"Control" is Character of the Year in China

Interesting that the Chinese character for "control" is the word of the year in China. This seems to indicate a growing expectation that inflation and price hikes should be kept under control.

You can listen to the following piece at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/cdaudio/2011-12/16/content_14278789.htm

New character took control in 2011
[ 2011-12-16 15:43 ]


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The Chinese character kong 控, a word that generally means control, has been selected as the 2011 character of the year in China.

The word was chosen after recommendations from Internet users, expert reviews and online polling that was jointly organized by the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center under the Ministry of Education, the State-run Commercial Press, and the China Youth Daily, a report in the newspaper said on Thursday.

Two million Internet users took part in the selection, the report said.

Kong, replacing the character zhang (meaning price hikes)from last year, symbolizes a logical consequence of the government launching proper macro-economic policy to keep the hikes under control, said a statement issued by the organizers.

A statement on Wednesday after a three-day central economic work conference attended by senior leaders said the country would maintain the steady macro-economic policy and measures to control inflation, stabilize prices and regulate the property market.

The selection of kong indicates the public's expectations and the government's efforts to respond to the expectations, the organizers' statement said.

Moreover, the use of kong as shorthand for a homophone of the English word "complex" to express a special liking, is also getting popular this year, which reflects a more diversified lifestyle of the Chinese people, the statement said.

In this respect, the word kong usually follows a noun or verb. For instance, weibo kong refers to those people who like to use micro blogs very much and spend a lot of time micro-blogging.

The phrase shang bu qi, which means too delicate to bear a blow, was chosen as the phrase of the year, revealing the public's sensitivity to personal and social problems, and their call for justice and equity.

Also, "debt" and "euro debt crisis" were voted the international word and phrase of the year, showing the public's growing awareness of a globalized world, the report said.

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Carter recalls his lifelong fascination with China

BEIJING - When a 7-year-old farmboy in Plains, Georgia, opened a package from his seafaring uncle nearly eight decades ago, he found a delicate model of a wooden Chinese junk - and at that moment a lifelong fascination with China was born.

From: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2011-12/15/content_14267665.htm


Occasional friction won't derail ties between China and the US, former US president Jimmy Carter said in an interview with China Daily in Beijing on Wednesday. [Photo by Wu Zhiyi / China Daily]

"My uncle was in the US Navy here," former US president Jimmy Carter told China Daily on Wednesday, "and he would send me souvenirs from seaports where his ship visited. I got that package from Hong Kong, and others from Shanghai and from Qingdao. I still have that ship, it's in the bedroom of my boyhood home.
"Then later when I was in the submarine force in 1949, I came here as a young naval officer to visit the same seaports, and I was intrigued with the people of China," he said, noting that when he became president he began the process of normalizing relations with China that began in the Nixon administration.

"So it's been a long process in my life, involving China and my love for the Chinese people."

That sort of exchange was the reason Carter has been in China for the past week, marking the 40th anniversary of Ping-Pong Diplomacy at a series of events.

At a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People that he attended with Vice-President Xi Jinping, Carter said: "It was a very historic moment. But it was that breakthrough just with ping-pong players - that is people-to-people - that was really more important than the decisions of political leaders. And I think that is a stability that is going to prevail in the future."

On Wednesday morning the former president was taping a television spot at the US embassy to support President Barack Obama's campaign for 100,000 Strong - a push to have 100,000 US students studying in China four years from now.

"Now we have 165,000 Chinese students in American universities, and about 13,000 American students in Chinese universities. And in the future, they will be the leaders of our two countries. And they will also be knowing more about each other and the reasons for harmony and cooperation and mutual respect."

Carter said that despite his decades of interaction with China, he's learning about it all the time.

He said one reason for his current visit is China's interest in working with the Carter Center in Africa, for instance, in healthcare programs.

A meeting with a Chinese official, who is in charge of healthcare assistance to Africa, informed Carter of the many programs that China has in Africa to improve healthcare there, involving malaria and many other diseases.

"This was a surprise to me, and I think this is one thing that the rest of the world doesn't acknowledge - or know about - is how extensive China's programs are in improving the quality of lives of people in Africa and in poor countries elsewhere."

Carter is not overwhelmed by issues of discord between the two countries, from regulating the value of the renminbi to US arms sales to Taiwan.

He noted that rhetoric gets ratcheted up from time to time, "especially during US election years". And while some in Congress want to punish China for not moving as far as the United States would like on currency revaluation, Carter said flatly that such a bill would not pass both houses of Congress. "And if it did, President Obama would veto it."

"I think the more rational people in the US Congress - and in the White House - understand that this slight difference of opinion over the value of the Chinese currency is relatively insignificant. I've observed this very closely myself. Five years ago, it took about eight RMB to equal one US dollar. Now it just takes six of them. That's a 22 percent change in the value of the Chinese currency just in the last five years. So change is taking place - not because of comments from Washington but because the Chinese leaders in politics and economics agreed this is best for China.

"Decisions about the US currency should be made in Washington, and decisions about the Chinese renminbi, the yuan, should be made in Beijing."

"We'll always have differences, with our cultural approaches and our political backgrounds, our ancient histories," Carter said.

"But still, the ties that bind us together are much more important than any differences that might arise."

10th Annual Chinese New Year Festival!

