Another Reason to Study Mandarin

By Austin Ramzy | @austinramzy | May 29, 2007 | +

From the New York Times, a fascinating story about a neighborhood in Queens where people have decided to learn Mandarin. The reason? To get along with the Chinese community.

Last year I did a piece on the growing popularity of Mandarin. TIME reporters talked to students in London, Phnom Penh and Kentucky, among other places. The chief reason for studying the language was the hope that it would offer some economic benefit in a world where China is playing a bigger and bigger role. Some folks were interested in getting to know a different culture. But getting to know your neighbors? That’s a nice twist.

It reminds me of an apartment building in Oakland, California, where I lived for a short while in 2001. One of my neighbors, an 8-year-old girl named Aminah, made it her business to learn to say “hello” in all the residents’ native tongues. She was up to a dozen or so phrases when I moved in. I tried to teach her the words in Mandarin–”ni hao”–but she already knew them.

Related Topics: China

@TIMEWorld

Latest on Global Spin

israel May 15, 2012

Netanyahu’s New Government: Warming to Peace Talks with the Palestinians?

A flurry of gestures toward the Palestinian leadership suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his new role as leader of a center-right government, is warming toward the resumption of peace talks — or at least giving the appearance of warming; call it a rosy glow rising from a pair of announcements on Monday. One was about Palestinian prisoners who had been carrying out a mass hunger strike for weeks inside Israeli prisons. With several prisoners near death, Netanyahu approved an agreement that improves prison conditions and permits visits by family members in the Gaza Strip, the heavily guarded enclave that Palestinians have been allowed out of only for medical emergencies. Greeted by Palestinians as a victory, the deal eased concerns that a prisoner’s death might combust what are usually routine protests planned for Tuesday’s commemoration of Nakba Day, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s 1948 victory over Arab forces trying to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.

Middle East May 15, 2012

Palestinians Mark Their Day of “Catastrophe”

Protesters challenge Israeli troops in the West Bank while commemorating the Nakba, or “day of catastrophe” in Arabic, which marks the day when Israel declared its statehood in 1948—an act which forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and into a life of exile

U.K. May 15, 2012

Rebekah Brooks, Husband Charged in Phone-Hacking Scandal

The convoluted saga of the British phone-hacking scandal seems to have been dragging on longer than a back-to-back performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Yet despite the demise of Rupert Murdoch‘s News of the World, the launching of a public inquiry into British press standards, three police investigations and more than 40 arrests, the scandal has yet to draw real blood. The closest it has come was a report released this month by a Parliamentary committee, which accused Murdoch of turning a blind eye to the hacking at his paper and declared him “not a fit person” to run an international company — a damning conclusion that nonetheless seems to have had little immediate effect.