Pinyin in 6 Minutes / We Better Learn It

This may be the only way I will ever learn any Mandarin!

We’d Better Learn It

Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, served as a sociologist at the World Bank. He is the author of “Standardized Childhood.”

Imagine that your monthly mortgage bill arrives, unremarkable except that it’s suddenly written in Mandarin. Then, your bank sends over a Chinese translator to explain that you are falling deeper into debt. Mind-boggling? Well, this is America’s contemporary predicament as the Chinese finance a growing share of our national debt. Beijing holds $1.8 trillion in U.S. bonds and other instruments of borrowing. We are fused at the hip with the Chinese, economically speaking.

So, we better get to know them. They certainly want to know us, sending over hundreds of teachers to spark our children’s interest in Mandarin and East Asian ways. Affluent urban parents get it. (One San Francisco colleague felt compelled to apologize that his 6-year-old daughter had access only to a dual-language Spanish-speaking school, rather than to the Mandarin immersion he wanted.) But unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual, unless you count our growing Babel of texting as a second tongue.

We are pathetically slow in realizing that East Asia will soon dominate the global economy. We believe, as did the last living Romans, that the American empire will reign forever. So, we fail to grasp the hard work, collective spirit and enormous investment in public institutions advanced by Chinese citizens.

We must learn the language and engage them at a human scale as first steps in appreciating the strengths of East Asian cultures. These virtues already lift America’s best universities. Over half of Berkeley’s undergraduates are now of East Asian descent.

Rather than bumbling along, government and corporate leaders should advance coherent policies for bilingualism. Europe began this process about four centuries ago. Washington moves quickly when military interests dominate. My Arabic-speaking son, Dylan, was offered $20,000 up front to staff intelligence outposts in the Middle East. But Mandarin? What’s the rush? The count of American high school students enrolled in Chinese classes is less than those studying German.

Instead, President Obama’s ballooning budget for education could focus dollars on teaching foreign languages. This should be co-financed by multinational corporations who richly benefit from the bilingual skills and graduate training of top Chinese students, financed in part by American taxpayers. Cash-strapped school districts need strong incentives to rethink their language programs. And let’s see language as a window into China’s cultural assets and cooperative skills, not simply as a tool to expand market share.