What's in a Chinese Name?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/world/asia/picking-brand-names-in-china-is-a-business-itself.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Picking%20Brand%20Names%20in%20China%20Is%20a%20Business%20Itself&st=cse

Picking Brand Names in China Is a Business Itself

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — After a hard day’s labor, your average upscale Beijinger likes nothing more than to shuck his dress shoes for a pair of Enduring and Persevering, rev up his Precious Horse and head to the pub for a tall, frosty glass of Happiness Power.

Or, if he’s a teetotaler, a bottle of Tasty Fun.

To Westerners, that’s Nike, BMW, Heineken and Coca-Cola, respectively. And those who wish to snicker should feel free: the companies behind these names are laughing too — all the way to the bank.

More than many nations, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance. Western companies looking to bring their products to China face a problem not unlike that of Chinese parents naming a baby boy: little Gang (“strong”) may be regarded quite differently than little Yun (“cloud”). Given that China’s market for consumer goods is growing by better than 13 percent annually — and luxury-goods sales by 25 percent — an off-key name could have serious financial consequences.

And so the art of picking a brand name that resonates with Chinese consumers is no longer an art. It has become a sort of science, with consultants, computer programs and linguistic analyses to ensure that what tickles a Mandarin ear does not grate on a Cantonese one.

Art “is only a very, very tiny piece of it,” said Vladimir Djurovic, president of the Labbrand Consulting Company in Shanghai, which has made a business of finding names for Western companies entering the Chinese market.

Maybe. But there is a lot of artistry in the best of the West.

The paradigm probably is the Chinese name for Coca-Cola, Kekoukele, which not only sounds like Coke’s English name, but conveys its essence of taste and fun in a way that the original name could not hope to match.

There are many others. Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean “gets rid of dirt.” (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean “too purple.”)

There is also Reebok, or Rui bu, which means “quick steps.” And Colgate — Gao lu jie — which translates into “revealing superior cleanliness.” And Lay’s snack foods — Le shi — whose name means “happy things.” Nike (Nai ke) and BMW (Bao Ma, echoing the first two sounds of its English and German names) also have worn well on Chinese ears.

Still, finding a good name involves more than coming up with clever homonyms to the original English.

“Do you want to translate your name, or come up with a Chinese brand?” said Monica Lee, the managing director of the Brand Union, a Beijing consultancy. “If you go for phonetic sounds, everyone knows where you are from — you’re immediately identified as a foreign brand.”

For some products, having a foreign-sounding name lends a cachet that a true Chinese name would lack. Many upscale brands like Cadillac (Ka di la ke), or Hilton (Xi er dun), employ phonetic translations that mean nothing in Chinese. Rolls-Royce (Laosi-Laisi) includes two Chinese characters for “labor” and “plants” that more or less have become standard usage in foreign names — all to achieve a distinct foreign look and sound.

But on the other hand, a genuine Chinese name can say things about a product that a mere collection of homonyms never could. Take Citibank, Hua qi yinhang, which literally means “star-spangled banner bank,” or Marriott, Wan hao, or “10,000 wealthy elites.” Or Pentium, Ben teng, which means “galloping.” Asked to introduce Marvel comics to China, the Labbrand consultants came up not long ago with “Man wei” — roughly phonetic, foreign-sounding and eminently suited to superheroes with the meaning “comic power.”

To introduce Clear dandruff shampoo to young Chinese, who are already inundated with foreign brands, Ms. Lee’s firm decided to focus on the shampoo’s image. “It’s not about where this product comes from; it’s about the benefit it can bring to you,” she said. The ultimate choice, Qing Yang, combines the Chinese words for “clear” and for “flying,” or “scattering to the wind.”

“It’s very light, healthy and happy,” Ms. Lee said. “Think of hair in the air.”

“Clear” is one of a select number of Chinese words that carry unusually positive connotations, and that find their way into many brands’ names. Others include “le” and “xi,” or happy; “li,” meaning “strength” or “power”; “ma” or horse; and “fu,” translated as “lucky” or “auspicious.”

Thus the name for Heineken beer, Xi li, and the many automobile brands — Mercedes, BMW, even Kia — that include a horse in their Chinese names (one Kia sedan is named Qian li ma, or “thousand-kilometer horse,” an allusion to strength).

Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone’s guess. But Denise Sabet, the vice general manager at Labbrand, suggests that the reasons include cultural differences and the Chinese reliance on characters for words, rather than a phonetic alphabet. Each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own.

Then again, some meanings are best avoided.

Microsoft had to think twice about bringing its Bing search engine here because in Chinese, the most common definitions of the character pronounced “bing” are “disease,” “defect” and “virus” — rather inauspicious for a computer product. The revised name, Bi ying, roughly means “responds without fail.”

Peugeot (Biao zhi) sounds enough like the Chinese slang for “prostitute” (biaozi) that in southern China, where the pronunciations are especially close, the brand has inspired dirty jokes. And in China, the popular Mr. Muscle line of cleaners has been renamed Mr. Powerful, (Weimeng Xiansheng). The product’s maker said in an e-mail that it had forgotten why.

But it could be that when it is spoken, the name Mr. Muscle has a second, less appealing meaning: Mr. Chicken Meat.

Adam Century and Li Bibo contributed research.

