Germany still isn't very interested in Chinese

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

From an article here in German today.
I found another article on the same subject in a different country today but I'll save that for tomorrow.

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The Chinese language is having a tough time in Germany: with over a billion speakers Chinese is the language tho most spoken as a mother tongue, but in spite of this there are very few students learning it in Germany.

China is seen as a new world power and one can find the language being learned already in kindergarten...but recent numbers from PAD (Pädagogischer Austauschdienst) show that an insignificant number of students learn the language in Germany. According to them there are 433 schools offering Chinese as a foreign language. In 226 of the schools (the other half was surveyed last year) there was a total of 5570 students.

In spite of this low number, it has gone up by 75% over the past four years. In the 2007/08 school year there were a total of 3200 that studied Chinese. In comparison with this, however, other numbers are huge in comparison: 7.5 million learn English, 1.7 learn French and 56,000 learn Italian.

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