Wired’s article on the global Madarin ‘Chinese Fever’ – http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/mandarin.html
The main Chinese government sponsor is Hanban, where Ma Jianfei is serving as the deputy director general of the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. His goal is to reach 100 million Chinese speakers around the world in four years (i.e. 2010).
In 2007, high school kids across the US will be able to take the first ever AP exam for Chinese language and culture …
Gaston Caperton, ex governor of West Virginia, now president of College Board and unofficial promoter for Chinese-language education is on the road ever since the AP Chinese course was established, trying to solve the shortage of qualified Chinese teachers in the US by prodding American universities to offer certification programs and persuading elementary schools and colleges stateside to offer more Chinese language classes. He’s recently been in Beijing, meeting with Hanban officials about their volunteer-teacher program. But today he’s in Shanghai with his wife, Idit Harel Caperton. She spent the fall teaching software engineering at a university here and is a consultant and major investor (along with MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte) in a language software company based in China.
By Michael Erard (erard@lucidwork.com)