China's great gender crisis

Chinese families have long favoured sons over daughters, meaning the country now has a huge surplus of men. Is it also leading to a profound shift in attitudes to women?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/02/chinas-great-gender-crisis?CMP=EMCGT_031111

His parents knew exactly what they wanted from their son: they called him Famiao, or "produce descendants". Yet when their first grandchild arrived, they refused to step across the courtyard of the family home to see the new baby. Qiaoyue was a girl.

When finally obliged to meet her, "they didn't even wash her face or comb her hair. I was furious," says their daughter-in-law, Chen Xingxiao.

"My father-in-law's friends would ask him, 'How come you haven't brought your grandchild out for a walk?' He would say, 'If it was a boy I would have done. She's a girl, so I won't.'"

Chen's righteous anger is perhaps more surprising than her in-laws' disdain. China's preference for sons stretches back for centuries. Infanticide, the abandonment of girl babies and favourable treatment of boys in terms of food and health has long produced a surplus of men. In the past two decades, the gap at birth has soared: the advent of ultrasound scans has allowed people to abort female foetuses, even though sex-selective abortion is illegal.

In the early 1980s there were 108 male births to every 100 female, only slightly above the natural rate; by 2000 that had soared to 120 males, and in some provinces, such as Anhui, Jiangxi and Shaanxi, to more than 130. The result is that more than 35 million women are "missing". Though China is not the only country affected – India's situation is similar – it has by far the widest gap; its one-child policy has exacerbated the problem.

The effects of the discrepancy are only now emerging in full. The country has tens of millions of menwho are destined to die single. Some fear that the excess will lead to increased sexual violence, general crime and social instability. Yet campaigners see the first signs of hope, as more parents come round to Chen's way of thinking. Official statistics released this summer suggest the sex ratio at birth (SRB) has fallen slightly for two years running, to just over 118 males in 2010.

China's population and family planning chief, Dr Li Bin, said it showed the discrepancy "has been preliminarily brought under control"; while experts are more cautious, they agree that the figures offer some hope. The country's new Five Year Plan sets an ambitious target of cutting the ratio to 112 or 113 by 2016. Could China at last be poised to close the sex gap?

No one is claiming victory quite yet: in fact, the government has just pledged to get tougher, launching a new drive against sex-selective abortion. It is increasing safeguards – such as the requirement that two doctors are present at each ultrasound – and toughening punishments. Institutions, as well as individuals, will be held responsible for breaches; the worst offenders risk having their medical licences withdrawn.

"[In the short term] cracking down on illegal foetal sex testing and sex-selective abortions is very important and effective," says Professor Li Shuzhuo, of the Institute for Population and Development Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong University. But he acknowledges medical staff often find ways to indicate a baby's sex, despite the law. They may nod or shake their head; or use a full stop or comma at the end of medical notes – to indicate that parents have achieved their goal or must continue efforts to have a boy.

Other experts fear that cracking down on sex-selective abortion could lead to unsafe, illicit abortions or infanticide if the underlying wishes of the parents remain unchanged. In other words, the battle for China's baby girls will ultimately depend on changing preferences. But as Li points out, that is a long-term struggle, and society pays a high price in the meantime.

The roots of son-preference lie deep in Chinese culture. Traditionally, the bloodline passes through the male side. Women also "marry out", joining their husband's families and looking after their in-laws, not their own parents. For a long time, a son was your pension. Having a girl was wasteful. "Even though son-preference is not rational from the viewpoint of society as a whole, it is a rational choice for an individual," says Li.

Chen's home lies near lush rice paddies, where farmers in wide-brimmed straw hats bend double. The community used to rely on agriculture and believed a boy was necessary for the heaviest work in the fields.

"I can't really blame [my in-laws]; their view was a common one. We have a saying, 'The better sons you have, the better life we can have,' because men have more strength and can carry out more work," says Chen.

In fact, official policy has adapted to these assumptions. China's strict birth-control rules, introduced just over 30 years ago to curb a soaring population, restrict most couples to one birth. But there are several exemptions. Ethnic-minority families are allowed more than one child; couples who are both only children are permitted to have two. The most striking example is the exception made for rural households. While their urban counterparts are generally restricted to one birth, rural couples are allowed a second - if their first is a girl. The statistics show just how important producing at least one son is: the sex ratios for second and third births are vastly more skewed than for first children.

When Chen's daughter was born, a little over 30 years ago, the consequences of the ultrasound had yet to be felt in Shengzhou. But by 1982, 124 boys were being born for every 100 girls. Five years later that figure had risen again, to 129.

Then something striking happened: the ratio dropped steeply. By 1996 it was 109.5. Soon after, according to statistics, it returned to the natural level.

You do not have to look far for part of the explanation. Shengzhou is, it boasts, International Necktie City of the 21st Century, making 350m ties a year – or 40% of the world's supply – as well as huge quantities of gas stoves and cone diaphragms for speakers.

Its factories offer plenty of jobs for daughters, allowing them to make a hefty economic contribution to the household. Across the country, manufacturers have frequently preferred female employees, regarding them as more careful and less troublesome.

Many rural families have less land than they used to; and machinery is available to work the soil, making brute strength less important. China is beginning to develop a welfare system. And development has brought other changes – couples who move into cities have more exposure to new ideas, and less pressure from extended families, say experts.

