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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.

3 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. No surprise it's happening in Kenya as Africa is heavily invested in by China.

    A better investment would be if the world adopted Esperanto; so much easier to learn than Mandarin. Based on European languages, so very easy for an English speaker to learn- especially since it was designed to be easy to learn (2 months to become low-level conversational)... and guess who else is a big believer in Esperanto? China. China already publishes all their official news in Mandarin AND Esperanto.

    I bet if the EU committed to Esperanto as a universal second language, China would too- and the rest of the world would follow. Makes so much more sense than the world learning English or Mandarin, two of the hardest languages to learn as an adult.

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    1. Re:Learn Esperanto instead- China approved! by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Memorization is easy, especially if you start young. And that's exactly what this plan is about.

      Memorization isn't that bad either, but Western education simultaneously loves and hates memorization and have forgotten how to teach memorization, but still assess students based on what amounts to memorization.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  2. Re:Makes sense by rahvin112 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wake up western colonizers. China is learning from the IMF and World Bank of the last century.

    The Irony of this statement cannot be overlooked. China is engaged in the second wave of colonization of the third world. They are exporting millions of Chinese citizens to countries like Kenya as part of their Road and Belt initiative. The countries involved are tolerant of this just like they were the Europeans because the Chinese are paying off all the right people right now to keep this suppressed. At some point down the road the populace will figure out what's going on and it'll end up just like European colonialism.

    What China is doing is just a reshoe of European Colonialism. The first thing the European colonizers did was build infrastructure funded by their own government. They also used the current Chinese practice of giving loans to the countries they couldn't afford and then seized the product afterwards.

    You might think the Chinese would be smarter than the Europeans had been but they are just as racist and just as entitled and will abuse these undeveloped countries just like the Europeans did. If you supported these countries you would realize they are being abused.