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Kenya Will Start Teaching Chinese To Elementary School Students From 2020 (qz.com)
Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China. From a report: The country's curriculum development institute (KICD) has said the design and scope of the mandarin syllabus have been completed and will be rolled out in 2020. Primary school pupils from grade four (aged 10) and onwards will be able to take the course, the head of the agency Julius Jwan told Xinhua news agency. Jwan said the language is being introduced given Mandarin's growing global rise, and the deepening political and economic connections between Kenya and China.
"The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin," Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.
"The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin," Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.
The first step of many towards English losing it's place as the premier language in the world and the world's "second language". More countries will switch as China replaces US as biggest economic power.
It may be possible that China becomes the dominant economic power in the world. A path towards that possibility is entirely reasonable.
However, Chinese will never become a linga franca of choice. It's too hard to learn due to the lack of an in-band phonetic representation. To learn Chinese requires memorization of characters and a separate memorization of pronunciation. Furthermore, looking up words in a dictionary without a camera and optical character recognition is so frustrating that it's not practical for people learning Chinese as a second language. Learning English as one of the few non/loosely phonetic languages is already difficult, but Chinese is much, much harder.
Of course, this assumes that reading is important. If Chinese is used solely as a simple conversational language, it might not be so bad.
Disclaimer: I'm an American who has been to Kenya recently.
For English not familiar with the national language (Swahili), you see some Swahili words in The Lion King (simba, rafiki, hakuna matata).
Everyone is multi-lingual. You start with your local/regional/tribe language (20-60 of them?). You then learn swahili when you go to school or travel. As you progress and want to start interacting with foreigners, you learn English. Kenya was a British colony in the early 20th century. The capital Nairobi was founded as an British railway town, and people learned English.
China just funded and operates the new Nairobi/Mombasa railroad that's key to getting goods to and from the shipyards in Mombasa inland to other parts of Africa through Nairobi.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funded-railway-in-kenya-sparks-debt-trap-fears
New road construction has chinese-sounding names on the green tractors, not American Caterpillar or .Japanese Komatsu.
Kenya Airways has flights from China. I saw many Chinese tourists.
Managers of Chinese-owned operations would benefit from having more Kenyans know Chinese rather than possibly double-translating through English.
If you want to be successful working with the new Chinese money and management, it helps to speak Chinese, right?
Wake up western colonizers. China is learning from the IMF and World Bank of the last century.
English is the (or a) official language of Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, the three countries mentioned in the summary. This is about adding Mandarin (as an elective) in schools, not replacing English.
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