Old habits and beliefs are eroding. In villages as well as towns, conjugal ties between husband and wife have become more important, while the filial links between parent and child have become less so. Young couples are more likely to live apart from relatives. Few parents can now count on a dutiful daughter-in-law caring for them; and many are noticing that daughters are doing a better job.

Chen admits that she was initially disappointed when her daughter was born. "Of course, I wanted to have a boy. But after giving birth, I thought: 'I don't care. This is my baby,'" she says.

"I looked around me; one of my neighbours had five sons and one daughter. One day, when he was 60 or 70, he wanted some money from his sons for living costs. He cooked a tableful of dishes and bought wine and invited his sons. But none of them agreed to give the money to him. He was furious and smashed the table with his stick. And I thought: 'Well, sons are useless.'"

Meanwhile, she noticed, daughters were returning to visit their parents, bringing gifts and money. Despite strong pressure from her husband and in-laws, she refused to have another child: Qiaoyue was enough for her.

Anthropologist Yunxiang Yan's work suggests that others in China are drawing similar conclusions – and that it is changing their attitude towards girls.

"You can see clearly that a trend of treating sons and daughters equally is slowly emerging in some regions and developing in others," says Yan, of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Some even think that son preference may partially correct itself. The surplus of men has increased competition for brides, meaning families must buy ever more expensive housing to ensure their sons can marry – increasing the economic attractiveness of daughters.

The government has spent an estimated 300 million yuan (£29.5m) trying to precipitate this shift in preferences. Li is the lead consultant in the Care for Girls programme, which combines carrot and stick with educational projects.

There are punishments for sex-selective abortions and extra subsidies for couples who do not use their right to a second child after having a daughter. One county in Fujian has built houses for daughter-only families.

But Ru Xiaomei, deputy director of the international liaison department at the National Population and Family Planning Commission, says the programme is designed to promote female equality in general. So there are roadside signs telling villagers that girls can continue the family line; focus-group discussions for mothers-in-law; help packages for women starting businesses and extra encouragement for girls to enter schools. Officials have even tried to promote the idea of men marrying into women's families, rather than vice versa.

A pilot programme in 24 areas, selected for their very high imbalances, saw the average ratio fall from almost 134 in 2000 to just under 120 in 2005 – still high, as the experts involved acknowledge, but a substantial improvement. It has since been rolled out across China; Li says it is hard to know how exactly how much of a difference it is making, but is confident it has shown results across the country.

Others have concerns: Dr Lisa Eklund of Sweden's Lund University suggests in a recent thesis on son preference that parts of the programme could backfire. Capitalising on gender norms – such as the idea that women are caring – may increase sympathy for girls in the short term, but in the long run reinforce stereotypes – and, thereby, son preference.

Similarly, the social and economic incentives "are partially based on the assumption that having daughters creates vulnerability ... They convey the message that daughters are not as valuable as sons, and that families with only daughters are in need of financial support," she warns.

Whatever the merits of individual policies, government intervention has helped to rebalance births. In the early 90s, South Korea had Asia's highest ratio at birth; by 2007, it had a normal rate. Experts suggest that reforming the family law system, expanding female employment and increasing urbanisation were key.

"I think that the preference for sons is decreasing in China, especially in the more affluent coastal areas, where the SRB shot up fastest earlier," says Dr Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank, who has been tracking son preference in Asia. "But you shouldn't expect to see the sharp decline you saw in South Korea, because South Korea is a small, homogeneous country ... The new ideas swept through the country very quickly. In China it will take longer because of its size and internal differentiation."

Professor Yuan Xin, of Nankai University's Population and Development Institute, warns that it will take at least 10 or 20 years' more work to end a preference that dates back thousands of years. Others think that is optimistic.

Chen says she has witnessed attitudes in Shengzhou shift in the past few decades. Even her in-laws have been won over, because her daughter treats them so well. "I'm not boasting, but I think I took the lead," she says. "There's been a very positive trend, but I won't say things have changed totally."

Recently, a neighbour agreed to have a second child under intense pressure from her husband's family, joking that she was damned if the next child was a girl. "It was twin daughters," says Chen ruefully. "The mother-in-law still wants boys.

.....

Legends of the Silk Road at Cos Cob Library

Chinese Language School of Connecticut Presents Children’s Chinese Artwork at Cos Cob Library

--Cos Cob Library graciously hosts students’ art work as a special display in their community room through September 30.--

Greenwich, CT, September 17, 2011– The Cos Cob Library is host to a new display of children’s Chinese artwork, which is being exhibited in their Community Room through September 30, 2011, sponsored by the Chinese Language School of Connecticut. (www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org), the non-profit, Riverside, CT-based provider of Chinese language programs to students, schools and corporations.

This year’s theme is “Inventions from the Middle Kingdom,” based on Simon Winchester’s book, “The Man Who Loved China.” The first day of the show coincided with the Library's annual Open House and book fair this past Saturday, September 10th. On display is a sampling of students’ work from kindergarten through sixth grade. Mr. Richard Campbell, the ex-president of the Cos Cob Library Association who facilitated the show was on hand to assist in hanging of the large panels and assorted canvases.

