2 have gotten several offers now from companies that are either Chinese companies doing business in other countries (not just the US) or American companies doing business in China. And their level of conversant or conversational is considered more than enough to do their jobs well.  Only when technology or science terms uniquely Chinese in origin come up do they really need help understanding or explaining, otherwise they do great.

This is a very long way of saying that over those 14 yrs of PreK4-12th grade, we paid at the most $30,000 for 3 kids and if we couldn't have afforded the trips, they would still have been able to go and it would have been down to paying about $5,000 through all those years.

Nothing even CLOSE to $500,000.00 and they are fairly close to fluent at this stage (and very high scoring though not fluent in reading and writing).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics