Why are we learning Chinese?

I heard on the news yesterday that Chinese is being taught in American elementary schools. I don�t understand why this is.

Supposedly we as Americans hate that our jobs are going to China. Now we are only serving to better facilitate our corporations going over there. I don�t understand this and I�m really pissed off about this.

We should learn Spanish or French aside from English, not Chinese. We are trading with a government which is so damn repressive and opressive to its own people. But instead we talk about how great they are. If anything for ideology we should be learning Hindi and smacking India to embrace the open market and not their communistic style hold they have on their industry (which is holding it back). We are making a huge mistake with this.

French because I believe it is one of the best languages in the world but for a more practical one Spanish would siffice (even Polish in some citys).

Its better to teach children new languages early on, they can learn Chinese i have no doubt. But they should b learnign it when we hate thta out jobs go over there. It doesnt make sense. We should stop this and teach them French and Spanish (for more diversity) and even Italian. Just keep it European because its Latin and its where our roots lie.

I really don't see what the big deal is having SOME elementary schools (probably just a handful of them) offering rudimentary Chinese language classes to kids. First, it's not like those courses are compulsory. If you don't want to take them, just don't take them. Second, it's not like the Americans are all of a sudden catching this unstoppable fever of foreign-language learning; in fact the Americans are known for their antipathy to learn foreign language.

Third, no offence to you Loknar, you are a native speaker of English, right? And I assume you're college-educated too, right? You should really pay attention to your spelling (it's "cities", not "citys"), grammar (it should be "it's", not "its"), and typo (so many of them that I can't even list them) ... Sometimes you make so many mistakes in your posts that they are not even that intelligible. Maybe you shouldn't even be talking about the teaching of Chinese, French, Spanish or whatnot. How about just sticking to the basic and teaching plain olde goode Englisch to kids???

Ni hao ma?

I did Mandarin for four years and let me tell you it is a painful language to learn for those who speak a European first language. I am learning Spanish at the moment and it's ten times easier than Mandarin. Personally, from how I have seen Mandarin taught in high school, the only people it benefits are the children of Chinese speaking families. It is simply too complex for anyone except the most determined of Euro-speaking students.

However, that does not mean it should not be taught. An intensive reform of how the language is taught may be necessary to ensure Euro-speaking students can still study it and come off with a functionable use of the language. China means big business and money in the future, intelligent governments will encourage a sector of their population to learn the language. Spanish being much easier to learn and French being more elegant does not make China any less of an important trading bloc.

As the Chinese (and maybe some of these kids) would say "know thy enemy"

Actually, I really do not believe I have dyslexia. I just did some research and there is way more to it than reversed letters. My reading comprehension is in the top 2% (according to my GED transcript) of all US high school and GED graduates. Maybe my typing really sucks.

Yes, of course I do.  Americans should learn Chinese though because they'll be our enemy in the future.  The fact that English is the lingua franca of the world at this point doesn't change that.

If the Chinese become half the threat the USSR was, then we should be learning Chinese.

I plan on trying to learn some once I finish with German.