CLSC VP Art & Culture, Katy Chen Myers explained, “We are so grateful for the Cos Cob library’s support of our children’s art and culture programs. CLSC’s curriculum integrates Chinese history, art and culture, and includes hands-on learning projects for students via weekly workshops, so each student can learn experientially, through art. The Greenwich community is very fortunate to have the Cos Cob library’s resources available to children, teens, and families.”

Ms. Myers continued, “Each year, teachers at CLSC prepare an in-depth art and culture study for students of all levels. This past year's theme was the study of the Silk Road during the Tang and Yuan Dynasties, two of the major trading periods of the Silk Road in Chinese history. Colorful images of the Eight Immortals, plum blossoms, landscapes of the Steppes, silk worms on mulberry trees and caravans of camels and mules laden with treasures cover the walls in the library's community room, giving the viewer a glimpse of the trade along the fabled Silk Road during the 9th and 13th centuries. Students at CLSC used mediums such as acrylic paint, foam, ink, paper, fabric and assorted materials to create the artwork on display while learning about geography, trade, art, politics, along with China's contributions to the world during this important period of history. Visitors can view the artwork during regular Library hours.

The non-profit, fully accredited Chinese Language School of Connecticut (CLSC) (www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org) teaches Mandarin Chinese as a second language to children and adults in their weekday and weekend classes, private and small group tutoring, iVuChinese online distance learning, Before and After School programs, cultural workshops, summer classes, and AP Prep sessions. CLSC is the only fully-accredited supplemental Chinese language program in the U.S. which uses U.S. teaching methods in order to engage children in learning Chinese.

For information on the Chinese Language School of Connecticut’s programs, please visit www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org or email them at info@ChineseLanguageSchool.org. For interesting articles on Chinese language learning and Chinese culture, please visit http://GreenTeaPop.blogspot.com and on Facebook at facebook.com/ChineseLanguageSchoolofConnecticut.

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Long Way Home by Flora Wong

Flora Wong's new book, Long Way Home,is an interesting read about a young girl in 1930s and1940s China who moves to Montana after an arranged marriage. Info is here: www.LongWayHomeBook.com

A Jewish Girl in Shanghai During WWII

Shanghai, 1939. Little Rina and her younger brother Mishalli have fled here from Europe, awaiting reunion with their parents. Hungry and penniless, she swaps her mother’s necklace for warm pancakes and soon forges a friendship with the young vendor, Zhou A-Gen. They share their cultures and help one another cope with loss and conflict as Japanese thugs and German troops grip the city. All the while, the fate of Rina and Mishalli’s parents in Europe remains unclear… 

Director Wang Genfu’s screen adaptation of the graphic novel by Wu Lin is the first Chinese animated film to portray the Holocaust. Artfully rendered, this moving and enlightening film offers us a glance of Shanghai’s Hongkou district, where some 35,000 Jewish refugees found safe haven during WWII.

Date: October 16, 2011, 5pm

Speaker: Evelyn Pike Rubin, resident of Shanghai during WWII; Co-sponsor: Carmel Academy. 80 minutes

Location: Carmel Academy, 270 Lake Avenue, Greenwich  Perfect for ages 11 and up. Presented by JCCGreenwich.org. See below for link where people can register and buy tickets.  http://www.jccgreenwich.org/index.php?option=com_jevents&task=icalrepeat.detail&evid=56&Itemid=7&year=2011&month=10&day=16&title=a-jewish-girl-in-shanghai&uid=2ff590512ecd78b13ccb9b7921add37d 

Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

· August 17, 2011, 8:00 AM ET

Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

Philip P. Pan

Tom Scocca

I started to truly appreciate the power of early childhood Chinese-language education when our son, at the age of two, started speaking English wrong. “The blue of cup,” he would say, meaning his blue cup.

This wasn’t a random preschool linguistic hiccup, we realized. He was trying to use Chinese syntax: “of” was standing in for the Mandarin particle “de” to turn the noun “blue” into an adjective. And his odd habit of indicating things by saying “this one” or “that one”–he was rendering the Chinese “zhege” and “neige” in English. That is, he was speaking Chinglish.

The usual arguments in favor of Mandarin education say that he should be on his way to conquering the world. An extra language, the theory goes, supplies extra brainpower, and Chinese in particular is a skill that will prepare young children to compete in the global 21st-century marketplace of talent.

Fun, right? If building an optimized little academic and economic performer were all there is to it, we’d have pulled him out of bilingual preschool long ago. Luckily, the reality of having a little Chinese learner underfoot is messier and more entertaining than that.

Our son’s head start in Chinese was mostly an accident. He was born in Beijing because my wife and I were living and working there, and he arrived before we could get back to New York for the delivery. So his first influences were Chinese nurses and the sound of Mandopop on the night-shift radio in the newborn unit.

He spent the first year and a half of his life in the Chinese capital, the seat of standard Mandarin. This is a point of pride for him now, at age four, though in fact he mostly was exposed to his second-generation Chinese-American mother’s lax Taiwan accent and the Sichuan countryside accent of our nanny, who amused him by chanting old schoolhouse rhymes about the glory of Mao.

That early input, followed by half-days of Chinese preschool in New York, hasn’t yet produced a junior trans-Pacific CEO. If you’re considering Mandarin as part of a program of intensive child-improvement, it’s worth remembering that children aren’t so easy to improve.

Adding a second language means a child can play dumb in two languages at once. Or play smart: “Daddy can’t speak Chinese,” he says sometimes, when Daddy speaks rudimentary Chinese to him. Then he demands to borrow my smartphone, so he can look up Chinese characters in the dictionary software.

Lately, he refuses to address his Chinese-born grandparents by their usual titles, insisting on “Grandma” and “Grandpa” in English. But he serenades them with Chinese songs from school, with flawless schoolteacher diction and a gusto that would startle his actual teachers if they heard it. And he is more obedient in Mandarin than in English–when an order comes in Chinese, he has learned, his parents are serious about it.

Mostly, though, Mandarin in the hands of a toddler is not a practical tool. Trying to justify it that way is a bit like the efforts to put a dollar value on liberal-arts education. Chinese is, like math or music, a distinct system of representation, another way to think about the world. You may learn a language because you need to, but you stick with it because it is interesting to think about.

In Beijing, as China prepared for the 2008 Olympics, I used to visit an English class for senior citizens. Officially, the purpose was instrumental: to increase the number of English-speaking residents for the benefit of the foreign tourists during the Games. The students’ questions for me, however, were more esoteric: What was the English for an electrified bus? For saying thunderstorms were coming? For “hidden microphone”? When I came back two years after the Olympics, the class was still full.

So like his other bilingual friends, our son is capricious about how and when to use his own abilities. Have I toweled him off enough? “Chabuduo,” I say, meaning “close enough.” “Chabuduo!” he says, and keeps saying it off and on for days. Language is a playground. He calls up Mandopop videos on YouTube, and snubs American pop. He shakes down a Brazilian babysitter for bits of Portuguese, and asks for Dora the Explorer’s Spanish to be translated to English.

If he came from Boston, I tell him, his animated heroine would be Dor-er the Explorah. “I’m from Beijing,” he says, in English. “I pronounce things correctly.”

Tom Scocca is the author of “Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.” He is the managing editor of Deadspin and a columnist for Slate, and he lives in New York.

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Wall Street Journal "Big Innovation" Program Picks Chinese Language School of Connecticut as a Finalist

http://blogs.wsj.com/biginnovation/

Chinese Language School of

Connecticut

http://blogs.wsj.com/biginnovation/2011/08/15/chinese-language-school-of-connecticut/

Business: Chinese Language School of Connecticut
Headquarters: Riverside, Conn.
Industry: Education
Product/service: Mandarin Chinese as a Second Language
Number of full-time employees: 6
Year begun: 2002

What was the challenge your business was facing as a result of the economy?

Our company, the Chinese Language School of Connecticut, had lost about 15% of its revenue each year from 2008 through the first half of fiscal year 2011 from regular programs, and both corporate and individual fundraising were down dramatically.

What was the innovative idea you put in place?

We launched iVuChinese, our online distance-learning program, in July, 2011. iVuChineseused disruptive, simple-to-download and widely-available technology to access our online Chinese learning tools while students are online with a native speaking, fully trained, CLSC instructor.

What significant milestone has this innovative idea lead to since Jan. 1, 2009?

iVuChinese has hit goals in several ways: by increasing projected tutoring revenue by 25% this year alone; by expanding our programs and allowing anyone across the globe who has a personal computer and a set of headphones to learn Chinese using our award-winning, fully accredited curriculum; and by promoting all of our programs since iVuChinese has been picked up by many different media sites, schools, and forwarded to hundreds of individuals.

Please explain your innovation at greater length.

We adopted our two daughters from China in 1996 and 2000. Our older daughter, Emily, started asking, “How do I say ‘dog’ in Chinese? How do I say ‘flower’?” I realized how important it was to allow her to understand her native language and culture, so I worked with a native Chinese-speaking friend to start Chopstix, in 1999. Chopstix was a volunteer-run preschool Chinese program that donated all net proceeds to U.S. nonprofits working with children in Chinese orphanages.

When Emily was 5, I enrolled her in a traditional, “cultural” Chinese school, where we were the only non-Chinese speakers. She still loved learning Chinese, but this experience gave me the opportunity to work with some of the professional, highly dedicated colleagues I met there to form the nonprofit, dual-accredited Chinese Language School of Connecticut, in 2002. CLSC teaches Mandarin Chinese using U.S.-based immersion techniques and age-appropriate, interactive activities to students ages 18 months to adult via various programs.

CLSC hummed along from 2002 through 2008. We started to see a slowdown early in 2008, but it really wasn’t until 2009 that many of our programs began to be undersubscribed. At the same time, China’s emergence as a global powerhouse, with economic growth far surpassing the rest of the world, was becoming clear to most educated people, so our tutoring program began to expand dramatically. This continued through 2010, but in early 2011 we realized that our current, “local school” business model was not sustainable in the current business environment.

So, in spring of 2011, we started to develop and test our iVuChinese online distance-learning program. iVuChinese offers students (ages 7 to adult) the opportunity to learn Chinese using only a personal computer and a set of headphones. They may work with a custom-designed program, or can access our online Chinese programs, but are working one on one with a native speaking Chinese CLSC faculty member the whole time. iVuChinese allows students to practice speaking, reading, writing and listening to Chinese, all while online with their instructor.

We launched iVuChinese in July 2011, and results so far have been terrific. iVuChinese will allow CLSC to meet our objectives this year of both hitting our financial goals, but also by allowing even more students to explore the exciting challenge of learning Chinese.

Video on Chinese Characters

This is pretty good; would be even better with pinyin so non-speakers could know how to pronounce, and would be great with translations and pinyin of the Chinese they're speaking. ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VhOCX5WLpw&feature=autoshare

How to Raise A Global Kid? Have them learn Mandarin Chinese

Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2011/07/17/american-kids-immersed-in-chinese-asian-education.html

How to Raise a Global Kid

Taking Tiger Mom tactics to radical new heights, these parents are packing up the family for a total Far East Immersion.

Happy Rogers was the only American in her graduating class at Nanyang Primary School in Singapore.

Happy Rogers, age 8, stands among her classmates in the schoolyard at dismissal time, immune, it seems, to the cacophonous din. Her parents and baby sister are waiting outside, but still she lingers, engrossed in conversation. A poised and precocious blonde, Hilton Augusta Parker Rogers, nicknamed Happy, would be at home in the schoolyard of any affluent American suburb or big-city private school. But here, at the elite, bilingual Nanyang Primary School in Singapore, Happy is in the minority, her Dakota Fanning hair shimmering in a sea of darker heads. This is what her parents have traveled halfway around the world for. While her American peers are feasting on the idiocies fed to them by junk TV and summer movies, Happy is navigating her friendships and doing her homework entirely in Mandarin.

Fluency in Chinese, she says—in English—through mouthfuls of spaghetti bolognese at a Singapore restaurant, “is going to make me better and smarter.”

American parents have barely recovered from the anxiety attacks they suffered at the hands of the Tiger Mom—oh, no, my child is already 7 and she can’t play a note of Chopin—and now here comes Happy’s father, the multimillionaire American investor and author Jim Rogers, to give them something new to fret about. It is no longer enough to raise children who are brave, curious, hardworking, and compassionate. Nor is it sufficient to steer them toward the right sports, the right tutors, the right internships, and thus engineer their admittance to the right (or at least a good enough) college. According to Rogers, who in 2007 left New York’s Upper West Side to settle in Singapore with his wife, Paige Parker, and Happy (Beeland Anderson Parker Rogers, called Baby Bee, was born the next year), parents who really care about their children must also ponder this: are we doing enough to raise “global” kids?

“I’m doing what parents have done for many years,” Jim Rogers says. “I’m trying to prepare my children for the future, for the 21st century. I’m trying to prepare them as best I can for the world as I see it.” Rogers believes the future is Asia—he was recently on cable television flogging Chinese commodities. “The money is in the East, and the debtors are in the West. I’d rather be with the creditors than the debtors,” he adds.

It has become a convention of public discourse to regard rapid globalization—of economies and business; of politics and conflict; of fashion, technology, and music—as the great future threat to American prosperity. The burden of meeting that challenge rests explicitly on our kids. If they don’t learn—now—to achieve a comfort level with foreign people, foreign languages, and foreign lands, this argument goes, America’s competitive position in the world will continue to erode, and their future livelihood and that of subsequent generations will be in jeopardy. Rogers is hardly the only person who sees things this way. “In this global economy, the line between domestic and international issues is increasingly blurred, with the world’s economies, societies, and people interconnected as never before,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in remarks in the spring of 2010 at the Asia Society in New York. “I am worried that in this interconnected world, our country risks being disconnected from the contributions of other countries and cultures.”

Despite Duncan’s articulate urgency (and the public example of Rogers and a few others like him), America is so far utterly failing to produce a generation of global citizens. Only 37 percent of Americans hold a passport. Fewer than 2 percent of America’s 18 million college students go abroad during their undergraduate years—and when they do go, it’s mostly for short stints in England, Spain, or Italy that are more like vacations. Only a quarter of public primary schools offer any language instruction at all, and fewer high schools offer French, German, Latin, Japanese, or Russian than they did in 1997. The number of schools teaching Chinese and Arabic is so tiny as to be nearly invisible.

Meanwhile, 200 million Chinese schoolchildren are studying English. South Korean parents recently threw a collective hissy fit, demanding that their children begin English instruction in first grade, rather than in second. Nearly 700,000 students from all over the world attended U.S. universities during the 2009–10 school year, with the greatest increases in kids from China and Saudi Arabia. “Not training our kids to be able to work and live in an international environment is like leaving them illiterate,” says David Boren, the former U.S. senator and current president of the University of Oklahoma. The gap between our ambition and reality yawns wide.

There is no consensus on remedies. According to a white paper issued in 2009 by the Institute on International Education, most colleges and universities say they want to increase participation in study-abroad programs, but only 40 percent are actually making concerted efforts to do so. Long immersion programs are expensive, and in an environment of tough statewide budget cuts, students and professors are too crunched for time to make international experience a priority. Educators disagree on which kinds of experiences are most advantageous for kids—or even what advantageous means. Is it enough for a teenager who has never traveled farther than her grandma’s house to get a passport and order a pint in a London pub? Or does she have to spend a year in Beijing, immersed in Mandarin and economic policy? Is the goal of foreign experience to learn a language or gain some special expertise—in auto engineering or peace mediation? Or is it to be of service to others by giving mosquito nets to poor children in an African village?

