Mandarin lessons pave the road to
riches By Aventurina King
NEW YORK - "When a student is ready the
teacher appears." This Buddhist proverb is a good
starting point to describe what is rapidly
becoming the world's most enthusiastic
Chinese-language student: the United States.
For the past six years, the North American
population has watched the relentless growth of
China's domestic economy with a mixture of concern
and fascination. Beginning in 2002, China became
one of the United States' top three trading
partners. In
2005
alone, 3,741 contracts were signed between US and
Chinese companies. So with lucrative international
deals being closed by the dozen, an increasing
number of Americans are seeing top-dollar job
openings in China. And to get there, they need to
learn Mandarin, or putonghua ("common
speech") as the national language is known in
mainland China.
The US is ready, and
Chinese-language teachers are appearing slowly but
steadily. Chinese programs are gradually
proliferating across the country's high schools. A
simple "Mandarin" keyword search on Craigslist New
York will pop up a plethora of postings offering
private Chinese lessons. What's more, the
glittering stories of teachers who have
successfully mined the Mandarin seam could
certainly create a strong following.
One
of these success stories is that of Yao Zhang, the
founder of Quick Mandarin (www.quickmandarin.com).
During a recent interview, Zhang was comfortably
seated in one of the classrooms of his private
Mandarin school on the 63rd floor of the Empire
State Building. This, however, is a long way from
where he imagined himself being when he arrived in
New York in the beginning of 2004.
After
completing his undergraduate degree in China,
Zhang went to France to pursue his studies at
Science Politique. He received his diploma in
international finance and flew off to work at the
world's finance epicenter: Wall Street.
Giving private Mandarin lessons to friends
of friends was at first a temporary occupation,
designed to hold him over until he found a finance
job. But this temporary solution gradually
superseded Zhang's long-term plans. By January
2005, through word of mouth alone, enough
individuals and companies had come to Zhang to
justify renting a space in the Empire State
Building to accommodate his burgeoning student
body.
Zhang's students largely mirror the
new Chinese twist on the American dream. "About
35-40% of the students are in the finance sector,"
said Zhang. "We have a lot of senior-level
white-collars from very prominent companies;
others are young professionals who are seeking to
improve their opportunities. Their company might
have a branch in China and they want to enter the
race for a promotion abroad."
Other than
the propitious economic climate, Quick Mandarin's
success lies in Zhang's speedy refining of his
Mandarin-teaching methods. He explained: "I
developed a program in which people will learn to
hold a conversation in less than 30 hours of
Chinese lessons. I don't focus on grammar; from
the first minute on, I make them [students] talk.
In Chinese there is no masculine and feminine or
verb conjugation, so it's possible to learn very
fast."
And "fast" is the focus of the
modern learner of Chinese. In the past, when
English had the unchallenged monopoly over the
term "lingua franca", learning a second language
such as French or German was mainly a passport
into cultural sophistication. At that time,
learning Mandarin was an even more arcane endeavor
reserved for highly ambitious literati. Reflecting
this consumer pool, Chinese textbooks from that
period focused on the written language and
culture. Now, practical daily conversation in a
business context, instead of the Chinese zodiac,
is at the forefront of students' concerns.
But it isn't easy finding Chinese-language
teachers who understand the importance of "fast"
and "practical conversation". Ms Bai, a student in
bilingual education at the Teachers College of
Columbia University, explained that teachers of
Chinese "still focus on grammar, on reading, and
don't speak much. Chinese students focus mostly on
getting good grades, so writing is more important
for them. But in a job interview, you need to
speak the language. In the United States, the
focus is more on speaking."
Quick
Mandarin's Zhang said: "It's hard to find good
Chinese teachers, because teachers coming from
China are very strict in their methods of
teaching. Americans have a different way of
learning - they like to actively learn through
searching answers. But in China, it's different.
The teacher will talk and then just give a lot of
homework."
There is certainly no shortage
of immigrants who speak and are willing to teach
Chinese in the United States. But there is a
shortage of qualified teachers, of native Chinese
speakers who master the American method of
teaching that Bai is learning. This shortage is so
clearly felt that the Asia Society, an
organization promoting cultural exchanges on both
sides of the Pacific, has set up a program to help
US schools find Mandarin teachers.
Demand
for Mandarin instruction has blossomed among the
very young, revealing a deficit in a different
pool of qualified teaching professionals. A new
wave of upper-class parents is frantically
scouring Craigslist in search of Chinese nannies
to shape their toddlers into native Chinese
speakers.
"Many parents want their
children to learn Chinese," said Anna Zhao, a
Chinese native with extensive experience in
teaching Mandarin to upper-class toddlers. "They
say Chinese is going to be more important than
French and Spanish, that it will help their
children be able to find work in the future."
Zhao has a part-time job at a Goldman
Sachs daycare center. The rest of her time is
devoted mostly to parents who are unable to find
the right Chinese nanny. "Since hiring a full-time
Chinese teacher is very expensive, most of them
start by searching for a Chinese nanny to speak
Mandarin to their young children," Zhao said.
"However, these nannies often have bad accents or
they don't know how to teach." Most of the time,
the nannies cannot speak English and the parents
cannot understand them.
In these cases,
the parents hire experienced teachers like Zhao to
spend six to seven hours a week teaching their
children. In other cases, American parents-to-be
will learn Chinese merely to understand the
non-English-speaking nanny later on.
Frequently, parents will sit in on Zhao's
courses to learn to communicate with their
children in Mandarin. She said: "The problem with
only your child learning Chinese is that even when
he is one or two years old, he will say phrases in
Chinese, and if you don't respond to the child, he
will associate speaking Chinese only with the
teacher."
Outside of her part-time job at
Goldman Sachs, Zhao has 11 Chinese students. "Five
to seven people ask me every week for classes, but
not everyone can fit in my schedule and I have to
turn people down."
The teacher has
appeared, but with a student as hungry for
knowledge as the United States, many more will
have to come.
Aventurina King is
a freelance writer based in New York. She can be
reached at Aventurinaking@gmail.com.
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