Manager of a South Pacific Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong Franchise Says That Kids Should Consider Learning Mandarin
April 10th, 2013Via: New Zealand Herald:
Prime Minister John Key wants more students to consider learning Mandarin.
And a Herald-DigiPoll survey shows a surprisingly high number of people, more than 25 per cent, would like Maori and a foreign language to be compulsory at school – although the majority prefer no compulsion.
The Prime Minister is visiting China this week.
He said the argument against teaching Mandarin was that there were not enough teachers “but I think that’s not a very strong argument”.
There were 250,000 New Zealanders of Chinese ethnicity, a great many of whom spoke Chinese and many of them would teach on a part-time basis, he said.
Any student going through school today, faced with the choice of learning Mandarin or another language, would be well served to think about learning Mandarin.
When he went to the Lantern Festival in Auckland, the Asia Foundation executive director John McKinnon had given the entire speech in Mandarin “and boy did he have the audience engaging”.
