Chinese to be taught at school

Chinese may soon be taught in Danish schools alongside English, French and German. The proposal to offer Chinese language courses at school comes from Denmark’s Education Minister Tina Nedergaard and is supported by the opposition party as well as the Danish local government.

Some private schools already offer Chinese as an optional course but no Danish government-approved Chinese language exam exists. All this is set to change. “I would like to see more Danish children starting to learn Chinese at an early stage,” said Nedergaard, “there do not appear to be any legal barriers and if there are we will remove them”.

According to the Confucius Institute, a Chinese non profit organisation that works internationally to promote Chinese education, there has been an increase in the number of parents of Danish secondary school pupils requesting language classes.

A look at the figures suggests we should be paying close attention to the languages we teach our children at school. It is estimated that 1.4 billion people speak one of the Chinese languages, which include Mandarin, Wu and Cantonese. The most spoken language is Mandarin, with 850 million native speakers. English and Spanish, on the other hand, are spoken as a first language by ‘only’ 350 million and 329 million respectively. So, although there may be up to 1.3 billion people in the world who speak English at various levels of fluency, still more speak Chinese.

This isn’t the only reason why Danish children should start learning Chinese at school. According to the Danish Confederation of Industries (DI), China is Denmark’s tenth largest export destination and by 2030 is expected to be the third largest market for Danish goods. “Chinese at school is not just a fad and if the language is to be taken seriously then it should be an examination subject,” says DI head of policy Charlotte Ronhof.

Denmark’s education minister isn’t the first to catch on to the future potential of Chinese and indeed the past years have seen Europe’s interest in the Chinese language and culture boom. Since October 2009, 94 Confucius institutes and 34 Confucius classrooms have been set up across Europe, bringing the number of Chinese language teachers to 900. In Holland, more than 30 middle schools offer Chinese courses and in February 2010 the Dutch national curriculum syllabus included Chinese which means it will soon be a required subject for middle school graduates.

In the first China-European multi-language conference, held in Beijing in March 2009, Leonard Orban, Commissioner for Multilingualism in the European Commission, said that: “Language is a tool enhancing social cohesion and that language learning is a way to strengthen personal competitiveness and expand job prospects”.