Reader comments
Time for 'Mandarin immersion'

The same could probably be said of Arabic. The government dishes out the scholarships and grants to those learning such a critical language, and people who are fluent are almost guaranteed a job.

I would like to be able to speak other languages. It would be a great help on the road to success. However, the language of America is english and all who wish to be Americans should speak english. Did we not hear somewhere that english is the most universal language in the world?

Yes, English is rather ubiquitous around the world. So if you speak it natively or fluently, you have a leg up. The point of this article, though, is knowing a second language, especially Mandarin or Spanish, will give you another edge in the competitive global marketplace.

Bob, you are not very smart. English is capitalized. Maybe you should learn English, too. Stop being a racists and go take a Spanish or Chinese Class. Ni shi ge ben dan.

Children might benefit from knowing Chinese. When, the Chinese surpass us economically, they will the the nation with the gold. We await our new masters.

Arabic and Farsi may come in handy if we have to beg for oil.

Utah benefits economically and in public relations (e.g. the Olympics) from the language fluency of the thousands of former LDS missionaries in the state. The LDS Church would benefit directly from encouraging its members in the US to learn other languages, just as members in other nations are encouraged to learn English, which gives direct access to so much of the Church's supplementary literature and serves as a lingua franca for Church leaders worldwide. In Utah, thousands with actual in-country experience in speaking diverse languages could be enlisted as teachers, just as the Church uses them to teach new missionaries in Provo. If Utah used this talent pool intelligently, the addition of skills in Japanese or Russian to personal expertise in computer science, business, and medicine could make Utah a center of international trade and communication in all human endeavors.

Utah colleges fail to provide advanced language instruction to people who have already made a two year investment in learning them, and Utah fails to teach languages like Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic and Farsi that would give students a head start. It needs to get out of the rut of French, German and Spanish only.

My brother-in-law married a Taiwanese woman. His two little children speak three languages fluently without accents. I started my children learning Chinese about eight months ago and they are doing great. Children really are amazing.