Benefits of Being Bilingual
- Being bilingual gives your child more opportunities.
- Bilingual students show better critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and greater mental flexibility etc.
- Researches showed that bilingual students have been shown to have higher math skills and standardized test scores (including SAT).
- By knowing a second or third culture, they can make friends with different cultural background.
- By planting these seeds, our children are more likely to become more productive.
- Contrary to popular belief, not only does learning a foreign language not inhibit the child’s English language proficiency, it enhances and improves it.
- Your commitment now will truly give your child an advantage later on.
Learning a second language is a window into another culture and teaches flexibility of thought. In our increasingly global-oriented world, it’s more important than ever to be able to view personal, educational and business interactions from various perspectives. Learning a second language, at any age, creates more brain network connectivity, which allows a person to remember and perceive new information more effectively.
While English may be the undisputed global language of the moment, it seems likely that English-only speakers may, within the next 10-15 years, find themselves upstaged by global citizens who can speak English and another language. It is certain that, whether or not kids learn Mandarin today, they will face a different world featuring a changed and changing linguistic landscape-by the time they reach adulthood.
What's so special about MANDARIN?
Mandarin is the first language of 967 million people and the second language of another 258 million, for a total of about 1.3 billion speakers worldwide. It is the national language of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It is considered an important “world language” by the United States State Department and Department of Defense, both of which fund Chinese language programs at primary, secondary and graduate schools around the United States with the aim of increasing the number of fully bilingual, bilateral, and bicultural Americans. The U.S. State Department’s National Security Language Initiative also encourages the study of Chinese.
- The world’s economies and cultures are becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent.
- The rapid rise of the Chinese economy, which overtook other countries as the world’s second largest economy in 2011, has led the Councils of United States, the British, Canada etc. to encourage kids to learn Mandarin today.
- The ability to communicate across national and linguistic boundaries will be more essential than ever. Mandarin, English, and Spanish are the three most spoken languages in the world. In addition, China is becoming an increasingly influential player on the global stage.
- Chinese history and culture is one the richest and certainly the oldest in the world. China is renowned for producing beautiful novels, short stories, poetry and more recently excellence in film.
- Travel to beautiful countries with vast and diverse territory endows the country with some of the most beautiful natural scenery on earth.
- Enjoy great food, sizzling food markets across China offer some unique dishes not found anywhere else.
What's so great about starting early?
Exposing a child to a foreign language at an early age (as early as 3 years old) will result in far greater fluency than it's possible if learn later in life. Psychological studies suggest that children possess dramatically greater proficiency for learning Chinese due to their ability to hear and reproduce nuances of tone, deep funnel vowels and sophisticated consonant sounds.
Have you ever heard of children referred to as “sponges”? That description couldn’t be more accurate when it comes to foreign language learning. "Children’s brains are magnificently optimized to absorb and enunciate a foreign language. Fluency is often achieved with relative ease and virtually no accent. Between the age of 8 and 12, your child will lose the ability to hear and reproduce new sounds as they did when they were younger, making foreign language acquisition not impossible, but more difficult,” exerted from the article Top 5 Reasons Your Child Will Benefit from Learning a Foreign Language for frontiersacademy.org.
Learning a second language at an early age helps to reinforce and strengthen core academic subject areas such as reading, social studies and math. This enhanced aptitude can lead to significant academic achievements. Bilingual children possess exemplary problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, and generally enhanced mental flexibility. In consideration of the many additionally derived benefits, learning a second language is quite simply a no-brainer.