Jim Rogers sees an America in decline, and his solution has been to immerse himself in the countries and cultures that are ascendant. “We think we’re the world leader, but we’re not,” he says. “I don’t like saying that. I’m an American. I vote. I pay taxes. But the level of knowledge is not very high, and that’s going to hurt us, I’m afraid.” In the Rogers family’s five-bedroom bungalow, there is no TV. Instead, there are more than a dozen globes to look at and maps to ponder, a nanny and a maid who speak only Mandarin to the kids, bicycles to ride, and a new karaoke machine so the girls can learn Chinese songs.

A generation ago and as far back as Thomas Jefferson, a certain kind of child from a certain kind of family went abroad because it was done; a sojourn in Europe was as crucial to becoming a cultivated person as knowing the works of Mozart or Rembrandt. The point was to see the Great Museums, of course, but also to breathe the air—to learn to converse in another tongue, to adapt to the rhythms of another place. Hemingway did this, of course, but so did Benjamin Franklin and Johnny Depp. This is what Pamela Wolf, who just returned to New York City with her husband and children from a year in Barcelona, did. She enrolled her teenagers in an international school, where they made friends with kids from around the world and learned to speak fluent Spanish. Her children have a global perspective not only because of their language skills but also because arriving in a new place, knowing no one, forced them to be resilient. “It’s pushing yourself out of your comfort zone,” Wolf says. “It builds a very compassionate child. While, yes, grades and academics are as important to me as anyone, you need resilience to understand and have sympathy for other people.”

Such lengthy sojourns, though, are available to only a few: the very adventurous or the very rich. Wolf and her husband are both self-employed. “Financially,” she says, “we have the great privilege of earning money while we’re away.”

Without resources and connections, a foreign experience can be a misery. Two years ago, Maribeth Henderson moved from San Antonio with her husband, her college-age son, and her adopted 5-year-old daughter, Wei Wei, to a remote part of China, in Guangdong province. Wei Wei didn’t learn much Mandarin—her school taught mainly Cantonese—and Henderson felt lonely and alienated. “It was so Chinese that I couldn’t assimilate and feel comfortable,” she says. “I couldn’t speak the language; it was hard for us to even order food in a restaurant. If you ordered a chicken, they would literally hand you a chicken. You were lucky if it wasn’t alive.” Henderson abandoned ship, returning to Texas with Wei Wei ahead of schedule and leaving her husband and son in Guangzhou. Now, though, she’s planning to try again. This summer she and Wei Wei will move to Beijing, and Henderson hopes the big city will ameliorate her former isolation. About her goal—helping Wei Wei learn Chinese—Henderson has no doubts. “For children to be competitive and successful in a global economy,” she says, “it’s important for them to be bilingual.”

For parents who want to give their children global experience while keeping them safely on the straight and narrow American path of PSATs, SATs, and stellar extracurriculars, there’s an ever-growing field of options. Immersion schools have exploded over the past 40 years, growing from none in 1970 to 440 today, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, and Mandarin, especially, is seen among type-A parents as a twofer: a child who learns Mandarin starting at 5 increases her brain capacity and is exposed to the culture of the future through language. (One mom in San Francisco laughs when she recalls that her daughter learned about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in Chinese.) The education entrepreneur Chris Whittle and colleagues recently announced plans for the new Avenues school, to open in New York City in September 2012 and designed to compete with the city’s most exclusive (and expensive) private schools. Its curriculum will be fully bilingual—parents choose a Mandarin or Spanish track when their kids are 3—providing the Happy Rogers experience but with all the conveniences of home. “We think that any child that graduates from high school a monoglot is automatically behind,” Whittle says. Fourteen months before the school’s doors open, Avenues has already received 1,200 applications.

Study abroad is now a prerequisite on some college campuses, and a few professional schools, especially in business and engineering, have begun to require international study as part of their curricula. Nursing students at a community college in Utah must all spend a month at a hospital in Vietnam as part of their training. But Margaret Heisel, director of the Center for Capacity Building in Study Abroad, believes that a real global education comes from a long stay in a strange place; it gives kids skills that no amount of study can teach.

My own experience proves this point. During my sophomore year in high school, my father, a university professor, moved our entire family to Amsterdam for his sabbatical year and enrolled my brothers and me in local public schools. During that glorious year, I rode my bike through city streets, learned to roll a cigarette one-handed, and eventually spoke Dutch like a 15-year-old native. (I can still say “That’s so stupid” and “This is so boring.”) We saw Stonehenge and the Rijksmuseum and drove to Burgundy for the grape harvest, but the real impact of that adventure was that I learned a degree of self-reliance—a 15-year-old girl needs to make friends and will cross any cultural boundary to do so—that I didn’t know I had.

“I think it’s liberating to some extent,” Heisel says. “It touches people in places that being in a familiar place doesn’t. It requires versatility, flexibility. It’s a different culture and it’s pressing on kids in different ways.” Baby Bee is equally at home on visits to the U.S. and in Singapore, where her father rides her to school each day on his personal pedicab. There she sings the Singapore national anthem and pledges the Singapore flag. “She’s no different from the Chinese kids,” says her teacher, Fu Su Qin. “And her Chinese is just as good.”

With reporting by Lennox Samuels in Singapore