Why Learn Chinese?

Chinese language has a long history of development and has an estimated nearly 1.2 billion speakers; Mandarin Chinese alone has around 850 million native speakers, outnumbering any other language in the world.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Mandarin Chinese which is the official language of the People's Republic of China both in its mainland and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Mandarin Chinese is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

According to Chinese government news agency, over 30 million people outside of China are learning Chinese as a foreign language. In 2006, more than 120,000 people took Chinese as the Foreign Language test in China.

China is currently the world's third largest economy. Economists also predict that Chinese economy may surpass the U.S. as well as Japan by the year 2020 to be the world's largest. By that time, children today will enter the work force and face a very different job market than what their parents are in now.