chinesepod
How many people really need to learn Chinese?
One of my Google Alerts is the phrase “learn Chinese,” and every morning I awake to several stories about a school in some place or another (often in the United States) starting a Chinese program for their students. This morning I there was a story about an elementary school Chinese program in Oak Creek, Wisconsin:
While most elementary schools would consider themselves lucky to have any foreign language program, Meadowview Elementary School and this class of first-graders have scored what might be the ultimate coup: an elementary program in Mandarin.
Pretty cool stuff. Certainly better by a wide margin than the half-hearted Spanish programs I had in Central Florida in the 1980s (the article indicates that the program, like many others in the US, is being run by the Hanban). I wonder, though, what the real return on the investment in these programs is.
Chinese, like any language (and perhaps more so than many) is hard to learn. It takes time and dedication in massive quantities. While exposing children to a foreign language cannot be a bad thing, unless there are intensive programs and support materials for the students throughout their primary, secondary, and post-secondary education, wouldn’t the time be better spent on learning math, science, or history?
These questions are pertinent for Praxis Language, as a company that makes products for people learning Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, and English. Where do we provide value? How do we make sure that the investment the user is making pays off?
I think it comes down to motivation, which I’ll talk about later.
Reset and reconnect
On my personal blog, I wrote recently about idea mills — blogs in which ideas are presented to readers with the goal of enticing the reader to mull over the idea, chew it up, spit it out, and help refine the raw idea into something more useful, both for the writer and for the reader. It’s an idea that I have spent a lot of time pondering.
My goal for Learning on Your Terms has always been to connect with and spread ideas through our user community. We are lucky enough to have thousands of really bright people visit our sites and learn from our products every day, and I think that it is from them — you! — that we can learn the most.
Ken Carroll, when he was writing heavily for the ChinesePod blog in 2006 and early 2007, often referred to the user community we had then as “the Big Brain” — a nod to the pure and simple truth that as a group you are far smarter than any one of us. I hope to over the next weeks and months plug back into that Big Brain, put out the ideas that are bouncing around our heads, throw them out for everyone to chew on and pick apart, and then learn.
I’m looking forward to it.