I found this article about a an ambitious program captained by the Confucius Institute at the University of Auckland to quintuple the number of students learning Mandarin in New Zealand.
From the article:
“Last year, the institute placed eight assistants in New Zealand schools to promote the language – this year, that number will be 18.
Under the New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement, up to 150 Mandarin assistants can work in New Zealand at any one time.
“We are very encouraged by a near 40 per cent increase in Kiwis learning Mandarin last year and will be doing much more to generate interest in the language this year,” said institute director Nora Yao.
“I will expect a more significant growth, and even if we do not reach our target, I am confident we will get near there.”
This year, 18 schools will be hosting the Chinese language assistants, whose jobs will be to fuel interest in Mandarin among students and train local teachers to teach the language.”
First, kudos to the governments of China and New Zealand for undertaking this effort. It won’t succeed (a huge percentage of those who start studying Mandarin drop out before they learn more than a few phrases), but it is an admirable effort.
Question for the reporter: How do you train local teachers to teach Mandarin when they don’t speak it in the first place? Or, are there already certified teachers in place who are Mandarin speakers and readers?
Well china is the center to manufacturing and this is why world is moving to china . This is good to see that china is helping the world to come over the language barrier
I’m a New Zealander and my niece is benefitting from this program. It’s probably worth noting that we’ve had a large influx of Chinese immigrants over the past 20 years or so (and we also have a large number of English schools for foreigners, many of whom are Chinese). So we have a number of native speakers here and there is not a day that goes by without me passing people speaking Mandarin. So I think there is some hope, although I appreciate that this will not lead to the fluency that you write about.
Mandarin Language is very popular and both countries are working to promote it that I think is really a great job. My relatives also want to learn the same and they will start learning from next month.