In New York City, after English and Spanish, Chinese is the third most spoken language. At Claremont Preparatory School in Lower Manhattan, 5th grade students are required to take the most popular dialect of Chinese “Mandarin”, only if the student wants to continue with the Chinese. Headmaster of Claremont school, Irwin Shlachter said “It has been a huge success, more than 60 percent of our fifth grade students continue on with Mandarin when it comes to the time to choose a language.” Shlachter also said “Americans are traditionally comfortable speaking only one language, and we are changing that, it is our job as educators to prepare this generation of young people for the global community of the future.” A number of people are interested in learning Chinese for different reasons like business, travel, education and the most interesting reason is people love the culture and want to be part of it. Shlachter said that learning Chinese is not at all difficult and you will get the tones if you practice for thirty minutes daily.

Read: av.rds.yahoo.com

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