Reasons for your child to learn Mandarin Chinese

By Martin Woods

June 28th, 2021

A kid who learns and is fluent in more than one language, and it does not matter what that language is, can enjoy many benefits, including improvement in cognitive, social, and emotional development. The teachers here at RemoteLearning.school encourage all students to learn a second language and become bilingual as it will help in many aspects of life, and we offer a variety of language courses including Spanish and French, which are some of the more popular second languages to learn.

But now, there's a new "hot" language to learn - Chinese! While the Chinese language may seem scary to some - Its alphabet is very different from our alphabet, and Chinese has a stigma of being very hard to learn. -  RemoteLearning.school's Chinese course makes it fun and easy to learn the language! 

So now that's out of the way, lets look at some great reasons why your kid should learn Chinese:

For starters, Chinese is the most spoken language in the world! Around 1.3 billion people speak Chinese. Chinese-speaking people live all over, and there surely are many in your neighborhood too! And more and more people are starting to learn Chinese, whether for travel, job prospects, business, or just for pleasure. So, it makes sense to want to learn the language that is most spoken. At our course, we focus on Mandarin Chinese, which is the most common dialect.

Let's speak about opportunity. All parents are naturally concerned with their children's future, and want them to do the best in life. In terms of Academia, and fierce competition getting into good schools, one of the biggest challenges your kid will face will be standing apart from the thousands of other applicants trying to get into the same college. Most of the high schools nowadays only offer Spanish and French. But the kids at RemoteLearning.school have a chance to learn Chinese and stand apart from the crowd! Being able to list Chinese on an application is a great way for your child to distinguish themselves as it is one that is more rarely seen listed.

In terms of career opportunities, China is one of the major economic powers in the world, and every important international company does business or has some sort of business relations with China or with Chinese companies. Being able to add Chinese to their resume will increase their job prospects tenfold and will vastly help them on the business and career stage.

Another great reason to learn Chinese - learning Chinese is fun! The Chinese language is like art, and various characters combine into pictures to make words. Children love to draw, and they will love to master writing all those Chinese Characters. Your kid will learn the different characters through pictures, or more precisely, pictographs. Chinese characters originated from pictures resembling the thing they were drawing. All Chinese characters have a fun story to go with them, and your kids can learn the evolution of Chinese characters altogether. This also makes it very easy to remember. For example, that when you see a picture of a ‘leaf’, it has something to do with vegetation.

One last thing we would like to address in this article. You've probably heard this before, learning a second language is easiest at a very young age. This is true, but, with regard to the Chinese language, this is very important. Chinese is a tonal language, in which the same combination of consonants and vowels can be pronounced in different ways to mean completely different things. This is much easier to learn in early years. The younger they learn, the more authentically they can reproduce these sounds. So while languages such as Spanish and French are also much easier to learn as a child and harder as an adult, the Chinese language is especially hard to learn as an adult compared to learning as a child.

Also, since Chinese writing relies on thousands of characters, learners have to read and interpret a big number of visual symbols, activating more regions of the brain than English, which relies on a phonetic alphabet. This will vastly improve your child's cognitive development.

And let's end this article with a bit of Trivia. Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg and his children, President Obama’s daughters, President Trump’s grandchildren, Prince William and his son Prince George, are all learning Mandarin Chinese? Will your kids be next?