NEW YORK—Commanding the most speakers and the oldest contemporary culture on earth, the Chinese language now seems to be growing in popularity in New York City, based on information provided by new schools offering the language in Manhattan.
At Claremont Preparatory School in Lower Manhattan, 5th grade students are required to take one year of Mandarin, the most popular dialect of Chinese, before deciding whether they want to continue with Chinese or study French or Spanish. The pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school that opened in 2005 is quite possibly the only elementary school in the country that makes such a requirement.
"It has been a huge success," said Headmaster Irwin Shlachter of Claremont Prep. "More than 60 percent of our fifth grade students continue on [with Mandarin] when it comes to the time to choose a language."
Claremont is ideally located near Wall Street for businesspeople in New York City's finance industry who want to drop off their kids before heading to work. It's also suited for Wall Street salaries, charging approximately $28,500 in yearly tuition. Claremont's Chinese language requirement is aimed at giving students a uniquely global perspective from an early age.
"Americans are traditionally comfortable speaking only one language, and we are changing that," said Shlachter. "It is our job as educators to prepare this generation of young people for the global community of the future."
Catering to a different type of clientele, the newly opened Mandarin Master School in Midtown Manhattan has also been a success, immediately reaching its student capacity for its first course. The school offers a six-week crash course in Mandarin for $828.
"There are a lot of people who want to learn Chinese," said Jenny Dong, chief instructor at Mandarin Master School. "A lot of people are interested in learning the Chinese language for business, travel, or education."
Students at Mandarin Master School learn to read and write very simple and popular phrases that can get them around in settings like restaurants and banks.
Another attraction for students who seek to learn Mandarin is Chinese culture, including China's 5,000 years of history and the traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism. According to most historians, China was the world's leading civilization in the arts and the sciences up until the last couple hundred years.
"Chinese words have a lot of meaning. It may be one word but it has a lot of culture inside," said Dong, who speaks highly of Tang Dynasty poetry. Dong said that as the Mandarin Master School grows they will add a component that teaches culture.
Other Chinese schools in New York City, including Bing Chen and Quick Mandarin, also offer separate Chinese culture oriented classes or a strong cultural emphasis in their teaching.
"A large number of people are learning Chinese because they love the culture and want to be part of it," reads Bing Chen's website.
The Hard Part
Of course, along with the global perspective and rich culture comes a language that is just totally foreign, and difficult for most native English speakers to learn.
Unlike the English language, where 26 letters represent sounds that describe how words should be pronounced, Mandarin relies on thousands of unique pictures, known as characters, that are simply words themselves and have to be memorized. It also includes four tones, meaning that a word like "ma" can be said in four different tones and can have four different meanings, from "mother" to "horse."
"It's drastically different from learning other languages based on the alphabet as [the children] know it," said Shlachter. "Writing the characters, patterns, sentence structure etc. looks more like an art project to them."
But, the diligent student conquers all, according to Dong.
"It's not difficult, some people think that the Chinese language is difficult, and the tones are a little more difficult, but you will get the tones if you practice for 30 minutes every day," she said.
A sixth grader at Claremont Prep confirmed this, "The first year is hard. In the second year, you start to get confident—you start to know how to do it and it gets to be fun."
"Writing the characters is a challenge. The script order has to be perfect, but I want to do it because China is a big country and a lot of Chinese people live here too," said a fifth grader at Claremont Prep.
Behind English and Spanish, Chinese is the third most spoken language in New York City, home to approximately 360,000 Chinese, more than any other U.S. city, according to the United States Census Bureau.
"It's fun to know," said the fifth grader. "The thing that surprised me is that after a few classes I said 'wow it's not as [difficult as] it looks.'"
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